DR-CAFTA is a regional trade agreement between the US and Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. If approved, the agreement would further open Central American economies to US exports and foreign investors. It would reduce local decision-making and fail to ensure international labor and environmental standards.

With Oxfam's support, representatives from El Salvador's FUNDE, Guatemala's CIDECA and Nicaragua's Centro Humboldt met with US Congresspeople and their staff.

Oxfam provides grants to the Central American partners, which lobby against DR-CAFTA and educate citizens about the consequences of the trade agreement, if ratified.

"Oxfam has allowed us to do a lot of research. And Oxfam has been instrumental in helping us come to the US to say, 'We really don't want CAFTA,' face-to-face," said Mario Rodriguez, 40, an economist specializing in intellectual property with CIDECA.

It's important for US citizens to lobby their Congressional representatives to make trade fair. But it also makes a big difference when Central American civil society representatives can speak directly to the US Congress to explain how their countries' development will be affected, said Stephanie Weinberg, Oxfam America policy advisor.

In addition to providing direct support to the Central American groups, Oxfam America also fosters connections between US farmers and farmers in other countries around policy debates like CAFTA. Working with US partners such as the National Family Farm Coalition, Oxfam has funded exchanges where American farmers from the National Family Farm Coalition meet with farmers in Mexico and Central America, and vice versa, with Mexican farmers touring US farms.

The exchanges help farmers from the North and South understand each other's situation and make tangible connections, farmer to farmer, about the impacts of agricultural and trade policies on their daily lives.

"My ability to explain to my fellow farmers why we should help didn't come naturally," said George Naylor, president of NFFC and a farmer from Iowa. "Meeting with farmers from other countries helped me understand."

After hearing the stories from the Central American and Mexican farmers he met, Naylor said he realized that CAFTA would further depress prices abroad and push more farmers off their land.

Any farmer can understand that threat.

"When everybody in the family ends up working off the farm, then what you used to think of as a 'family farm'—where everyone is involved in caring for the land and producing food—can't happen anymore," Naylor said.

How would you describe Oxfam's partnership with Centro Humboldt?

I believe there are interests that we share that are very important to the work we do in Nicaragua—natural disaster preparedness work, extractive industries, and irrigation issues.

Oxfam also helps build campaign support, political understanding and meaningful participation.

What are you doing in your country to try to defeat DR-CAFTA?

We have firsthand information about what's going on with CAFTA. We are trying to provide that information to those people who don't have access to it.

We are influencing public opinion and pressuring the government to prevent the agreement from being ratified in the countries throughout Central America.

At the international level, we are trying to convince members of Congress who are undecided that CAFTA is not the thing to do.

What aspect of the DR-CAFTA agreement are you most concerned about?

CAFTA will have very serious consequences on the Central American environment. Even though there is a chapter on the environment in the agreement, it is not enough to mitigate the negative effects CAFTA will produce if approved.

The intellectual property rights provisions will allow exploitation of all the local environmental capital that Central America has. This chapter will just benefit big corporations at the expense of local companies and communities.

The big corporations will tap the genetic information in tropical forests and use it for their own needs. In this agreement, foreign investors will benefit to the detriment of local businesses in Central America.

Biodiversity is an area in which Central America is very rich. And those resources are at risk under CAFTA.

Another major problem for the environment is genetically modified organisms. US agriculture allows the use of these kinds of products without a problem. If CAFTA takes effect, increased trade will bring these products to Central America. Right now, these genetically engineered products don't exist in Central America. This would lead to contamination of the local resources.

We don't know what type of problems these new seeds will introduce. We don't know what consequences there will be.

Describe the different levels at which you work on CAFTA in Nicaragua.

After the agreement was negotiated, the nature of the activities changed. We moved from a phase where we constructed proposals to a second stage, which involved getting information to the people about what had been negotiated.

What kind of reception have you received during your visit?

I believe that the US Congress is near a decision. It will be very tight, a very close call. So, this is a very important time. This is the time to influence the decision.

We still have to wait for the final result, but we have provided them with important information so they can make an informed decision.

How would you describe Oxfam's partnership with CIDECA?

Oxfam has allowed us to do a lot of research. And Oxfam has been instrumental in helping us come to the US to say, "We really don't want CAFTA," face-to-face.

Why should people in the US care about DR-CAFTA and its affects on your country?

We believe that public opinion has been manipulated. The business sector, which is pushing CAFTA, has said that people in Central America want CAFTA. The reality is totally different

For example, in El Salvador, this agreement was approved late at night and behind closed doors. In Honduras, when they approved it, the legislature had to leave through the back door because there were protestors out front. In Guatemala, the people are asking for a national referendum even though the president says they can't afford it.

We believe that this is an important decision for the future of our countries. There has to be a national referendum so people can say what they think.

I believe that the negotiations and ratification process is totally undemocratic—because the negotiations have been carried out, and still are being carried out, by a very small group of people. We have asked the Congressional representatives in Guatemala if they understand the agreement. And they say they don't even have a copy to look at. But they have been pressured to vote in favor of CAFTA. That's not democratic and says a lot about the process.

If CAFTA really is a good thing, why do they have to hide negotiations and do it behind the people's back?

Today, we got news that the Guatemalan congress was trying to approve DR-CAFTA. What have you heard?

I got news of the police repressing local people who were protesting against CAFTA. I don't think CAFTA has been approved yet, but it can happen at any moment.  (Guatamala's congress ratified CAFTA on March 10, 2005. The agreement is awaiting ratification by the US congress).

What is your organization doing to defeat DR-CAFTA?

We lobby the Guatemalan congress. At the national level, we are part of Mesa Global, which has been leading the protests this week. We also present proposals and research on issues related to the negotiation process and the potential impact of the trade agreement. We have been working with people involved in the negotiations and ratification of CAFTA, as well as with local organizations.

How do you feel about your visit here?

I'm very sad because I feel that the future, whatever it is, will be decided here in the US. They don't have the right to make decisions about our lives.

The discussions on the future of the International Coffee Agreement present an historic opportunity to address the ongoing crisis facing smallholder coffee farmers and farmworkers by contributing to sustainable coffee supply chains. At the 2nd World Coffee Conference in September 2005 several organizations presented the International Coffee Organisation and its delegates with the Carta de Salvador—the Salvador Declaration, which stressed the ongoing effects of the coffee crisis facing small-scale family farmers and farmworkers. This paper calls on International Coffee Organization members to support small-scale farmers and farmworker organizations by ensuring space for their direct participation in international debate, creating mechanisms that enhance the availability of market information to small-scale farmers, and maximizing opportunities to develop cohesive international strategies to provide technical support, access to credit, and direct access to markets.

The sound of the rain woke him up. He nudged his wife, asking if she heard it too. Pregnant and tired, she told him to go back to sleep.

"When I woke up again, I opened the door and mud was everywhere. All the kids were screaming," Carlos recalled in February. "We ran from the house, with mud up to our waists."

As the Ajznels sprinted for shelter, the rain poured. Boulders tumbled. Mudslides cut through the earth. Hurricane Stan unloaded on Guatemala, reworking the landscape, and leaving some of its deepest scars on the country's small-scale coffee farms.

Many farmers, like Ajznel, lost their homes and the means to support their families. Coffee trees were infected by fungus, or buried under mud and rocks. Individual coffee farmers said the storm wiped out between 25 and 100 percent of their coffee production.

Five months after the storm, Oxfam America staffers traveled to Guatemala to assess the damage and determine what it would take to rebuild the lives of small-scale coffee farmers.

"Looking at the devastation, you realized what used to be there, that it was someone's income. Then you thought about what it would take to bring it all back," said Seth Petchers, Oxfam America's coffee program manager.

Homes buried, families displaced

Guatemala's volcanoes and rolling hills provided a perfect funnel for the rain and mud from the hurricane. Much of what was dislodged finally settled on coffee farming communities, located in the high elevations that produce quality beans.

Members of an Oxfam partner cooperative in La Unidad, a village at the base of a mountain in the Tajumulco region, found their community split down the middle by the hurricane. Two concrete bridges that had connected the village collapsed during the storm, taking some riverside homes with them.

"When it started to rain and the river swelled, we left our house knowing that something was going to happen," said Lidia Perez Chavez, 22, a member of the APECAFORM cooperative. "We only took the children and the clothes we were wearing. Afterward, we had lots of trouble. We could only eat once a day because we had so little firewood."

In San Lucas Tolimàn, a community near Lake Atitlan, Don Antonio Chavajay Ixtamer estimated that 80 percent of his land was affected. Walking through his property, he pointed to newly formed ravines, uprooted shade trees, and coffee trees buried under mud, boulders, and silt.

Ixtamer, who is the president of a coffee coop called La Voz, said he intends to replant. But it will take at least four years for the new trees to bear fruit. And while he and his family are doing the recovery work on their own land, they'll lose out on the supplemental income they would have earned doing off-season work in the city or on someone else's farm.

But at least Ixtamer has some coffee trees left to harvest. Some farmers lost everything and were forced to flee to Mexico and the United States.

Building it back

What will it take to recover? Farmers say they need to replace what was lost—and prepare for future disasters.

Oxfam America will use a $100,000 grant to help partners repair damaged land, provide technical assistance for rehabilitation projects, repair equipment, and offset the dues some coops can't pay because of reduced profits after the hurricane.

The relief work will be coordinated through partner organizations Manos Campesinas and CRECER, which will hire appropriate staff, help farmers plant coffee saplings, make and spread organic fertilizer, build drainage barriers, treat water, and repair coffee mills.

It will mean a lot of work during the next few months. But for many small-scale coffee farmers, there's simply no alternative.

"We need to replant," said Don Juan Tacaxoy Botan, president of ANMSI coop. "We don't have any other option."

Groups like the National Family Farm Coalition, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, and Rural Coalition, carried out direct advocacy of their own, telling their elected officials that trade agreements should protect food sovereignty, not threaten it. Just as the Central Americans wanted to avoid the US flooding their surplus commodities into their market, small-scale American farmers wanted their government to pursue policies that supported them, not the huge agriculture corporations that would benefit from DR-CAFTA.

"This agreement is absolutely horrible for us livestock producers," said Rhonda Perry, a farmer and head of Oxfam partner, Missouri Rural Crisis Center. "It's also not beneficial for farmers in the DR-CAFTA countries. All these promises about export markets, clearly, that's not what happens. There are a few multinational corporations that have no allegiance that make out like bandits. The rest of us are stuck picking up the pieces."

Oxfam America created opportunities for Central and North American farmers to meet, learn from each other, and work together to oppose unfair trade. The National Family Farm Coalition worked with members of Iniciativa CID in Washington, DC to help them bring their concerns directly to members of Congress and share perspectives, farmer to farmer.

"This was really a united front even though people were coming at it from different angles. It was a chance to develop shared understanding about CAFTA's negative impacts on farmer livelihoods in both the US and Central America," said Jaeda Harmon, a US Regional Office Program Officer at Oxfam America

How would you describe Oxfam's partnership with FUNDE?

Oxfam shares common interests with FUNDE, especially when it comes to civil society. For example, the Make Trade Fair campaign had a very strong reception in El Salvador. And FUNDE did a lot of research on the drop in coffee prices on the international market, which helps support Oxfam's work.

A lot of the work we do around CAFTA is with Oxfam's help. Oxfam has provided support, training and capacity building—everything related to organizational development.

How would DR-CAFTA affect your country?

The difference between El Salvador and the US—we don't have subsidies like US farmers have. On the one hand, there's a highly subsidized agriculture and on the other, there's a poor economy, which doesn't have subsidies.

CAFTA would basically open our economy up to the largest economies in the world, which is the US.

Whatever affects agriculture is going to translate into socioeconomic problems. My country's economy depends on agriculture. And our ability to produce our own food depends on agriculture.

You talked about your worries that the US will dump its exports on El Salvador if DR-CAFTA is approved. What other aspects of DR-CAFTA worry you?

CAFTA is about more than trade. Foreign investment for example. The agreement favors protecting foreign capital. This is an agreement that really takes away the flexibility of local governments to enact policies that meet their own objectives.

In addition, it creates a very damaging relationship between investors and the state. This relationship allows the investor to sue the state if things don't go the way they want.

What are you doing in El Salvador to try to defeat DR-CAFTA?

FUNDE works at two levels. One is the regional level in Central America, in which the CID initiative plays an important role. It allows us to coordinate actions like this one that brought us to Washington to influence Congress.

There's also the national level. There, we have a direct relationship with several organizations, unions, churches, local governments, environmental organizations, micro enterprises. We provide information to these different groups. At the same time, we try to craft proposals that reflect the interests of those sectors. For example, these organizations decided to reject CAFTA after we completed an analysis of each chapter of the agreement.

Also we have a relationship with US agencies where we present the negative effects of CAFTA. We basically demand actions to prevent, but also mitigate, what CAFTA would produce.

Every chapter of CAFTA, such as agriculture, environment, and intellectual property—basically every country has its own way of approaching these things. But, in general, we try to integrate the regional view. This allows us to work at two levels, international and national.

How do you feel your visits with the US Congresspeople and their staff went?

The problems that we face in our countries—there is just a superficial understanding. But there are differences between the Congress people. There is a lot of opposition, but many say they have not decided how they will vote.

Whatever happens, we have given them information. In the future, they cannot say that they didn't know. Because we told them.

When's the last time a small-farm family called it quits and had to sell their land for development? Probably yesterday or the day before.

There's no coincidence here. The loss of truly fresh fruits and vegetables, grown for their taste, and the loss of farmland and small-scale farmers are two faces of the same coin. In this issue of EXCHANGE, we meet Michael Rozyne, founder and managing director of Oxfam partner Red Tomato.

Also in this issue, ethnic discrimination in Guatemala—and the Mayan defense. Plus, how community radio is engaging Senegal's youth, and the humanitarian imperative of land mine clearance in war-torn Afghanistan.