Bitter Beans

The coffee may be good, but the plight of farmers continues to leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

- Bea Misa-Crisostomo

No matter how many years you go through it (and most farmers and processors can attest to this), coffee harvest season is always a little bit nerve-racking. You have nightmares about complications. You get phone calls about freak weather. Some things get stolen. Assumptions get thrown out the window. Nothing goes as expected, which is exactly what you come to expect.

Going up the mountain, I usually ride the back of a habal-habal; on my shoulders I carry a bag of my stuff—a bit of fruit, some equipment, a wad of cash. The feeling is always the same as the engine struggles and pulls, the air becomes cooler and the cement houses I see turn to bamboo. I feel like false layers of reality fall away.

OUTSIDER IN

I began working in this coffee community years ago after I was contracted as a consultant by a progressive commodities company, Tao Commodity Trader, to explore sustainable ways of doing community based agriculture. My appetite for uncertainty then was already more than the average person’s—I didn’t expect development to be linear— but my learnings so far still leave me in awe at how little I knew and still know. So I began, with another coffee-processing friend in tow. (Interesting footnote: most of the specialty coffee processors I know on the ground from all over the country are women. I don't really know why.)

The Baslay Farmers Association communally owns a dense, wild, completely organic coffee forest (mostly robusta and liberica) that yields luscious red fruit not only for our coffee mill but for bats, birds, civet cats, insects, and a myriad species. They are also caregivers and forest farmers to a growing area of native trees. Their forests yield such gems as kaong, abaca, passion fruit, sayote, and many more. The community is composed of mostly former