Sustainable Food Laboratory

By Daniella Malin, February 20, 2008

It took a simple question to uncover a basic fact of life that so pervades the lives of coffee growers throughout Central America that they even have a name for it, but goes virtually unrecognized in the industry and beyond, Los Meses Flacos (the thin months). Rick Peyser, Director of Social Advocacy and Coffee Community Outreach at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR), came across this fact while looking into the quality of some of the company’s supply chains from a social and environmental perspective with help from the Sustainable Food Lab and the International Center for Agricultural Research (CIAT).  What he found has helped shape the company’s approach to Corporate Social Responsibility in these communities ever since.

In late 2007, Peyser participated in on 10 of the 33 interviews the researchers conducted in Nicaragua. In total they conducted 179 interviews in communities in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico.. The study was to get a sense of what was going on in the source communities both in terms of coffee and the family and communities.  This built on previous research Michael Dupee, V.P. for Corporate Social Responsibility, led in 2006 to find indicators of farmer economic well-being.  In both phases of work the company sought to go beyond its motto, “doing well by doing good,” and ask how they would know if choices they made as a company would make life better for the farmers.

Peyser took the first phase of work on key performance indicators  (KPIs) the next step. During this second phase he and the research partners tested the validity of the indicators developed in the first phase to see if they in fact, gave a good picture on the ground about what was happening. In addition they gathered the first set of data to develop a profile among the producer communities along the indicators: about the ability to stay on the farm, the ability to re-invest in the farm and the ability to access food, education and health services. This basic information about the producer communities also provided context for KPIs and gave the company a better understanding of the people and places in their supply chain.

The household level questionnaire that Peyser and the researchers used in their interviews with farmers included questions about the families, their land holdings, their coffee, earnings and expenses, health and the availability of basic food supplies. Thomas Oberthur and Sam Fujisaka, from the International Center for Agricultural Research (CIAT) designed the questionnaire and as they had in the first phase, conducted the research.

It was the farmers’ answers to this last question – availability of food -- that surprised Peyser the most.

The farmers interviewed were part of a Fair Trade network and thus part of systems that is designed to target issues of poverty and hunger Peyser sat in one of the Nicaraguan farmer’s homes, conducting his last interview, and arrived at the question about food supplies, “How many months in the last year did you have extreme scarcity of food (if any) and what did you do about it?” he asked.

The farmer’s wife and four healthy children, ages 5-16, were at home with them as he answered. The home wasn’t fancy but had a cement floor, wooden walls, a small stereo and a few other amenities.  The farmer and his wife were in their 30s.  Unlike some of the other farmers Peyser met, life seemed pretty good for this family, but even here he heard the same answer he’d heard in all his previous interviews, “three or more.”

"I started to think about my own family,” Peyser said. "This family had a pretty basic lifestyle but when I walked in I thought that compared to other families in the area, their living conditions didn’t look too bad.  But they had the exact same problem.  It was hard not to be moved when I was interviewing them with their children right in the room,” he said.

Most of the interviews were in private so the answers would be as unencumbered as possible, but in this case that wasn’t possible. Two-thirds of the interviews were with women.  Every family Peyser talked to had three or more months every year of extreme scarcity of food.  More than 75 percent of the total 179 farmers interviewed shared that experience.

They call them Los Meses Flacos, the thin months, or sometimes Los Meses Meurtos, the dead months. These are the months of June, July and August when farmers are caught between coffee payments and the coming harvest of basic staples like corn and beans.  By June, most of the funds from coffee are depleted (coffee is harvested through February in these regions) and the harvests of basic staples don’t come until late summer, so supply is scarce and prices are high.  Peyser said families have three strategies for dealing with this: consume less of the same foods, eat less expensive foods, or go into debt for food.

Peyser came to this study with 20 years of experience in the specialty coffee industry. He is past president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, past president of the Coffee Kids board of directors, and is on the board of the Fair Trade Labeling Organization International, yet he had never heard mention of this annual period of food inseurity. After making this discovery he asked members of other coffee producer organizations. Over and over again he heard confirmation. Two significant coffee co-ops in Central America, an old contact in Honduras, contacts in Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru all said it is virtually universal to varying degrees; in Honduras los meses flacos last five months a year.

“It is a big issue and it is a mystery to me that something so commonplace is not spoken of in the industry,” Peyser said.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters devotes 5 percent of its profits to the communities where they do business. Half of those funds stay in the U.S and half go to to support projects in the communities where they purchase coffee. Having learned that a need so basic as the need for food is not being met in the source communities, Peyser came home and reordered the company’s giving priorities.

“In the past we used the money for a variety of purposes, all of them good, but I started having a sense that we need to get really focused. I came back and put together a proposal with a vision, mission and tactics for these funds, with a real focus that basically indicates that the funds have to touch farmers and their families. We are no longer going to fund any program that relies on trickle down,” Peyser said.

Next he turned his focus specifically to los meses flacos.

“If we can reduce or eradicate the impact of these months I think others will want to do the same. The best thing we can do is to show there are ways to do this,” he said.

With endorsement from his team, Peyser is now investigating the feasibility of pilot projects to address seasonal food insecurity that would be owned and managed by the local cooperatives. GMCR would provide financial and technical support along with other local, national and international NGOs. To date, two strong cooperatives have expressed interest.

The cooperatives that take on these projects will likely generate their own ideas for what to do, but some ideas have already surfaced: provide farmers with help to diversify their incomes so that families are not entirely dependent on coffee, provide education on better organic compost management techniques so that farmers can increase yields without turning to expensive chemical fertilizers, and establish community vegetable gardens and/or communal silos where communities could purchase staples when the price is low to tap into when the price is high.

Peyser is hopeful that the methods of dealing with this issue are likely to have ripple effects on other issues affecting the health of individuals and communities.

“With the right resources, things can change.  Just because it’s part of life now doesn’t mean it has to be,” he said, adding, “It just seems within our reach as a company and as a society to demonstrate that seasonal food insecurity isn’t something families have to put up with.”