Cover: Beyond Fair Trade by Mark Pendergrast
BEYOND FAIR TRADE:
HOW ONE SMALL COFFEE COMPANY
HELPED TRANSFORM A HILLSIDE VILLAGE
IN THAILAND
Mark Pendergrast
Greystone Books, November 7, 2015, $18.95
ISBN-10: 1771640472
ISBN-13: 978-1771640473
Pendergrast reports:
I was first attracted to the Doi Chaang story because it was so unusual. I had never heard of excellent coffee coming from Thailand. Having written Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee, I would have been an obvious person to know about it.
Mark Pendergrast
I wrote an article for my semi-regular coffee column in The Wine Spectator magazine, focusing on the quality and characteristics of the coffee. I found myself fascinated by the story of the Akha hill tribe, one of several tribes that migrated into the northern Thai mountains.
The Akha had no written language, and, until a few decades ago, had little contact with the outside world. They had an elaborate set of spiritual beliefs, and phenomenal memories. They were a peaceful, egalitarian people who usually preferred to flee rather than fight.
In Thailand, however, as more hill tribes immigrated, more children were born, and Thai loggers destroyed the forests, the Akha ran out of land. They resorted to growing poppies as a cash crop, scraping opium from the scored seed pods, an activity that increased their contact with Thai authorities. They were in poor health, with high child mortality.
All of that changed through the work of two remarkable people — an aging hippy Thai entrepreneur, Wicha Promyong, and a wealthy Canadian businessman, John Darch. Darch started a Vancouver coffee company specifically to roast Doi Chaang beans, giving half of the profits to the Akha.
This book — part anthropology, part business saga, part adventure travel, part science of opium and coffee — is the result. In writing the book, I traveled to both Vancouver and Doi Chang, Thailand, to see for myself what the company is doing and how it is doing it.
Darch helped fund my travel, with the written agreement that he would have no censorship power over the final product. Although I was nervous about this arrangement, he proved to be good to his word, and, fortunately, also proved to be quite an interesting character.
One of the people I interviewed in Vancouver was a neighbor of Rob Sanders, who owns Greystone Books, which specializes in works of social import and sustainability. My book was a natural fit, and I required no agent.
Contact Info:
- Mark Pendergrast, 802-497-1570, markp508@gmail.com, www.markpendergrast.com.
- Publicist: Andrea Damiani, 866-924-2264, andrea.damiani@greystonebooks.com.
- Book websites: www.markpendergrast.com; http://www.greystonebooks.com/book_details.php?isbn_upc=9781771640473.
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