Greetings from Mykanos, no longer the destination of choice for sophisticated international visitors.
Before the news became mono-topical, there was a story in the press about Nespresso buying coffee from farms using child labour. They took great delight in adding a photo of George Clooney and challenging his moral credentials.
The Guardian International Edition wrote …
High street coffee shop giant Starbucks has been caught up in a child labour row after an investigation revealed that children under 13 were working on farms in Guatemala that supply the chain with its beans.
Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte. The beans are also supplied to Nespresso, owned by Nestlé. Last week, actor George Clooney, the advertising face of Nespresso, praised the investigation and said he was saddened by its findings.
The one positive aspect of the programme was the reason they gave for this unacceptable practice.
Dispatches calculated that of £2.50 spent on a typical cup of coffee on the high street, the shop receives 88p. Staff receive 63p and 38p goes on tax. A profit of 25p goes to the coffee company – such as Starbucks, which has an annual global revenue of more than £20bn, and has nearly 1,000 shops in the UK alone. After other costs are accounted for, 10p is left for the coffee suppliers, of which 1p goes to the farmer, who uses a fraction of this to pay coffee pickers.
As I lament, over and over again in these Letters, coffee farmers receive too little recompense for all their hard work.
But the story is not quite as simple as that.
I can only speak from our experience here in Colombia, but child labour has been a recurring problem; specifically during the ‘cosecha’, the harvest, and specifically with indigenous coffee pickers. Quite a few families pick coffee as a team and include the children, either because they want the kids to make some money for the family, or because the kids want to make some money for themselves, or because they don’t want to leave the kids at home.
The minimum working age of children in Colombia is 14, with 18 the entry level for ‘hard labour’, however education is compulsory, and free, for everyone aged from five to 15. We won’t have anyone under 15 working here, or being on the farm. We tell the parents the kids should be in school. They agree, but bring them anyway. The only way we could enforce it, after repeated instances, was to warn the parents that if we find any of their children under 15 on any of our farms, the whole family will no longer work for us. That seems to have done the trick, so far.
The situation in Guatemala might be very different, and the farmers might well be knowingly employing underage workers, but even so it’s unfair criticising George Clooney for it. We can’t realistically expect him to be patrolling coffee fields in 11 countries checking birth certificates.
What we also could not expect, but which came as a welcome surprise, is a rise in the price we get for our coffee. It has risen significantly; all because of an unexpected phenomenon you might have noticed. It’s called Covid-19, the new coronavirus.
When it appeared in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, and was just a foreign oddity, there was a rather mean joke here that both China and Colombia were suffering from a virus. For China it was the coronavirus; for Colombia it was Venezuelans.
That was when it was in far distant East Asia. Not any more.
I know you are all facing the same predicament and have probably heard more than enough of what is going on around the world but maybe not from the Colombian Andes, and anyway, what else have I got to talk about at the moment, apart from cats that is, and I know some of you have had quite enough of them.
Like some four billion people around the globe, to varying degrees, we are in lockdown. It is total here and quite strict. It started nationally a more than two weeks ago but Adriano had anticipated that by a week. As a result I have not been out the gate, or even to the gate, for almost a month.
To tell the truth, life has not changed that much at all, except that nobody comes here, not even Lucero who usually helps us around the house, which means I am doing a lot more washing up. That’s nothing new, however, as when we are in Bogota or other foreign climes, I always do the washing up. Adriano does the cooking. I never regret it. It’s always worth it.
The only exceptions to the ‘no visitor’ rule are Juan and Julian, our key assistants, who are doing the plantain business and taking coffee to the Co-Op. They come to see Adriano when necessary, with masks and hand sanitizer, and stand two metres away for short meetings. Most of the business is done by phone, and Adriano loves it. It means he spends hours undisturbed in his studio without even Lucero interrupting him with coffee. He paints and sketches in the studio, while I am upstairs writing and monitoring the progression of the pandemic on television news. It is really much the same as usual except that the road is wonderfully quiet and the loudest ambient noise is incessant birdsong.
Beyond the gate things are very different. Anserma town is open, apart from cafes, restaurants, bars, brothels and cantinas, but only until 3pm, after which only pharmacies and petrol stations can trade. Moreover access around town, or permission to be driving, is restricted via a ‘pico y placa’ (peak and plate) system. Originally pico y placa was used to reduce traffic congestion, as only cars with a licence plate ending in the corresponding daily numeral could be on the road. In this application, it is the last number of each individual’s cedula (National ID) number that determines which day one can go shopping etc. and then it must be restricted to one person per household. Adriano can go on Wednesdays and Saturdays, not that he chooses to. Juan can also go on Wednesdays and he gets what we need, such as a few more bottles of Chilean Rosé and Carménère.
In any event, Juan and Julian, whether in the camioneta, the jeep or on motorcycle are allowed on the roads on any day, as we are an essential industry. We grow food to keep people alive.
To keep ourselves alive, and even more important enjoying life, Adriano has really powered up the huertas (vegetable gardens), even if he is up against it sometime as they are all organic and the pests love the tomatoes and brassicas. We are using non-chemical treatments in an effort to deter egg-laying insects, but only time will tell if we are successful. Until then it is just a case of eating the vegetables as soon as they are ready and before they are attacked.
He has also invested in two pigs at Rancho Grande, and 30 chickens that have joined our ducks and geese here. With pineapples growing around ponds full of tilapia, and the avocado and citrus trees bearing fruit, we are pretty well catered for in terms of future meals.
The current figures for Covid-19 infection in Colombia, which are undoubtedly out of date by the time I write this, let alone by the time you read it, is 2054 cases with 54 deaths. Adriano said to leave numbers out, but this is the way pretty much all of us monitor each day so it puts us into a bit of perspective for you.
We were infection free locally until last week when a local woman, who returned from a holiday in Spain on the 18th, a day before Colombia was closed, developed symptoms and tested positive. She was supposed to self-isolate for 14 days after arrival, in her home in San Pedro, one of the boroughs of Anserma, but was seen, and photographed, strolling around the village. Locals were not impressed and informed the police, who might well prosecute. 10 days earlier, in Bogotá, two foreign couples, one French, one Spanish, left their hotels to do some sightseeing two days into their mandated 14 days self-isolation. Their hotels notified police and they were found, arrested and deported. The woman in San Pedro woman has already been in touch with the police, not to apologise but to seek protection, as there are some in Anserma who want to kill her and burn down her house.
It is a serious state of affairs. I originally told Adriano that there was no need to panic. He explained that in this culture the alternatives are simple; panic or complacency. No panic, no action. So now we have panic, and action, and the locals will do what they are told if told strongly enough and it is enforced. That is what worries me about the UK and Australia. We don’t like to be told what to do, and there are many who refuse to take quarantine/lockdown/social distancing seriously.
We do, but of course here in the bush, on the farm, we really are much more fortunate than most. We are blessed. Originally we were thinking of visiting Australia in March, or Madrid and London. Fortunately we never got past the hypothetical stage. I can imagine being trapped in Madrid unable to return home, just as I can imagine if we still lived in Paris, confined to the 4eme étage in Rue Turbigo, standing on the balcony waving to the lovely Anne in the building opposite, similarly imprisoned. For that matter I am so glad I left Bogotá when I did. I was there for a meeting and only flew up here on the 26th February.
Bogotá, however, like so many major cities, is actually doing rather well in this pandemic, if you discount the sickness, death, fear and financial strife.
Our friend Richard, who kept his young family in their Bogotá apartment rather than decamping to Mompos in the north on the Rio Magdalena where they have a house and hotel, took a photo from their apartment window in which the Nevado del Ruiz, a snow topped volcano some 129 kilometres west of the city, is clearly visible beyond the smaller range of mountains that usually define the horizon on a clear day.
In Richard’s words: ‘It only took a global pandemic to occur for me to be able to see this! Incredible. Look how 20 days of no traffic and no light/heavy industry in the city rewards us.’
My last letter talked about Australian bush fires, extreme weather and global warming, at a time when Greta Thunberg was saying things must change. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, there are hardly any cars on the roads, no planes in the sky, few factories belching fumes into the atmosphere, and the air is cleaner, pollution down, and God knows what else.
Back in the 70’s I read a book by astronomer and writer Fred Hoyle called ‘Ten Faces of the Universe’. In his final chapter he wrote that the recurring challenge for Earth was overpopulation, and throughout history there have been different phenomena to address it. Cholera, for example, is usually the product of contaminated water caused by overcrowding and lack of sanitation. The phenomena he cited included epidemics, famines, wars etc.
Consider the Black Death. In 1348 bubonic plague killed a third of the world’s known population, 75 to 125 million, including half of London.
Wikipedia suggests that:
‘The demographic decline due to the plague had economic consequences: the prices of food dropped and land values declined by 30–40% in most parts of Europe between 1350 and 1400. Landholders faced a great loss, but for ordinary men and women it was a windfall. The survivors of the plague found not only that the prices of food were cheaper but also that lands were more abundant, and many of them inherited property from their dead relatives, and this probably destabilized feudalism.’
Thank God we are not faced with such a cataclysm. This pandemic does not present anything like such an apocalypse. We will lose too many, including some we know and like and love, but the world and life will go on, and hopefully for the better. We can learn to do without some of the things we thought were important before this pandemic, and really value and appreciate others that we took for granted, not realising how essential they are to our hopes and happiness.
Here in Colombia, in Bogotá and the major cities, the winners are the Rappi (local version of Deliveroo) and Uber Eats boys on their bicycles. They have never had it so good, with huge demand for picking up and delivering groceries and takeaway food, and no cars to contend with on the roads, nor pedestrians on the pavements. Funnily enough, very many of them are Venezuelans.
For many other Venezuelans, the ones who make their living cleaning car windscreens at traffic lights and selling things on the streets to passersby, the coronavirus is proving catastrophic. There are no cars on the road, nor passersby on the footpaths, and with no income they are being turfed out of their cheap rental rooms as many places close up for the duration. Suddenly there is an exodus; Venezuelans packing up and heading back to their home country. Venezuela is a disaster but at least they don’t have to pay rent and they can be with their families.
Stay safe at home. I know you all and don’t want to lose any of you, or anyone in your family.
Love from him and me
Barry
