Journey Through Zapatista Coffee Lands
Last Thursday, SWELL (South Walton Environmental & Low-impact Living) hosted a discussion on fair trade coffee provided by Amavida’s Dan Bailey. The attendees gathered at the owners lounge at Redfish Village to watch a beautiful slide show of Dan’s recent journey to Chiapas, Mexico. Accompanying Dan at the SWELL gathering was Miguel Mateo Sebastian from the Manos Campesinas in Guatemala.
The photographs captured the beautiful murals of the Zapatista’s culture and their struggles and strength, united as an independent agrarian entity. The Zapatista’s ceded from Mexico in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect.
The Zapatistas or the EZLN’s ideology is to support the peasant ways of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas by rejecting neo-liberal globalization that is destroying the social fabric and undermining their ability to subsist by traditional agricultural means.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation :
Apart from opening the Mexican market to cheap mass-produced US agricultural products, NAFTA spells an end to Mexican crop subsidies, and drastically reduces income and living standards of many southern Mexican farmers who cannot compete with the subsidized, artificially fertilized, mechanically harvested and genetically modified imports from the United States. The signing of NAFTA also resulted in the removal of Article 27 Section VII in the Mexican Constitution which previously had guaranteed land reparations to indigenous groups throughout Mexico.
After a journey through Zapatista coffee lands, Miguel shared with us, the process by which Fair Trade coffee from Guatemala reaches Amavida and Cooperative Coffees. He shared with us the importance of forging relationships with buyers that value social, economic, and environmental justice over bottom dollar corporate profits.
The most important message he shared was how his people respect Mother Earth because they strongly believe they are a part of the Earth, not separate. By planting the coffee with a companion shade tree, using fallen leaves and cherry pulp as fertilizer, creating swales around the trees to capture water and stop erosion, and carefully harvesting the cherries, the balance in nature is preserved. This results in the ability to grow coffee organically and provide a prosperous livelihood for the indigenous people.
To find out more about Fair Trade coffee and Cooperative Coffees visit: http://www.coopcoffees.com/
so disappointed I missed this
Chandra,
Thanks for posting that. I was so glad Peter and I were able to meet Miguel and hear his amazing stories, his beautiful perspective on our place as part of nature. Interesting contrast to a “spiritual gardening” seminar I attended in Montgomery on Saturday, where the thinking seemed more about separating the garden from “life and work” as a place to get closer to God. No mention of physical sustenance for God/Earth’s people or creatures, though we did celebrate the Eucharist in a beautiful old country church just outside my hometown, with real bread (not those pasty wafers that stick to the roof of your mouth). The folks leading and attending the seminar had great intentions and the gardens were beautiful. I wonder what the next generation of gardeners will do with what’s in place.
I must say, they had a fantastic shaded playground slap up next to the cemetery, by intention, so that children would grow up aware of, familiar with and comfortable with all the cycles of life and death. I liked that a lot.