THE CANADIAN SIDE of the company went to great lengths to maintain a solid relationship with the Thai side. It was company policy to take the Vancouver employees (those who stayed at least three years) to Doi Chang to show them where the coffee they sold came from and why it was so important. I was invited to accompany some staff on one of these trips in March 2013 so that I could see for myself how the company operated and what changes it had produced in the village.
The rainy season hadn’t yet begun, and as we drove up the mountain to the village, the hillsides, mostly barren of trees, were brown and unappealing. Some still smoldered from illegal fires set to clear the brush. On the side of the road, we saw garlic bulbs spread out to dry. As we neared the top, we entered a more forested region, with coffee seedlings by the side of the road, growing under black cloth screens to shade them. An off-shoot road forked left to the Akha village of Saen Charoen and another went right to the Lisu village of Doi Lan, but we kept straight on and crested a ridge near the top of the mountain. Now the landscape was completely transformed, with trees everywhere, some towering over us, others shorter, sporting the glossy green leaves I recognized as belonging to coffee shrubs.
We could see the village of Doi Chang tucked into the valley below, but before we got there, we turned off the road to the left onto what looked like a large concrete parking lot. It was, in fact, the drying patio for processed Doi Chaang coffee beans. The harvest had ended a few weeks earlier, so there were only a few remaining beans scattered near the big processing mill to the right, with its various concrete vats where the coffee cherries had been fermented for twelve hours, then depulped and fermented again in water—twenty-four hours for “semi-washed” and forty-eight hours for “fully washed”—before being demucilaged. A big conveyor belt at a 30-degree angle reached up from the processing plant. Below its highest point was a huge pile of cherry pulp. Worms and special bacteria had been added to help turn the new pile more quickly into fertile compost to spread beneath coffee trees.
Next door, women sat around tables, sorting the processed green coffee beans, removing any that were broken, bug-damaged, over-fermented, or otherwise imperfect. And next door there was a large warehouse with piles of burlap bags bulging with coffee. Many contained beans still resting in parchment, their papery outer covering. They would be hulled shortly before they were shipped out.
I was to discover all of this shortly, but first we got out of the van, stretched our legs, and walked left into the brand-new two-story coffeehouse, which would be dedicated that night. We ordered coffee drinks—I got a beautiful cappuccino—at the bar, then sat at tables made of cross sections of rustic logs. The chairs, too, were rough-hewn and solid.
I met Adel, a round-faced man with straight, silky jet-black hair and an engaging smile, dressed in conventional, comfortable slacks and a sports shirt. He looked much younger than his forty-three years. As a child, he spoke only Akha, but now he was fluent in Thai and could understand much of what I said in English. He was just uncomfortable trying to communicate in English.
Then a small man with a scraggly beard and loose-fitting clothes strode over the parking lot from the large Academy of Coffee building at the far end of the concrete drying patio, where Doi Chaang delivery trucks were lined up. Wicha Promyong greeted me with a firm handshake after shifting his ever-present clippers to his left hand. He later explained that he used the clippers to snip promising cuttings of unusual plants. The clippers were almost a security blanket for him. He even slept with them next to his pillow in his “palace,” as he called the tiny thatched-roof hut where he lived in a small leafy glade to the left of the Academy.
Wicha spoke excellent English (he had lived four years in England, and his first wife was Scottish), so I didn’t need a translator. Despite his maniacally busy schedule—he always seemed to be explaining something, planning a new project, or talking on his cell phone—he spent a lot of time with me over the next few days, explaining the operation, telling me about his childhood and remarkable life, describing the plight of the hill tribes, and outlining his vision for the future.
We piled into a four-wheel drive truck for a tour. Over time, I drew a rough map of Doi Chang and the surrounding area, reproduced at the front of this book, as improved by graphic artist Carol MacDonald.
We drove out of the Doi Chaang Coffee compound and turned left, passing A-Roy’s noodle soup restaurant, a small office building, and the Doi Chaang Mart (which features the highest ATM machine in Thailand). We descended to a Y intersection where we turned left to go down to the village. The roads here were concrete, old and cracked, but more durable than the new asphalt. My first impression was that this was a sleepy, poverty-stricken area, with scruffy children and chickens in the road, red clay gashes, clothes hung on lines outside ramshackle homes, and vegetables drying on bamboo platforms. But then I noticed all the motor scooters and trucks, the satellite dishes, and some modern-looking homes amidst the shacks, and I realized that in its way, Doi Chang was a boomtown.
In the middle of the village, we turned right and started uphill. The road deteriorated quickly, then turned into rutted dirt, as we bounced higher and crested a ridge. We were surrounded by hundreds of acres of lush coffee trees in delightfully fragrant bloom. This was a critical time, when a severe storm and high winds could severely impact the next crop. The white coffee flowers last only a few days, though they bloom on the mountain in waves over a few weeks, during which the honeybees busily work to produce the special Doi Chaang coffee honey.
We lurched from side to side, then stopped to get out and explore. We walked down among the blossoming coffee trees, which enveloped us in their gentle, sweet odor. Wicha pointed out the macadamia shade trees as well as a white-flowering tree he called a siew, explaining that it fixed nitrogen to enrich the soil. A few workers were pruning coffee trees nearby. In his emphatic way, Wicha used the present tense, though he was talking about the past: “Many grow tomatoes and cabbage here. I hate that kind of crop. They cut down all trees, and they spray insecticides and chemical fertilizer. Then the price drop, no use even harvesting. And people get sick from the pesticide. You see this?” He swept his arm expansively. “Coffee is beautiful crop, no need for chemicals.” Indeed, with the coffee and its shade trees, biodiversity had returned to the area. We could hear birds singing, insects thrumming. Snakes, deer, and civet cats had reportedly come back to the mountain, along with pythons and cobras.
We continued our drive to Ban Mai, which means “New Village,” an outpost of raggedy-looking dwellings near the coffee fields, then looped back to the intersection where we had turned down to the village. This time we turned left to go up the mountain, past the Wawi Highland Agricultural Research Station and its thousand-plus acres that had been snatched from the Lisu and Akha back in the 1980s, past a few small Akha communities hanging onto the left side of the road, past the Royal Project on the right and the military outpost on the left, and up to a park owned by the research station, with a spectacular view of the mountaintop and valley. “You see?” Wicha said. “It looks like elephant’s head with trunk curved back.”
On the return trip, we stopped in the middle of a peaceful bamboo grove that featured multiple statues of Buddha, apparently over a century old, though no one knows who brought them there. We walked quietly through the grove and came to a swampy pond with lily pads, hanging moss, bromeliads, and croaking frogs. Around the far end, we came to a circular stone-walled well, one of the nine sacred wells from which the Thai king drinks once a year. A young monk, whom I later met, lives nearby in a small house with its own temple area. He walks down into the village every morning with his begging bowl, but few could blame him for hitching a ride back up the steep slope.
We drove back to the Doi Chaang compound. There I met Miga, Adel’s younger sister, at her desk in the Academy, where she kept track of orders and maintained records. A short woman with a ready laugh, Miga was the one who worked most closely with Wicha, whose desk sat just behind hers. I also met Nuda, a niece of Miga and Adel, who made the Doi Chaang soap, and Lipi, a nephew, who grew tea as well as coffee.
That night we took part in a feast to celebrate the opening of the new coffeehouse, with many Akha men and women in attendance. The men looked debonair in their fedora hats and sober dark pants, with their brightly colored embroidered vests and bags hung from their shoulders. The women were decked out in elaborate leggings, skirts, and jackets, topped by extraordinary headdresses, dripping with silver coins, balls, colored feathers, and beads. They laughed and gossiped in Akha as they ate.
There was an extravagant amount of food, including lots of meat—beef, chicken, pork, duck—as if to make up for all the years of poverty on the barren hillside where game had disappeared along with wild edibles. Wicha told me that at one stage people had been reduced to eating fried banana flowers with salt.
To round out my first day, as the darkness fell, we gathered in the Academy of Coffee around the fire. (That fire was kept smoldering all day to cure the thick thatched roof and prevent insects from eating it.) Wicha and I sat against the wall, where he sipped his green tea and smoked a cigarette. I observed that he really ought to quit smoking. He just laughed. I said that his body was too small to abuse like that. Maybe that’s why he was more tired than usual, he said. He didn’t want to travel so much anymore.
I love to sing, especially old folk songs, and Wicha had told me he used to be a rock musician and protest singer, so I asked if we might sing something we both knew. It turned out he knew a lot of songs—Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; John Denver; the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul & Mary; Hank Williams; Harry Belafonte; Nat King Cole; and other old tunes—so I harmonized above his sensitive, smoky baritone, sitting around a fire there on a mountain in Thailand. Then he broke into “Malaika,” an African song. I pulled out my harmonica, on which Wicha played a lively version of “Oh! Susanna” and a soulful version of “There’s No Place Like Home.” This man will be my friend, I thought.
THE NEXT DAY Anand Pawa, Lipi, and I drove down into the village. I wanted to get more of a sense of who lived there and how coffee had impacted their lives. Coffee trees were growing in front yards, coffee beans drying on various patios.
In addition to those who called themselves traditional Akha in the village, there were a sizable number of Catholic and Protestant Akha—perhaps as many as 70 percent of the villagers. The Catholics had mostly been converted by Korean or Italian missionaries, and the Protestants (just called “Christians,” as opposed to “Catholics”), had been converted primarily by American Baptists, Australian evangelists, or Aje, who all those years ago had convinced his father, Aso, to become a Christian. A small but growing number of Akha had become Buddhists. The remaining Lisu—many of whose relatives had left for the lowlands in the 1990s—lived on the high side of the village. There were a few Chinese families in the same neighborhood, and some Chinese had intermarried with Lisu. The old antagonisms seemed mostly to have been consigned to the past.
Near the main road, I saw a traditional Akha swing, its four tall posts tied with thickly twined vines at the top. It stood ready to carry boys, girls, and adults for three days the following August or September, during the annual fall Swing Festival. I asked where the upper village gate was, and Lipi led me to a small gate such as I had seen in books, with wooden birds atop it and a carved woman and man (with an oversized penis) outside it. But the gate was lost amidst a jumble of houses, as were the other two village gates. Doi Chang had spilled outside the gates, which had traditionally divided and protected the Akha from threatening jungle spirits and outsiders. No one had bothered to replace them annually, so they were slowly rotting. This is a sad, symbolic commentary on fading traditions, I thought.
The houses, mostly made of concrete cinderblock and lumber, with corrugated metal roofs, were jammed close to one another, with little room for vegetable gardens, which had been moved near the coffee fields. Land on the main road sold for $1.5 million baht ($50,000) for a hundred square meters (about a thousand square feet), while prime coffee-growing land cost 50,000 baht ($1,700) per rai (about 0.4 acres), putting it far beyond the reach of the average laborer.
No one knew exactly how many people lived full-time in Doi Chang. The official census, taken every ten years, is unreliable, because illegal immigrants from Burma and Laos are, of course, unregistered. There are probably 8,000 to 10,000 people living in Doi Chang, and during the coffee harvest, that number could nearly double with temporary workers. There were signs of new construction everywhere, with raw red clay cut away, rebar sticking up from concrete foundations. Almost all of this growth had taken place in the past ten years, with the pace increasing in the past five years, after the Canadians had begun to buy Doi Chaang beans.
A consumer lifestyle was becoming established. Somsak, a former village chief and another cousin of Adel, invited us into his spacious home, where we sat on a couch in his tile-floored living room on the second floor, which featured a large flat-screen television. The house was only a year old, with room for his three children, ages fourteen, sixteen, and twenty, but they were all in school down in Chiang Rai. He ran a business on the bottom floor of his home, bottling Ja Dae Water. The brand name came from the city of Ja Dae in Yunnan Province, from which the Akha had allegedly been forced to flee centuries ago. Water piped from a spring up the mountain was subjected to UV light and a reverse osmosis process. His sixteen-year-old son, home on vacation, was using a hair dryer to melt hygienic plastic over the filled bottles to seal them. Somsak said that the spring water coming out of his tap was perfectly safe, but he had to treat the bottled water to meet Thai FDA inspection criteria.
Somsak also owned a 30-acre coffee farm and his own brand, Ja Dae Coffee, which he roasted and sold in Bangkok, Chiang Rai, and elsewhere. The Doi Chaang trucks transported his coffee for a fee. Why would they help the competition? “We all help each other,” he said, which is the same thing Adel had told me. There was a big enough market for everyone.
Everyone in the village now had income relating to coffee, one way or the other. This boom was bringing more and more people to Doi Chang, and there was some concern that the village was becoming too congested. While the growth meant more and varied jobs—for cooks, construction workers, fruit growers, motorcycle repairmen, for example—it was now harder for villagers to find room to grow vegetables near home.
We then stopped at a community gathering spot, where men, women, and children sat or reclined on a raised bamboo platform shaded from the hot afternoon sun by a makeshift roof, where I spoke to Boocha, a woman who lived nearby. She was a Catholic, she told me, along with everyone else there. There were ninety-six households in the neighborhood. She was converted twenty-two years ago by Italian missionaries from Mae Suai, down the mountain.
A young man leaning on his motor scooter seemed particularly friendly and interested. Unlike many of the older Akha, Worachit spoke fluent Thai. He grew coffee on 3 rai and sold his cherries to Doi Chaang. “Wicha is a good man,” he said. “He helps people.” He knew that some of his beans might go abroad somewhere for farangs to drink, maybe Canada, he had heard.
I asked if anyone still had a thatched roof, and Worachit surprised me by saying that he did, though he didn’t like having to patch it, and he planned to replace it with metal when he could afford to. Intrigued, I asked if we could see it, so we followed his scooter far down a truly awful, narrow dirt road and stopped beside a tiny thatched hut with children’s clothes hanging on a line in the back. His home had a bamboo floor and two rooms. He and his daughter, six, and son, four, slept together on one side, while his wife and eight-month-old daughter slept in the other room. On the rough wooden walls were pictures of Mary and the baby Jesus and, of course, the king and queen. On a shelf sat a very small television set.
Back in the truck, we drove back up to the main road, turned left, and soon turned off into a courtyard where we found the Lisu macadamia factory in full swing, since this was the harvest season. The round brown casings that contain the white nut meat grow inside something resembling a dark green walnut shell. A clattery machine took off the shells, and then the unripe “floaters” were picked from the surface of the water. The rest of the smooth round brown balls, which reminded me of giant gumballs, had to be slow roasted and dried at low heat for three days. Then they were cracked open one at a time by women operating a simple device that brought a sharp point down on each shell, cracking it gently without harming the gumdrop-shaped nut inside. The nuts could then be further roasted, sometimes flavored with honey or other spices.
The afternoon was waning by the time we found a Lisu man in his late fifties who was willing to talk to us as his grandchildren played nearby. I forgot to ask for his name. “Yes, I grow coffee,” he said, on 5 acres. He used to grow rice, corn, and eggplant, but now, coffee and some macadamia and Chinese cherry. He sold his coffee to Doi Chaang, using the profits to improve his house, which was made of concrete blocks. He had been born in this location in a thatched hut.
He said that there was no longer friction between the Lisu and Akha. His nephew was married to an Akha woman. “It will be easier for my grandchildren, but I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this interview in my father’s generation. They didn’t talk to strangers.” It wasn’t that the Lisu and Akha hated each other in years past, he said. They just stayed in their own groups, that’s all, with very limited interactions.
ANOTHER DAY I was lucky enough to meet agronomist Patchanee Suwanwisolkit, who had been so instrumental in helping the Akha. From Chiang Mai University, she brought an expert, entomologist Professor Yaowaluk Chanbang, to teach farmers from Doi Chang and nearby villages about how to control coffee berry borers (Hypothenemus hampei, known as broca in Latin America), a tiny black insect nuisance, without using chemicals.
The infestation had to be caught when the cherries were just forming. It would be too late once the coffee beans were mature. “Females can bore into cherries as small as 2.3 millimeters,” the entomologist said. They chew chambers in the coffee seed in which they lay their eggs. The hatched larvae then feed on the seeds. He recommended that each farmer get a magnifying glass. All diseased cherries had to be picked off. He flashed photos of the insect’s life cycle—eggs, larvae, pupa, adult—all of them living inside a coffee cherry. Then he demonstrated how to make a simple trap out of an empty plastic bottle, cutting a section from the middle and hanging a small bottle of scented lure—three parts methanol to one part ethanol—to attract the bugs. Drill a hole through the bottle cap to hang it by wire to the tree, and put soapy water in the bottom to catch and drown the insects.
As he explained all of this, I talked to a few visiting farmers. Sura Phon, a Lisu from Doi Lan, had started with a half-acre thirteen years ago and now owned 30 acres of coffee. He grew supplementary crops including cabbage, radish, and tomato and some fruit trees. Unlike most farmers, he drank his own coffee, he said. Yes, he had noticed a lot more birds now, and he planned to plant more shade trees, including some macadamia. I asked what he did for fun. “I am too busy to play.”
Yi Pha, an Akha from Ban Mai, told me he had been growing coffee for eight years on 7 acres because it guaranteed a more stable income than the tomatoes he used to grow. As he spoke, I noticed his reddish brown teeth, stained from chewing betel nut. Yes, he said, he now had a Thai ID card, which Adel helped him to get when he was village chief.
I asked Wicha if there had been a turning point for the village. He explained how he had motivated two Akha brothers, Law Beh and La Cho, who own about 10 acres nearby. “I told them, trust me, follow me, you do the way I am teaching, you do pruning, mulching, fertilizer like this, I guarantee that you will get at least 80,000 baht. But whatsoever, if you make more money, it belong to you. The first year they follow me, they make more than 300,000 baht. That was ten years ago. Two boys start doing it. Some follow, more and more now, doing shade-grown, mulching, pruning.”
I told him that I was confused about who owned the land, since I had read that, technically, the government had declared all of the northern mountains a national preserve. “In a sense they own their own land to grow coffee on, but they have no rights by law, no papers.” But the government couldn’t realistically confiscate the land, since it was doing too well already. “Instead, the government now brings people up here to show them what we are doing and to take credit for it. I don’t care, as long as the way of life of my people is better,” Wicha said.
He explained how he had studied the tea, honey, and soap businesses, and he hoped to expand into a line of cosmetics, having found that coffee oil was good for the complexion. He had also added a small line of Doi Chaang macadamia nuts. For three years, Doi Chaang had been the exclusive agent for small Colombian coffee pulpers. “We sell to Laos, Burma, Thailand, all over.” He had convinced Paolo Fantaguzzi, the Italian who had installed the new Brambati roaster, to move to Thailand and start the Ital-Thai Service Company, to build and repair brewers and, eventually, to build their own coffee roasters. “I can’t just keeping doing one thing, you know?” Wicha said. “We have to do everything by our own.”
Wicha said that there were now some 300 coffeehouses serving Doi Chaang Coffee in Thailand, six in Australia, five in Japan, two big shops in Malaysia, and he had ambitious plans for 300 Korean cafés within the next two years. “They asked for 1,200 in Korea, but we don’t have enough coffee yet to supply them,” he said. That made me ask why he still needed the Canadians, if he could sell so much roasted coffee for a bigger profit right there in Asia. It was thanks to Darch and his company, he said, that Doi Chaang coffee had gained international recognition. “Don’t forget that we start together, you know? People know the name Doi Chaang. That’s from Canada. Ourselves, we know how to grow coffee, how to produce coffee. But to introduce to the market, they do it. We are family, we are family. We work together,” he said, clasping his hands together. “Not just business.”
I asked Wicha whether the sudden relative wealth from coffee might be too much for some of the Akha to handle. “Now everyone gets paid,” he said. “Some want to show off, go to town, spend money like rich man, buy new truck every year, new house in town, gambling. These are mostly men in their forties and fifties.” Yes, there were drug problems in Doi Chang, especially methamphetamines called Ya Ba. “To solve this problem, we asked the military to base here.”
Still, he had high hopes for young people. He wanted the Doi Chaang Coffee Foundation to build a $2 million school for children from all twenty-five villages in the district. The school would have room to house one hundred children who came from too far away to commute. “All tribes will learn to be together.”
Wicha still seemed to be the heart and soul of the operation. I wondered what would happen if he were bitten by a cobra? Would the business collapse? Would Adel and Miga be able to carry on without their visionary leader?
In Chiang Rai, before flying back to Bangkok, I met Wicha’s charming daughter Kwan, my waitress at the Doi Chaang Coffeehouse. This was the café’s third location, larger and more central than the previous spots. With its trees and courtyard, it provided an oasis from the busy city street. Its menu extended beyond coffee, including goodies such as coffee fudge, coconut pie, and macadamia brownies, along with homemade ice cream flavors such as strawberry, green tea, and mixed berry. There were also light lunches to appeal to Western tourists, ranging from mushroom Panini sandwiches to a hamburger and fries. Although they may have faced a steep learning curve, it was obvious that Wicha’s family, many of whom lived in the back of the coffeeshop, ran a sophisticated, popular operation that was attracting both locals and tourists.
I RETURNED TO Doi Chang in November 2013, near the start of the frenetic harvest season. Every afternoon, pickup trucks laden with bulging burlap bags lined up near huge scales next to the processing station. Farmers threw the bags with freshly picked coffee cherries onto the scales, then anxiously awaited the results, before a team of Doi Chaang workers emptied the sacks into a huge vat of ripe cherries. The farmers received a chit to redeem for cash at the ATM machine down the road. In 2013, with the C-market prices dropping, they received 18 baht per kilo early in the season, when there were more unripe berries in the mix. A week or two into the season, the price would go up to 20 baht.
With the cash flowing more slowly than it had in 2012, Wicha took a two-day trip to borrow money from a couple of banks in Nan Province. Despite the fact that Thai banks don’t like to lend money on volatile commodities, Doi Chaang was now well known within Thailand, and the loans wouldn’t be difficult to secure.
The previous morning in Bangkok, before flying to Chiang Rai, I had met John Darch Junior and Anand Pawa, who had been in Shanghai striking a deal with two young sisters whose father had begun Oro Caffè, based in Udine, Italy. Oro Caffè had ordered a container of green beans to roast or sell in Italy, Germany, and France. “If all goes well, this could be a big foot in the door in continental Europe,” Darch Junior said.
Then we picked up a Rainforest Alliance auditor from Indonesia, who was joining us to explore certification for Doi Chaang beans. Darch Junior explained that Fair Trade certification was cumbersome and expensive, with a 20 cent per pound charge at both the green bean and roasted level. “Plus we have to pay the $4,200 annual auditing fee.” Rainforest Alliance charged only for the audit, so many roasters were considering a switch away from Fair Trade.
We flew to Chiang Rai and drove up to Doi Chang. All seemed amicable at first, but talks with the Rainforest auditor soon turned tense. He wanted more information about the farmers than anyone could easily provide. Anand Pawa, Wicha, and Darch Junior explained that any village farmer could sell to Doi Chaang, but that they were also free to go elsewhere. Rainforest wanted a more formal cooperative arrangement. The next morning, the auditor left without any resolution of the issue.
DOI CHAANG COFFEE had been cleared of any involvement of cruelty to civets, but I wanted to see for myself how the Doi Chaang civet beans were found and collected. The day after a heavy downpour, Lipi’s brother Jay led me up into Lipi’s steep acreage. I brought my small digital video camera to document the trek, which I undertook in my sandals, slipping badly and clutching onto coffee and shade trees to keep my balance. After a very challenging climb, we finally located a mound of civet-pooped coffee beans, clustered between the coffee trees. Jay explained that they wouldn’t pick it up until the end of the harvest season, because a civet would return to the same place to defecate only if the site remained undisturbed. We climbed further up the mountainside and found several more civet cat deposits. We also encountered Jay’s sister-in-law picking coffee cherries; she had told him where to find the deposits of civet coffee.
Jay said that he could tell the difference between wild and caged coffee poop, that the wild version was darker, with more variation in bean size. He had never seen a civet cat, since they come out only at night. As I clambered down the muddy mountainside, splashing over a stream, I considered that it would indeed be easier to feed caged civets, but I could now prove that the Doi Chaang civet coffee I witnessed was authentically wild.†
Later I found that some villagers were raising civets in cages, feeding them coffee cherries, and attempting to market them for a large profit. But none of them were trying to sell them to Doi Chaang. The caged civets I saw did not appear to be mistreated, and their owners were obviously unaware that they were doing anything wrong or controversial. The civets, which looked like skinny raccoons, were kept in relatively large, separate cages, and were fed coffee cherries and bananas. Nonetheless, I agreed with Wicha and the WSPA that civets are wild animals and should not be kept captive.
BACK FROM HIS trip to woo bankers, Wicha revealed that he had several new projects on the go. Eight types of edible and medicinal mushrooms from Hungary and Nepal were growing in moist test wood in plastic jugs, with a small building under construction for mushroom agronomy near the pulp pile. Wicha said that the mushrooms thrived using the pulp as a growing medium. “Just one hundred pots of mushrooms, it feeds like ten or twenty families, and you don’t have to invest a lot,” he explained. He planned to use it as a demonstration project for villagers, who could get a tenfold return by growing their own mushrooms and selling them fresh or dried. A Chiang Mai University professor would come every week to offer tutorials.
In the basement of the office building, Wicha was having equipment installed to process and bottle fruit and energy drinks he planned to make from the mushrooms and local wild fruits, as well as blue and green teas, along with bottled water. He created a new corporate name for each new business. Doi Chaang EcoZone would make the drinks, and Doi Chaang BioGrade the mushrooms. But the biggest and most exciting project was to grow cordyceps, a fungus that was gaining a growing reputation as an alternative medicine. The parasitic fungus grows in spectacularly ghoulish fashion from the bodies of caterpillars and spiders in the mountains of Tibet and Nepal, sprouting in stringy orange growths that kill their hosts. It has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries and is supposed to prevent various types of cancer and kidney disease, strengthen the immune system, increase energy levels, and act as an aphrodisiac.
Over the summer, a Thai entrepreneur nicknamed Nong (Chayanin Sritisarn) had seen Wicha on a television program and contacted him. Having made a substantial amount of money from selling a chicken processing business, she was seeking a more life-affirming enterprise and had hooked up with Professor Tawat Tapingkae of Chiang Mai University, who experimented with various types of cordyceps. I met them when Nong and Professor Tawat drove up the mountain one afternoon to see how their new lab in the Academy of Coffee was doing. Nong and Professor Tawat explained that Cordyceps sinensis, the traditional Tibetan version, had to grow from a medium using ground-up insects, but that Cordyceps militaris, which contained even more of the active ingredients adenosine and cordyceptin, could grow in a medium of cooked rice. Professor Tawat turned out to be the mushroom expert Wicha had been telling me about, and he was also an orchid specialist. Wicha was sure he could sell a brand of Doi Chaang Cordyceps in the coffeehouses for a sizable profit.
That evening, Nong, a slim, lively woman in her forties with a ready smile, roasted sweet potatoes and coconuts for us over the fire, while Wicha and I grew mellow and sang folk songs, though he complained that he had trouble catching his breath. To end the evening we sang the old African peace anthem “Kumbaya.” “We are hand in hand, Kumbaya, we are hand in hand, Kumbaya… Ah, good!” he declared. Then he retired to sleep behind his desk, having abandoned his hut after he found that he was about to share his bed with a python.
Over the next few days, I talked to several new people. Dawan, twenty-six, the third of five siblings, worked in the Doi Chaang office next to A-Roy’s noodle shop, and she was the one who sat at the table handing out chits every day as farmers brought their coffee cherries to be weighed. She was yet another Akha relative, Adel’s niece. Lipi and Jay were her older brothers, and she told me that she was embroidering a traditional Akha shirt as a wedding present for Jay, who in January would be marrying a Thai woman who worked for a television station in Bangkok.
Dawan spoke good English, in part because she had spent three months in Panama City, Florida, part of a work/travel program sponsored by Chiang Mai Commercial College, where she earned a business degree. Her mother, Piko’s daughter Misor, had married an Akha man from Chiang Mai, so Dawan had grown up in that city’s suburbs, three hours to the south, but she frequently visited her grandparents in Doi Chang, living with Piko and his wife, Bu Chu, every summer. “I loved the Swing Ceremony,” she said. “It was so much fun. You could see the whole valley, and I felt like I could fly.”
Every Friday at her school was “culture day,” when Dawan wore traditional Akha dress. When she was twenty, her mother made her a full Akha headdress, with tassels down the back to indicate that she was single. Like most younger Akha, she did not really believe in jungle spirits or divination, but she valued the Akha language and culture.
I asked her what she thought of Bangkok and other big cities, and whether she wanted to settle down in Doi Chang. “I like learning new things and meeting many people,” she said, “so I enjoy Bangkok, and I want to explore the world. But when I am older, I want to settle here.” The weather was nicer than in the lowlands, the coffee business was thriving, and most important, these were her people, her family.
I met A Sho, thirty-six, an Akha man who had worked in Taiwan for eight years in an automobile factory. He had returned to Doi Chang to care for his elderly grandfather, who died three years ago, and A Sho was now married, with an eight-month-old son. He had inherited 8 acres on which, of course, he grew coffee. “I know about the pima,” he said, “but I know little about Akha culture really.” He had become a Buddhist, the leader of thirty-five Buddhist Akha families in the village. “My grandfather felt that Buddhism was the same-same with the Akha Way. But when he got sick, he put the Akha string on his wrist.” When A Sho’s son grows up, he will not learn the Akha Way. He will be a Buddhist. I asked if A Sho thought other Akha his age would raise their children as traditional Akha. No, he said, maybe just 20 percent.
I had seen a slim Akha man with a ponytail and slight limp, who frequently hung out in the coffeehouse. I finally introduced myself and learned his name, Leebang. He had his own coffee brand called Doi Yama, and he drove me with his two cute little girls and baby boy in his pickup down a dirt road just behind the coffeehouse. The road dead-ended at his farm. An older girl was in school in Chiang Rai. He grew coffee on 20 rai but also purchased cherries from other Akha. He had created the Doi Yama brand two years ago. Before that, he sold to Doi Chaang.
His farm, which offered a stunning view down the valley, had its own processing station, drying patio, and roaster. He had just begun to grow strawberries as a supplemental crop. While I wandered around, his children watched a Thai translation of the Flintstones on a small TV in the warehouse.
Leebang was one of the processors who had initially supplied Doi Chaang, but whom Wicha and Adel had cut off in 2010 when they upgraded their processing station in order to buy directly from farmers. “All of these guys used to come drink free coffee here at the Doi Chaang coffeehouse and laugh at Wicha,” John Darch Senior told me later, “because they were rebagging cheap coffee from down the mountain and calling it Doi Chaang. They thought Wicha was stupid for not doing the same thing.”
This story isn’t so simple, I thought as I climbed in bed in my little green cottage up the hill on the other side of the road from the Doi Chaang compound. Yes, it’s an uplifting story showing the impact that an alternative approach to capitalism can have on an oppressed people. But they are still people, and human beings being human, there will always be conflict, greed, misunderstanding, and unforeseen consequences of change, even when the change is clearly for the better.
ONE OF WICHA’S big plans had been to make education equally accessible to all the children within the region of twenty-five villages. The Doi Chang primary school educated first through ninth grades. Nearly 600 children attended the school, though children without Thai ID cards would receive no graduation certificate and would be unable to pursue further education beyond Grade 9. In the library, which was funded by Doi Chaang Coffee, a group of girls were drawing and painting during an after-school program, and a boy was singing karaoke through a microphone attached to a computer.
I spent a morning in English classes for seventh, eighth, and ninth graders taught by Meeyae Saedoo, the only Akha teacher in the school. In the first class, most of the students were Akha, with a few Lisu and one Chinese. About half were Christian, with a slight Protestant majority. All of their parents grew coffee, some on small plots, others on up to 40 rai. Most of the students planned to go to Chiang Rai to attend high school, where they would rent rooms.
As much as I appreciated Meeyae’s energetic teaching efforts, it wasn’t clear how much English her students were learning, as she taught from curriculum-prescribed workbooks. She had them repeat words and sentences, such as “She is going to town at the present moment.” Not only was the language stilted, it was incomprehensible when they repeated the sentences in their heavily accented singsong manner. I only ascertained what they were supposed to be saying by reading the workbook. Meeyae wrote the words living room, kitchen, and bathroom on the blackboard and had the students assign words such as sofa, armchair, fridge, coffee table, and toilet to the correct room.
Meeyae was an enthusiastic, supportive teacher, but I was saddened that she, the only Akha teacher in the school, was not teaching anything about the Akha way of life—nothing about bamboo platforms, men’s and women’s sides, of a home, ancestor shrines, hunting, gathering medicinal herbs, creation stories, spirits, divination, weddings, or funerals. Nothing about a rich way of life that was disappearing, although of course no one mourned the absence of poverty, malnutrition, and other problems of the recent past.
ANOTHER DAY, I met with the traditional Akha village elders at Piko’s house, a large modern tiled home on the main street. The older men, wearing their fedora hats, sat on rustic benches or cross sections of large trees. We drank tea, as Wicha translated.
All of the elders, who ranged in age from sixty-six to eighty-two, were part of the Saedoo clan that Piko belonged to, and they still performed important rituals. The pima, Akue Choemue, was right there, one of the elders. He was also the nyipa, the shaman. He killed water buffaloes as part of funeral celebrations and could recite hours of ritual poems and stories. He was training four younger men to be pimas and to carry on the tradition.
They expressed some concerns about the traditional way of life being eroded by television and increased contact with Thai culture. It was less of an issue with the older generations, but the younger Akha were vulnerable. Some of the elders attended meetings to discuss how to minimize the damage to their traditions. Some wanted to videotape the ceremonies to preserve them. I asked about a written version of the Akha language that Paul Lewis had created. They knew nothing of it and were not interested. Theirs was an oral tradition, and that was it.
With some trepidation, I asked whether they still killed twins at birth. No, there had been a meeting of Akha from China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in 1998 to discuss many issues, and they had decided to stop the long tradition of smothering twins. No Akha twins had been born in the village since then. Other laws remained unchanged. Were they worried about Ya Ba and heroin use in the village? Yes, they never saw such problems in the past. What about the illegal mobile casinos? They hated them. In the old days, there was some small-time gambling, but not these high-stakes games for millions of baht. Many gamblers came from the lowlands, and they didn’t listen to old people.
I asked what they used to eat. In the old days, when there was deep jungle, they ate many animals, but once they moved to Doi Chang, there was no more jungle and no animals to hunt. They had carp in a fishpond and grew vegetables. Now that the trees were growing back, wild boar and barking deer were returning. Yes, they sometimes ate dog during a ceremony. And they were fond of bamboo worms.
What about music? They carved Jew’s harps and a simple flute out of bamboo and used big bamboo poles to thump rhythmically on the ground, along with gongs and drums, to accompany dances. During harvest season, they were always singing, making up new words for ballads. “If we see a bird, we sing about it, or it might be about a young boy kissing a girl and telling her how beautiful she is.”
That reminded me to ask about the courting yard. Did boys and girls still meet there in the evening to sing, dance, and flirt? No. The courting yard still existed, but it was no longer an important part of social life. “Things change,” an elder said, meaning, What can you do? Most of the teenagers were attending school in Chiang Rai anyway. More Akha were falling in love with and marrying non-tribal members. At least, now that coffee was creating jobs, the young people were moving back home.
Why had so many Akha converted to Christianity? This was a touchy subject. No, it was not because it was too expensive to sacrifice animals in Akha rituals. A lot of conversions occurred because other family members converted. But, Wicha said, the Christians made everything easy. You could go to heaven without making any sacrifices.
THE NEXT DAY, I met Mike Mann, whose father, Dick Mann, had been a coffee pioneer in Thailand. In 1959, when he was two years old, Mike Mann arrived in Thailand with his missionary agronomist parents and grew up there, visiting villages and hiking the mountains with his father. The younger Mann returned to the United States to attend California Polytechnic, where he earned an undergraduate degree in international agronomy and a master’s in plant pathology. In 1990, he came back to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to carry on his father’s work with hill tribes through what was eventually named the Integrated Tribal Development Program (ITDP). The best of the ITDP coffee beans went to Starbucks, but others were sold as the Lanna Coffee brand. (Lanna is the name of a former kingdom in northern Thailand.)
When Mike Mann arrived in Doi Chang that day, with his coffee manager, Boonchu Kloedu, a Karen tribal member, I feared he would be defensive about the success of Doi Chaang, since Mann had helped form an Akha farmer’s cooperative in Doi Chang in 2002, about the time Wicha was beginning to help Adel. Then Mann had sponsored a Lisu Doi Chang cooperative three years later. Mann had also arranged for coffee from Doi Chang to be part of the Thai Starbucks blend, Muan Jai, introduced in 2004.
But as Doi Chaang Coffee became a huge success, and prices for freshly picked cherries and processed village beans rose, the farmers abandoned ITDP. Many started roasting their own coffee. “Our last major purchase from Doi Chang was in 2010, when we bought over 50 tons, but it tapered off in 2011,” Mann explained. “People sold to the Doi Chaang co-op or started their own businesses. They learned about the importance of coffee quality from us and some marketing strategy, but now they could do it on their own. So we put our resources in other places. We are not about taking over, but promoting and building awareness.” Mike Mann and Wicha had met at a coffee conference in 2006, he said, but otherwise they appeared to have kept their distance from one another, and there clearly was some tension there. Both claimed credit for improving coffee quality, for instance.
Then we headed for the village, meeting on a terrace at the home of an Akha named Akaw, who had moved to Doi Chang eighteen years ago and had been one of the original ITDP co-op members. We were joined by Teenoi, a Chinese coffee farmer, and Bancha, a Lisu and one of long-time village chief Beno’s sons. They had invited Mike Mann back to Doi Chang to discuss the possibility of restarting the co-op, since coffee prices were declining. They apologized that more farmers weren’t there, but most had gone to a funeral in Maemon that morning.
It was an ideal opportunity to ask the farmers about their holdings and operations, with Mike Mann translating. Akaw owned 20 rai at a high altitude near Ban Mai, so his harvest had not yet begun. Teenoi owned a total of 30 rai in various parcels, and Bancha had similar holdings. During the harvest season, they hired pickers from other villages, paying them either a daily wage of 200 baht (about $7) or 4 baht per kilo. In the early harvest season, when there were fewer ripe cherries, the pickers wanted to be paid by the day, but at the height of the season, when a skilled, hardworking harvester could pick 100 kilos, they wanted to be paid by the kilo. The farmers complained that they had to pay for gas to pick up their workers every day. “They make more than we do,” groused Akaw, but that was clearly far from true.
Akaw and Teenoi sold their cherries to Doi Chaang, but they were not satisfied with the 18 baht per kilo they were getting, and they complained that they had to wait for a month or more to get paid. I made a mental note to ask Adel and Wicha about this allegation. Bancha processed and roasted his own coffee, which he sold as Lisu Doi Chang Coffee. But he, too, was interested in exploring other options. Maybe he would rejoin ITDP.
The meeting ended without any resolution, in part because only three farmers were there. After the meeting, Mike Mann commented: “They are hedging their bets. We are the David of the Thai coffee industry against a bunch of Goliaths.” By that time, he represented twenty-five villages in Thailand in five provinces, and the Fair Trade certification, which ITDP had pioneered in Thailand, had become a bureaucratic and financial nightmare. “It used to be that ITDP paid a premium fee for the amount of coffee we sold with the Fair Trade label. But they changed that about three years ago so that the farmers themselves had to pay.” In addition, in Thailand, cooperatives had to be formed on the provincial level, but Fair Trade insisted that each of the five ITDP cooperatives pay separate fees. So Mann abandoned the Fair Trade certification in favor of Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. Practices, a stringent company standard.
ON MY LAST day of this trip, Bancha, a vigorous, nice-looking man of forty-eight with a thick mop of black hair (in contrast to his bald father), invited me back to see the three caged civet cats he had recently acquired. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to sell the civet coffee for the big prices he had heard about. So far, his well-cared-for civets hadn’t produced much.
We walked up the nearby hill to the Doi Chang Resort, where Bancha showed me the small room where he and his younger sister, Chome, roasted and bagged their beans for the Lisu Doi Chang Coffee brand. There I met Chome, who spoke very good English, having worked for IMPECT before returning to Doi Chang to join the family coffee business and start the resort. She spoke fluently and earnestly about “indigenous people” and “sustainability,” and she said she had started a women’s group in Doi Chang. She was applying for a grant to go to Missoula, Montana, to study for three months, hoping to become a more savvy businesswoman. She showed me a mockup for Abeno Coffee, a new brand she wanted to launch with her father’s face on it, in obvious imitation of Piko’s image on the Doi Chaang bags. She suggested that I stay at her resort on my next visit, and she could translate when I interviewed her father.
Back at the Doi Chaang compound, Nuda explained how she made soap. As I was about to leave, she took a solid silver Akha bracelet off her wrist and insisted that I take it to my wife. “Nuda, I can’t take this, it’s yours,” I said. “I really want you to have it, Abopala,” she said, pressing it on me. I was touched, and I liked the new nickname I had earned this trip—I was Abopala, which means “honored old white man.”
As Adel drove down the mountain, we chatted, and his English was much better than I had realized. I asked him whether the Lisu had looked down on the Akha when he was a child. Yes, and perhaps there remained some vestige of that prejudice “in their hearts,” but no one would say it aloud. The younger generation was growing up without such prejudices, he said, and in the future Akha and Lisu might intermarry more frequently.
I told Adel that I had grown up in the American South in the 1950s, when blacks and whites could not use the same water fountains or schools. He was surprised. I told him that had all changed, in my lifetime, and that now whites and blacks could intermarry without huge concern, and that it was amazing how cultures could change so dramatically and quickly. But subtle prejudices remained.
We got to the airport. I thanked Adel again and grabbed my suitcase, already looking forward to my next visit to the village of Doi Chang, when I would arrive in time for the annual Academy of Coffee celebration the following April.