This past January, the Wedge sent me to Nicaragua to take part in Equal Exchange's Nicaragua Tour 2002. We were a collection of nine Americans and one Canadian, some co-op folks, some not, all invited by Equal Exchange to see Fair Trade in action. In an eight-day span we toured three organic coffee cooperatives with which Equal Exchange does business, arriving in the sauna of Managua, then traveling up to the arid plains outside Matagalpa, to a cloud forest farm high in the Isabelia Mountains, then back to Managua again.

On Oscar Ruiz's mountain coffee farm, high above the city of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, stacks of pinewood drying racks hold freshly depulped coffee beans. Top quality on the bottom; low quality on top. While fermenting in these racks for about 24 hours, the bean's flavor matures into the distinct characteristics for which a given farm is known, so this is a critical stage in coffee processing.

Rosario Castellon, a regal-looking woman with a crackling dry wit, leans her elbows on the pine racks, running her fingers through the coffee beans.

She has an important role on this tour, which is not merely to show us North Americans how coffee is processed. Rosario is Equal Exchange's "emissary," their Producer Liaison. As required by their Fair Trade agreement, she's here to show these coffee cooperatives how Equal Exchange is promoting their coffee and, conversely, how Equal Exchange informs consumers about Nicaraguan cooperatives. Rosario works in Boston now, but she was born and raised in Nicaragua. She looks totally at home on this farm, leaning over the racks of green-gold beans, glasses slipping down her nose as she inspects the beans.

If this coffee wasn't of the highest quality, Rosario and our tour group wouldn't be on Oscar Ruiz's farm. Your average conventional coffee farmer isn't as concerned with quality as Oscar is. If the average farmer fights hard for market price, he might get around 40 cents a pound but chances are good he'll be forced to sell to the omnipresent cut-rate middlemen known as "coyotes" and earn a lot less. That, or he could dump his lowest quality beans on the instant coffee market.

But Oscar Ruiz's reputation for quality organic coffee happens to be very high, and he's a member of Cecocafen Coffee Co-op, who keeps his OCIA (Organic Crop Improvement Association) certification up to date. As a result, Equal Exchange is willing to pay a premium price for Oscar's high quality beans. Right now, with the global coffee market scraping the disastrous low of $.44/lb for conventional coffee, Equal Exchange agrees to pay its Fair Trade partners, like Oscar, $1.41/lb for organic coffee. Equal Exchange is willing to do this because Oscar's co-op, Cecocafen, meets their criteria for Fair Trade. Cecocafen is democratically run as a cooperative - one member, one vote.

The co-op encourages its growers to use environmentally safe practices (like organic farming and triple filtering water before returning it to the soil). Cecocafen keeps its books "transparent" so that Equal Exchange and coffee farmers alike can see that the correct amount of profit is flowing to the farms.

When the market price for coffee goes above the Fair Trade minimum of $1.41/lb (which hasn't happened since mid-1998), a savvy coffee co-op like Cecocafen has the opportunity to make even more money for its members. When the price spikes, Cecocafen can send Equal Exchange a contract and ensure that its thirty thousand farmers (90% of whom own small 7 acre farms) get even more money for their premium coffee.

"Sorting is everything," Rosario says when I join her at the drying racks and ask her what she's doing. She makes a gesture as if to say that's it, nothing else matters.

I put down my backpack and lean on the rack next to her. She shows me the beans to remove - the ones with bug-bites and brown spots.

"Sorting is most important of all, because quality is everything," she says, dropping bad beans in a pail for the instant-coffee market.

After visiting Oscar's farm, the tour went to Solcafe Beneficio, Cecocafen co-op's organic processing plant. Downslope in the arid region outside Matagalpa, the cool mountain weather of Oscar Ruiz's farm seems much further than just a few miles away. The Nicaragua sun is raging here, and we're looking over a vast expanse of beans as they dry on a concrete patio beneath this desert sun.

Hamilton Rivera, the president of the operation, is a snappy dresser with the calm, easy manner we've come to appreciate in most Nicaraguans. Coffee processing, he tells us beneath a shade tree, happens in two stages before exportation: Wet processing and dry processing, and quality is obsessively checked at every stage in the operation.

During the wet stage, coffee is harvested from the living plant into wicker baskets and later "depulped," that is, the coffee berry is put into a friction grinder and the outer fruit is crushed from the pit, the so-called "bean." Depulped beans are then irrigated in a sluice to remove the remaining fruit and outer hull, and fermented for 24 hours in drying racks, as we saw at Oscar's farm.

Next, the depulped pits, called "green" or "gold" coffee for their color, are shipped in 150-pound bags to a dry processing plant like this one, called a "beneficio." Workers unload the bags at the weigh station ("bascula") and Quality Control takes a sample from each farm's bags to look for initial problems. The beans are then laid out to dry. Organic beans must be placed on a concrete patio (for easy cleaning) and women with wooden rakes walk between the aisles of unbagged beans, carefully raking them, turning them in the sun, and straightening the square piles of coffee. They wear bandanas over their faces both to protect themselves from the sun and to filter out dust. (Meanwhile, conventionally grown coffee beans are laid out on black plastic tarps, which can be rolled up at night to retain heat for continued drying.)

On the patio, the organic beans are labeled with red cards designating the farm from which the beans came and the date on which they arrived. This card will stay with the beans so that organic status can be verified at any stage in coffee processing and shipping.

After 5 days, when the dried beans reach 12% moisture content, they are bagged up again and placed in the warehouse ("bodega") for several days before being sent through a weighing and dehusking machine. After dehusking, they are sorted on two long conveyer belts where two teams of 18 women each remove imperfect beans before exportation. The better the beans, the more likely the co-op gets its Fair Trade premium price. The bad beans are sold off at a cheaper price for instant coffee.

And it's grueling work. All of it. The men who unload the heavy bags of coffee haul them across the wide concrete patios in teams of eight. Their technique is fascinating, but hard to watch in this brutal heat. One man lifts the bag to his waist, then another gets his hands underneath one end and flips the heavy bag with a snap onto his fellow's shoulders. Then that second guy heaves a bag up to his waist and another man flips it onto his back for him. When they aren't carrying anything, these men move slowly like jungle cats conserving their energy for the moment when they have to endure the snap of that 150-pound bag.

The other harsh job falls to the sorters at the long conveyer belts. The belts are loud and you can feel them in your body as soon as you enter the sorting room. Hamilton points out that mechanical sorting would be cheaper and more efficient, but it would also put 36+ women out of work at a time when coffee prices are in the toilet. He's also careful to point out that the women get two breaks and a long lunch, and few of them actually work a full forty hour week (most have other jobs and this one is supplemental). Good thing too. I take a turn at sorting, and my eyes go wacko doing it for just fifteen minutes, concentrating on the passing beans and scanning quickly for imperfections as they roll past, conveyer belts roaring in my ears.

Interestingly, this sorting job is considered women's work by the cooperative, which pays close attention to gender issues, albeit Latin American style. According to their internal studies, women are more careful quality control experts. As a result, women hold all the quality control positions at Solcafe, from the workers who carefully rake the beans to Dona Carmen, la scientista who roasts and brews coffee in the "laboratory" for quality checks. Hamilton says the mountain coffee co-ops let men rake the beans, but they're too rough, so the coffee suffers in quality as a result.

While it's easy to poke holes in these stereotypes, it's an attention to hiring practices (and hiring women) ignored elsewhere in Latin America. Women work at cooperative beneficios in a higher percentage than in corporate coffee facilities, and indeed, non Fair Trade beneficios are firing women during the current coffee crisis because they're seen as excess workers. Furthermore, ninety percent of Solcafe's workers, men and women alike, receive equal pay, all except for the loaders who haul the heavy bags.

And after watching them work for an afternoon, we North Americans agreed that these men deserved whatever premium they got for lifting those 150 pound sacks in the heat.

I've come to appreciate a little ritual with Kristin, the tour's main organizer. The nine of us are now in a truck, heading to a fungus farm in Miraflor, a coffee cooperative in the mountainous Segovia region of Nicaragua. As two of the Spanish speakers in this gringo tour group, we usually take time each day to tell each other cool Spanish words we learned, helpful language constructions, colloquialisms, etc.

While riding to the fungus lab, Kristin tells me about showing a book to a little Nicaraguan girl. In it was a picture of a ladybug. Knowing that organic farmers in the U.S. use ladybugs against aphids and other small pests, Kristin thought it would be a good word to know. She pointed to the ladybug and asked the girl what it was called.

"Una tortuguita," said the girl - literally, "little turtle."

Strange, but no stranger than "ladybug," I figure. We wonder if organic coffee farmers use ladybugs too, and Kristin can't wait to employ her new word at the fungus lab.

The fungus lab is key for organic coffee farmers. Four workers, all women, work in the lab, creating the fungus paste that can be sprayed on coffee and cabbage to protect them from pest insects called "brocas," which are found throughout Central America. The fungus in the paste smothers the bugs, killing them before they can damage the coffee berry. If the pulp of the coffee is broken, it reduces quality, and quality, as a wise woman told me at the beginning of the trip, is everything.

It's a 12-day process to create the paste. First, rice is boiled in glass beakers and pots and placed in a bag, creating a giant banquet for the fungus to come. Once it cools, workers put fungus in the rice for a 12-day incubation period. At the end of that time, the white curd-like substance is sold to farmers. The cooperative pays for the maintenance of the lab and for the paste to be made, but farmer-members pay for individual bags to recoup the cost. They spray it on their crops twice a season.

After the tour, Kristin asks the guide in Spanish, "So do organic farmers in Nicaragua ever use ladybugs to control pests?" She proudly uses her prized word. The tour guide shakes his head thoughtfully, pursing his lips after considering Kristin's question for an unusually long moment. "No, Nicaraguans don't really use las tortuguitas in organic farming."

I'm disappointed. I was hoping this would open up a wider discussion on organics, a favored topic of mine.

I glance over at Rosario who has been eavesdropping. She's giving Kristin the tartest, head-to-toe, "are-you-nuts?" look I have ever seen.

Kristin sees the look and practically jumps back. "What?"

Rosario and Kristin are Equal Exchange office mates in Boston, and they obviously think the world of each other. Rosario laughs and shouts, "What did you just say, Kristin?"

Kristin is mystified. "I asked him if they use ladybugs in organic farming!"

"The word for ladybug is la mariquita not la tortuguita," Rosario says in hysterics.

Kristin and I scan each other's faces for answers. Suddenly we realize that the little girl saw the picture of the ladybug in the book and thought it was a little turtle.

Kristin's question to the Nicaraguan guide suddenly sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch.

One of the biggest misconceptions about organic farming, especially organic farming in third world countries, is that the farms are filthy and not truly organic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

First of all, the same certifiers who certify in the States certify farms abroad. Furthermore, the organic practices are truly sophisticated in Nicaragua, as we saw from the fungus lab, the Quality Control laboratory at Solcafe, and the wide clean patios for drying organic coffee. And you can feel how much attention is paid to the details of organic farming. Simply walking through a coffee farm in Miraflor, ducking beneath the wet green boughs and red coffee cherries, all the North Americans commented how lush and alive it felt there.

And when farmers have the opportunity to earn three times as much through Fair Trade groups like Equal Exchange, the incentive to create and maintain such a farm is intense.

At the Wedge, we sell Fair Trade coffee exclusively (from Equal Exchange, B&W, Cloud Forest, and Minneapolis' own Peace Coffee) so our prices remain consistent and high. Wedge customers are willing to pay more for Fair Trade beans, even when the global coffee market is in free-fall and cheaper coffee can be found in big chains. As a result, women get work in Quality Control and fungus laboratories, and farmers like Oscar Ruiz get a decent price for their organic coffee.

While Oscar describes how he applies the fungus paste to his plants, Pedro Haslam (the General Manager of Cecocafen Co-op), Alejandro Garcia Zeledon (the President of the Board), and other members of the Cecocafen Co-op's Board of Directors all lean against the drying racks with Rosario and sort through the organic coffee beans. Everyone takes quality seriously here.