The Thin Months

By Jaman Matthews, World Ark senior editor

Heifer is featured in After the Harvest: Fighting Hunger in the Coffeelands, a new documentary film depicting the struggle of small-scale coffee farmers and their families during "the thin months." Narrated by Academy Award winning actress Susan Sarandon and filmed in part in Heifer project communities in Mexico, the film shows how Heifer is helping families diversify their sources of food and income, reducing their dependence on coffee for livelihood. Watch the After the Harvest film trailer now!

In the long stretch between coffee harvests, poverty and hunger grip the small mountain communities of southern Mexico. But a partnership between a coffee company, a local co-op and Heifer International is changing that.

RANCHO BONITO, Mexico—Saul Morales Cruz, dressed in a plaid shirt and straw cowboy hat like most men in this mountaintop village, stood on a bluff and motioned into the hazy valley disappearing below. Down there, he said, a two-hour walk away, is his small plot of coffee plants. And like the other men in Rancho Bonito, he makes the trek down steep and mud-slick trails to tend his plot every day. There is little else in this remote part of Chiapas.

Coffee is the main livelihood for many communities like Rancho Bonito in the mountains of southern Mexico. But, while coffee offers at least a meager income, it has one huge drawback: it is harvested only once a year, which means only one paycheck a year.

Learn how Green Mountain Coffee and Heifer International partner to help coffee-growing communities in Chiapas, Mexico build sustainable solutions to poverty and hunger.

In mid-July, the coffee fruit were still small, hard, green berries. They wouldn't be red-ripe until December, which means many families here had seen no money since last winter and wouldn't see any more until next winter. This time of uncertainty and hunger is known in coffee-growing communities throughout Central America as los meses flacos -- the thin months.

"The thin months are the months of the rainy season, from May to September," said Alejandro López Musalem, Heifer Mexico country director. "Everything is lush, but it is not easy to do any cropping." It's a struggle just to get to the fields, and the constant rain inhibits seed germination and promotes fungal disease.

"Not only is there less access to money, but it is more difficult to grow food during this time, which adds to a lack of access to food," he said. The dirt roads flood and wash out. Even if villagers could get to a town with a store, the price of food skyrockets during the rainy season.

During the thin months, lenders prey on the poor families. High-interest loans, borrowed against the next season's coffee harvest, may keep food on the table for the time being, but guarantee another lean year ahead, even if the harvest is good. And so the cycle continues.

But what are these communities to do? How can they break this annual cycle of scarcity and poverty? A fair price for their coffee is a start. No-interest loans. But they also need more diversified farms that will bring new sources of income and healthy food if the thin months are to become less lean. A new project—a partnership between Heifer International, a local coffee farmers' cooperative and a Vermont coffee company—is seeking to do just that. Heifer brings to this partnership its expertise in small-scale livestock, new and sustainable food crops, and market training.

photo: Russell Powell

SEASONAL POVERTY

While the term may be regional, the thin months are not unique to southern Mexico, or even Central America. It is a phenomenon more generally known as "seasonal poverty," defined for a recent conference at the Institute of Development Studies as "annually recurring periods when existing harvest stocks have dwindled, little food is available on the market, and prices shoot upward."

Throughout the tropics in particular, farmers must contend with cycles of scarcity, whether brought on by the floods of the wet season or the searing heat of the dry. Seasonal hunger affects about 600 million people worldwide every year. According to Stephen Devereux of the Institute of Development Studies, "Every year brings a kind of famine."

But seasonal poverty can quickly descend from short-term scarcity into long-term famine and poverty. Experts at the International Development Studies conference warned of a scenario in which "a chain of shocks leads to the erosion of resilience of a whole community, turning the 'normal' seasonal hunger into a major catastrophe." A chain of shocks could mean unseasonable weather, a global economic downturn and successive years of bad harvests.

Farmers in Rancho Bonito testified to unpredictable weather in recent years, and they are fully aware of the economic recession. In southern Chiapas, a good coffee harvest is usually followed the next season by a poor harvest. Last year, they say, was a bad harvest. They hope that this year will be good, but all it would take is another poor coffee harvest for the thin months to become the thin years.

photo: Russell Powell

THE THIN MONTHS STUDY

The road to Rancho Bonito is either a dusty track or a muddy scar, depending on the season. It climbs up and over the mountains in switchbacks. In the rainy season, washouts and mudslides force travelers close to the yawning precipice at the road's edge. Occasionally a pack donkey follows a man up the road. It's a three-hour trek by automobile to Jaltenango, the nearest town of any size. But automobiles are rare.

Once the road reaches an elevation of 2,500 feet, coffee plants appear on the hillsides. Most of the coffee here is still grown in small, wild-looking plots. By mimicking the surrounding environment, these plots provide a habitat for small animals, protect plant diversity and prevent erosion on the steep hillsides. But as large-scale coffee operations and retail-store middlemen have pushed further into the region, the small-scale coffee farmer is finding it difficult to hold onto his land and compete in the market.

In 1994, three coffee-growing communities in Chiapas took a proactive step and banded together to form the coffee cooperative CESMACH, Campesinos Ecologicos de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas. The first season, the co-op was able to sell some of its coffee directly to U.S. markets, getting a better price by cutting out the middleman. By 2006, the co-op had grown to 10 communities and could afford to buy a cargo truck to transport freshly harvested coffee beans to Jaltenango, where group members set up their own coffee roaster, ensuring that even more of the final price goes to the farmers.

But even with a direct connection to the U.S., prices fluctuated, buyers came and went, nothing was stable. That's where Green Mountain Coffee Roasters came in. In 2001, Green Mountain, a Vermont-based coffee company, began buying directly from CESMACH. This not only ensured that the growers got a good price for their coffee but it also guaranteed a stable and reliable market for their coffee.

photo: Russell Powell

But just paying a fair price was not enough for Green Mountain. "We believe that there is a direct link between the quality of coffee that we purchase and the quality of life in the farming communities that grow this coffee," said Rick Peyser, Green Mountain's director of social advocacy and coffee community outreach. "We believe it is right to support projects that improve the quality of life." Healthier communities, the thinking goes, result in a better product and sustainable profits.

So Green Mountain, in concert with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, conducted a study in 2007 of coffee-growing communities in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico "to determine whether the livelihoods of coffee-producing families were sustainable." What it found was that two-thirds of small-scale coffee farming families interviewed could not maintain their normal diet between three and eight months a year.

In Mexico, the study—which came to be known as "the thin months study"— found that more than half of the farmers interviewed obtained most of their livelihood from coffee. The study also found that the average gross return per acre of coffee was $465. In mountain communities like Rancho Bonito, the average size of family landholding is 10 or 12 acres, which translates into an annual income of $4,500-$5,500. That doesn't go far for a family, even in rural Mexico. As a consequence, 79 percent of those interviewed in Mexico reported a period of food shortage during the year.

The problem of widespread seasonal poverty became clear, and Green Mountain recognized a responsibility to the farmers who grew their coffee. So Green Mountain began furnishing its coffee-growing communities with fruit trees—peach, avocado, citrus, pear and macadamia.

Green Mountain has planted more than 11,000 trees so far. The fruit trees provide year-round food, but alone they are not enough to sustain a family through the thin months. So, with the encouragement of Green Mountain, the communities of CESMACH approached Heifer International.

In 2008, Heifer began working with 183 families in 10 coffee-growing communities in southern Mexico. The project, funded by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, will supply everything the farmers need to make it through the lean months—from rabbits to fish, from bees to mushrooms, and training in how to create local markets.

photo: Russell Powell

HEIFER COMMUNITIES

Before Heifer and Green Mountain arrived, the only way most families in these communities could survive was to leave to find work outside the community. "The household is under severe pressure to earn money, especially during these months," said Heifer Mexico Director López Musalem. "So the fathers—young adults, males—usually have to go work as construction workers, as farm workers on plantations or on ranches outside the region."

In Rancho Bonito, several of the men spoke up. One man had traveled north to work in North Carolina. But most of the men don't travel so far for work. They travel a few hours to the massive ranches that spread out across the valley east of here. And increasingly, they go to the city.

But urban migration simply trades one desperate situation for another. "These people are considered, by most of the middle class, disposable," López Musalem said. They are largely uneducated and have no professional training and know no one in the city. "If they go to the city, they work domestic service or as cheap labor or construction workers."

Heifer's primary goal here is to alleviate seasonal insecurity while allowing families to remain in their communities year round. "With the Heifer approach, what we want to do is have an impact at least in the food and nutrition aspects of the thin months," López Musalem said. "Also, families can have a little bit of income, not only by selling surplus but by not having to go out and buy things that are usually much more expensive."

CESMACH communities throughout the region are now receiving animals from Heifer. Heifer will provide more than 2,000 chickens and turkeys, 114 pigs, 85 rabbits, 70 sheep and 24 beehives, as well as horses, fish, vegetable seeds and fruit trees. In the next five years, the project will benefit 549 families—183 original families, 366 more through "passing on the gift"—from 12 coffee-growing communities. Each community works with Heifer to choose the right mix of animals and projects to suit local needs.

In Rancho Bonito, for example, coffee growers like Niver Salas Perez recently received pigs. Perez feeds his sow masa and kitchen scraps, supplemented with corn leaves and chayote vine that he collects with a machete from the surrounding mountainside. Without spending much money, Perez will be able to raise a sow and her litter. And pigs are very easy to sell here. Previously, if they wanted meat, the villagers had to make the trek to Jaltenango. Even then, most homes here lack a freezer. Now the family can keep what it needs and sell the rest to neighbors at a good price.

In Rancho Bonito, Heifer supplied pigs, and fish are on the way. In the community of Rio Negro, families chose to receive rabbits and sheep. In nearby Puerto Rico, project members requested draft horses to help them carry the harvested coffee beans from the steep plots.

photo: Russell Powell

In the community of Nuevo Colombia, project participants chose a mix of bees, sheep and pigs. But they also opted to try a new crop—mushrooms. No one in this community had eaten mushrooms, but they realized they could be harvested all year, eaten and the surplus sold, either here in the community or in the larger towns.

The mushrooms are grown in a small cinderblock room with a coffee sack over the window to keep out direct sunlight. Shelves line the walls, and on the shelves are misshapen masses that look like rough blocks of stone shot through with fossils. They may not be pretty, with chunks of corncob still visible, but they grow beautiful mushrooms.

The process goes something like this. Organic waste like corncobs, husks and coffee pulp are dampened, inoculated with the mushroom spores and then compressed into bags, about a cubic foot each. These bagged blocks are covered and left to rest while the mushroom spores germinate and the fungi begin to grow. After several weeks, mycelia, the root-like part of a fungus, have developed and what was once loose rubbish is now bound together into a solid mass. These blocks are removed and placed on the shelves in the darkened room. With careful attention, the first flush of mushrooms will appear in two weeks.

Every day, Neftali Guellen must mist the blocks with water. He stops to show off a clump of perfect mushrooms. Already, his family has learned how to cook with them, and a handmade sign outside his home advertises, "Se vende hongo de producion"—mushrooms for sale. Guellen harvests four or five pounds of mushrooms a day and gets about $2 a pound for them.

"By having other activities in the backyard, like keeping chickens, like keeping sheep, rabbits, fish, they are able to feed themselves, have some source of protein," said Heifer Mexico's López Musalem. "Not only putting food on the table, but also offering good, healthy, fresh products to the other families in the community."