In this blog article, let's move away from how and what we usually write — presenting the next information about coffee with fact-checking — and take a look at a person named Jean-Marc. This is not a real person. This is a hypothetical person. A collective image of a farmer from Cameroon, a country that produces approximately 35 thousand tons of green coffee of various quality levels every year. Sometimes ordinary, sometimes bad, sometimes super good, like speciality.
Jean-Marc is one of thousands of local farmers working for the global coffee industry. In this story, from his passionate and passionate, but tired of everyday life, he will talk about what it means to be a coffee farmer and what has changed in his life quite recently. And each reader will decide for himself what to do from the results of reading this story: Forget about it, think about it, or perhaps try to learn more about the lives of farmers, millions like Jean-Marc, who work in our world, growing what is on our plates and in our cups.
My name is Jean-Marc Tamba. I am 47 years old and a farmer. I grow coffee near Abon mBan, Cameroon. Some people will call it a village, but for me and my neighbors-farmers, this is a fairly large city — 19 thousand people and even more than 1 central street.
My farm is spread over 5 hectares and is large by local standards. All my life I grew coffee, just like my father, and like his father before him, making cocoa, sugar cane, bananas, and yams whenever possible. Every corner of my land, every inch of soil I cultivate with my own hands, and my wife and two children help me with this (the third is still small, let him grow up).
I sell seasonal coffee cherries to a coffee processing station. There they weigh what I brought them, look at the sight of cherries and give me money on my hands by weight. For most of my life, as long as I can remember, my father has been constantly arguing with the buyers at the station about the price, sometimes to the point of hoarseness. They might even have refused his coffee then, as long as he got out of their territory with his arguments. For every pound of coffee cherries he picked, he sold them for 20-30 US cents (in our money today it is 130-190 francs). To understand: to buy a liter of milk at the market, I need to pay 1000-1500 francs. That is, 5 kilograms of harvested berries for one or one liter of milk. This is 1-1,5 hours of operation. However, since 5-7 years ago, coffee prices have generally gone up, you need to pay a little less for milk.
For many years, the nearest station was 20 kilometers away from me. That's 12 miles. Our roads are dirt. In the dry harvest season, coffee is a normal, dense surface that gives off clouds of dust when you walk or drive on it. Of course, I can't walk 12 miles with a load of harvested crops. So my dad and I, and now my sons and I, to sell our goods, take bicycles, load 2-3 bags of collected berries on them and go. I can't count the number of times I've hooked back a chain that flew off on the way. How many times have I changed a swollen wheel right on the road (I always had 1-2 tires, cameras, and a pump in my backpack). It took us almost a whole day to bring 6-8 bags there! In the season from 5 hectares of our farm, we collect up to 10 tons of ripe berries. How much does the bag weigh? 25-30 kilograms. How many days do I have to carry 300-400 bags there? 50! Therefore, most often we ordered a car, but I really didn't want to give drivers 3 3-4 for each bag — and this is about a third of what I will be given for it at the station!
But there are not so many cars in our city and their owners keep prices to the last, because, in the end, they understand that otherwise farmers will not deliver their coffee to the station, except on rusty bicycles. Meanwhile, the collected coffee will rot.
And, of course, at the station itself, everything did not always go smoothly: sometimes something happened and the money was not given out on hand on the same day. But what if you can't go to the market without money? Since I have to collect coffee in season — from september to january – my children can only go to school from mid-january. With the delay in payments at the station, I couldn't even buy them textbooks and school uniforms.
But in the early 2010s, things started to change for the better! First, some people from other countries started coming to the city, and then to my farms and neighbors. They called our coffee "organic" and "eco", asked us something about it, told us something.and then they started buying coffee cherries from us and taking them somewhere in their own cars. I don't know why, but I am very grateful that they paid so well for coffee on my farm that since 2013 I even stopped growing other crops, planting everything only with coffee: 2, and sometimes 3 dollars per pound of berries! This is 10 times more than I had before!
In 2020, a road was built right at the gate of my farm, and then near my neighboring farmers. And not just leveled and rammed the soil, but laid asphalt! It was the first time I saw him with my own eyes. I asked the workers what it was, and they told me that it was a hard road, and it would be used by collectors of coffee, cocoa and everything else that we grow on our farms.
A year later, just 1.5 kilometers away, a large new processing station was built, where I now take my coffee in bags for sale at the same good prices. Those people who bought coffee from me before, now buy it at the station and pay money immediately, on hand, without delay, which all farmers are very happy about. The money allowed me to renovate my house and buy a tillerblock, in the trailer body of which I now drive 300-400 kilograms of coffee at a time. Now I take the entire crop to the station in 1-2 days. By myself.
I want to say a big thank you for these pleasant changes to those people who came to us and built a new station. They say they work for the foundation of the International coffee organization. And it is very nice to see how my neighbors now live with the hope of expansion, a better life and can send their children to school by buying them the best textbooks and school uniforms!
Of course, there is still a lot of hard work in our lives. But now life has received a new impulse, and the air is not what it used to be. I would say that this is hope and confidence in the future. Now I know that my coffee is actually of very good quality, and not as I was told at the last purchase station, which is no longer working. I also now know that my harvest brings joy to the people of many countries, most of which I did not know existed.
At the end of my story, I invite everyone to visit my farm, where I will tell you how I grow coffee, which I love only a little less than my sons :)