What We're Reading

Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee

Author: Dean Cycon
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
$19.95 Paper (239 p.)
ISBN: 9781933392707
B&T        MAJORS       YBP


Reviewed by Suzanne Kapusta, Senior Collection Development Manager, Sales

Traveling throughout my sales territory is nowhere near as adventurous as what Dean Cycon, founder and owner of Dean's Beans Organic Coffee, experiences on his business trips. My favorite side trips are to local coffee shops, indie and used book stores, and occasionally an antique shop - it's a real bonanza when I can find a main street encompassing all of these favorite haunts. Dean travels to Ethiopia, Kenya, Peru, Columbia, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sumatra and Papua New Guinea in this group of stories relaying his work helping coffee farmers improve their products and organize into cooperatives.

You might ask how a farmer can improve his product. One way is to stop dumping chemical pesticides on the land and work towards organic certification. A frightening fact I had never considered is that the fertilizer bags have instructions on the proper way to mix and apply the fertilizer often only in English - even if they're also in Spanish this isn't much help to a farmer who only speaks his local dialect and may not even be able to read. Another way to improve the product is to introduce a single water buffalo to a community to provide organic fertilizer and to have the animal feed on the weeds growing around the coffee plants. Inter-planting banana, mango, and a variety of other plants that enable the farmers to subsist off the land (and shade the trees) in addition to selling the coffee beans for money to buy things that can't be grown is another organic improvement. This type of farming is in direct contrast to large coffee farms that grow the coffee in direct sunlight. This latter type of farm needs lots of fertilizer and irrigation. The higher in altitude that the coffee is grown, the more shade it receives when growing, and the more organic nutrients that feed the soil - all these things contribute to a premiere coffee bean. That is just the beginning of the process. There is the issue of bees and the problems they have been encountering lately (they're dying off, if you haven't heard). Sometimes hurricanes strip the fruit and leaves. If there is a successful crop, then the farmers have to get the coffee cherries down off the mountain in areas often without developed roads. The fruit has to be stripped from the bean (one village was doing this by chewing them!). They have to be processed - historically many middle-men have been involved in getting the beans from the trees to the dock - which has resulted in the farmer receiving less than subsistence value for his or her work. By organizing into cooperatives the farmers can build their own de-pulpers, learn to separate the coffee into different grades, and thereby obtain a better price which enables the profits to leach back into the community to build schools and provide health care for the members.

In addition to learning much about the growing of coffee by reading this book, I was also affected by Dean's adventures with indigenous people throughout the world. He takes beans back to the farmers and lets them sample the finished product - some of these people had never actually tasted the coffee they are producing. Others brew their own coffee but haven't considered actually selling it locally as a finished product. Dean helped one community start to do this. Another way he became involved was to begin a program to help amputees that fell off the "Death Train" - the train leading from Latin America to El Norte.

This book provides a fascinating glimpse into areas and people who the general traveler will never meet. The danger Dean encounters and the wild areas he is allowed to enter brings respect and a consciousness of the difference that one person can make in many people's lives. I'll definitely understand the organic certification and fair trade designation on coffee now when I enter a coffee shop. On the Dean's Beans web-site I noted that Dean recently traveled back to Ethiopia and this time he was accompanied by his 16 year old daughter, Sarah. I find it wonderful that other people are willing to do so much to help others and to endure less than the best accommodations when traveling - the best I can do is to purchase the organic fair trade coffee - or is it? That is the question one is faced with upon finishing this book.

I became interested in this story after hearing Dean speak on XMPR while I was driving through North Carolina and Tennessee. It's sometimes hard when listing to news radio to concentrate on my driving. I'll hear a book review or some fantastic CD review, and want to immediately write down the information so that I don't forget. Luckily I had recently visited L.A., and become somewhat enthralled with a local coffee company there called Groundwork. On their website they advertised Dean's book! I figured it had to be the one authored by the person I'd heard on the radio. I'm glad I found it. I recommend this book to anyone who loves coffee or who wants to learn more about world-wide conditions of indigenous people.