Admit­tedly, Thailand seems an unlikely place to not only dis­cover ara­bica cof­fees of extra­or­di­nary qual­ity but also to dis­cover the gen­e­sis of a real­is­ti­cally sus­tain­able self-supporting cof­fee community.

A few years ago, no one in the spe­cialty cof­fee world had heard of Thai grown cof­fees, and still today, there is lit­tle aware­ness for cof­fee from this region. The asso­ci­a­tion in buy­ers’ minds between Thailand and Vietnam, as well as all of Indonesia is strong and abid­ing. The flood­ing of low qual­ity Vietnamese Robustas into the mar­ket in 1999–2000, and ongo­ing issues of cor­rup­tion, sup­ply incon­sis­tency, and fair trad­ing prac­tices in Indonesia have tainted the market’s perceptions.

And yet, in a pocket of what was once the infa­mous Golden Triangle of Thailand, an indige­nous peo­ple, the Akha Hill Tribes have, for the last 20 years, been lift­ing them­selves up from gen­er­a­tional des­ti­tu­tion through the cul­ti­va­tion of coffee.

The vil­lage of Doi Chang was, at one time, the cen­ter of the opium pro­duc­tion trade in Thailand. Opium, which requires slash and burn agri­cul­ture meth­ods, had destroyed the native jun­gle, brought death and des­o­la­tion through addic­tion and enslave­ment, and even­tu­ally caused com­plete eco­nomic dev­as­ta­tion. By the time the cul­ti­va­tion of opium pop­pies was made ille­gal and erad­i­cated in Thailand, the cul­ture of opium was so per­va­sive that the indige­nous hill tribes were left with ruined soil, eco­nomic col­lapse, and aban­don­ment by their government.

The cul­ture of racism that defines the rela­tion­ship of the hill tribes to the urban and gov­ern­men­tal cen­ters of Thailand descended upon the Golden Triangle and the Akha peo­ple. It was not until the Princess Srinagarindra, the mother of HRH King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand with­drew from pub­lic life in Bangkok and retired to Chiang Rai, the north­ern­most province of Thailand that offi­cial gov­ern­ment notice of the plight of the Akha Hill Tribes began to be understood.

Because opium was an eco­nomic crop, and not a core ele­ment of hill-tribe cul­ture, her work to change the eco­nomic equa­tion through crop sub­sti­tu­tion was more eas­ily imple­mented. Coffee was a nat­ural replace­ment for a cash crop but because of envi­ron­men­tal dam­ages, iso­la­tion, and the crush­ing need for sub­sis­tence farm­ing, cof­fee did not effec­tively ‘take root.’

The evo­lu­tion of sustainability

To under­stand the chain of events that have lead to this vital cen­ter of com­mer­cial suc­cess in the Thai moun­tains, one must first try to under­stand the cast of key char­ac­ters who brought this together.

The term, “Golden Triangle” gen­er­ally refers to an area where the bor­ders of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand con­verge and the point where the Sop Ruak trib­u­tary flows into the mighty Mekong River. Considered one of the world’s remain­ing wild places, the area remains largely inac­ces­si­ble. The name con­jures up allur­ing images of mist-shrouded moun­tains with forested slopes over­look­ing the mighty Mekong River, home of hill-tribe vil­lages. Its mys­ti­cal rep­u­ta­tion attracts hun­dreds and thou­sands of tourists, year after year, par­tic­u­larly adven­ture seekers.

The Golden Triangle, how­ever, has a darker side. It is one of the areas of the world where opium is grown, processed into heroin, and smug­gled out, and is the source of half the world’s ille­gal heroin.

As impov­er­ished hill farm­ers eek out a liv­ing from a rugged ter­rain through opium cul­ti­va­tion, mys­tery and dan­ger sur­rounds drug pro­duc­tion and traf­fick­ing, char­ac­ter­ized by the out­break of civil wars, clashes between the police and armed forces in a fight against smug­glers, sur­prise raids on clan­des­tine heroin fac­to­ries, and don­key car­a­vans along old jun­gle trade paths. The list reads like the stuff of mys­tery nov­els and action thrillers. Tragically, this is the stark real­ity of the drug trade.

First and fore­most is “Wicha” Promyong. A very hum­ble man who takes no credit for the work of Doi Chaang, nonethe­less with­out Wicha, so much would have been dif­fer­ent. Looking like an aging Asian hip­pie from San Francisco, Wicha is very well known through­out Southeast Asia and beyond. He lit­er­ally has spent most of his life walk­ing from vil­lage to vil­lage and coun­try to coun­try just to ‘see what he could see’ and in the process, this quiet, peace­ful, and wickedly intel­li­gent man gained the trust and admi­ra­tion of vil­lage lead­ers, com­mon ™peo­ple, and gov­ern­ment offi­cials. He still is called upon to travel to dis­tant vil­lages to help set­tle dis­putes. In dif­fer­ent times, he would be con­sid­ered an itin­er­ate saint. But in today’s world he makes his liv­ing sell­ing antiques and oper­at­ing 20 owned cafes and licens­ing an addi­tional 300 cafes through­out Thailand. So, it was nat­ural that the head­man of the vil­lage of Doi Chang came to Wicha for help lift­ing his vil­lage out of poverty through coffee.

At that moment, Wicha ded­i­cated all his energy toward per­fect­ing the cul­ti­va­tion and pro­cess­ing of cof­fee and increas­ing the wel­fare of the vil­lage of Doi Chang. Starting out with less than a hun­dred acres of land owned by the vil­lage, they now have 8000 acres with 3000 under cof­fee cultivation.

Wicha, who is an intense lover of plants had, as a key part of his plan the refor­esta­tion of the moun­tains. After the moun­tains had been clear-cut, there were no indige­nous plants remain­ing – the moun­tains were bar­ren. Raising trees in nurs­eries, all the cof­fee is now 100% shade grown under a dense canopy of trees hand planted by the farm­ers. Not only are there shade trees, but also alter­na­tive crop trees that bring addi­tional income to the farm­ers. Where once the jun­gle was gone, there now rises a high and thick canopy of lush forest.

Looking for a path­way for increas­ing his sales and price of the cof­fee, Wicha attended a cof­fee expo in Bangkok where he hap­pened to meet Pornprapa Bunmusik (Sandra). This pow­er­ful and inter­est­ing per­son in her own right hap­pened to have a friend that could have an idea or two. That per­son was John M Darch, a suc­cess­ful min­ing exec­u­tive from Canada. Together, they began to for­mu­late a plan to move for­ward with Doi Chaang Coffee.

The pil­lars of “Beyond Fair Trade®”

It prob­a­bly is unlikely that if a dif­fer­ent cast of char­ac­ters was assem­bled – younger or less finan­cially suc­cess­ful – the results would have been so spec­tac­u­lar. To pull this off, there needed to be peo­ple that were ready to give back, but only in a mean­ing­ful and sus­tain­able way. There were to be no hand­outs from this crowd.

In analy­sis, a key com­po­nent of the Doi Chaang devel­op­ment was John Darch’s life­time of expe­ri­ence as a min­ing exec­u­tive. If he had any expe­ri­ence in the cof­fee world, his meth­ods would have been very dif­fer­ent. In the min­ing world, investors know that huge invest­ments in equip­ment and infra­struc­ture must be made before any rev­enues are seen.

You may have noticed that Doi Chaang keeps get­ting spelled two dif­fer­ent ways – Doi Chang and Doi Chaang. The vil­lage in which the cof­fee com­pany, Doi Chaang resides is spelled Doi Chang. Both mean Elephant Mountain but because of old trade­mark restric­tions, the cof­fee com­pany added an “a.” Congratulations to those who caught it, and shame on you to those who did not. Your fifth grade English teacher is glar­ing at you.

When John first vis­ited Doi Chang vil­lage, the final 40 miles had to be trav­elled on mules over washed out tracks. There were no roads into the Doi Chang region mak­ing what he found there all the more remark­able. Under Wicha’s lead­er­ship, the vil­lage had built a mod­ern fully washed wet mill, dry mill, and con­crete patios. They had con­structed a ‘cof­fee acad­emy’ to train farm­ers in best prac­tices through a cur­ricu­lum design by a col­lege pro­fes­sor from Chang Rai and had installed a 120kg roaster. All of this was brought up that same trail using only mules and strong backs.

Through con­tin­u­ous rein­vest­ment of the money the vil­lage received for their cof­fee, sev­eral of the vil­lagers were able to attend uni­ver­sity, all receive health care, they feed all in the vil­lage who are hun­gry regard­less of what they do, and they pur­chase addi­tional land and equip­ment for coffee.

Darch saw imme­di­ately that Doi Chaang cof­fee required a rapid expan­sion of capac­ity and infra­struc­ture, espe­cially a road to con­nect the vil­lage with the world. And so was built the base of the idea of “Beyond Fair Trade®.”

Societal Capitalism and sustainability

The core of the idea of “Beyond Fair Trade®” is the firm belief in the power of Societal Capitalism. Darch formed a sec­ond com­pany in Canada, Doi Chaang Canada for the sole pur­pose of pur­chas­ing and sell­ing cof­fee from Doi Chaang Thailand. A price and quan­tity is struck between the two enti­ties. Doi Chaang Canada agrees to buy, for exam­ple, 75% of the crop for a price above the Fair Trade pre­mium. This pro­vides enough rev­enues to aggres­sively build out the facil­ity in Thailand and engage the social pro­grams nec­es­sary to sta­bi­lize the com­mu­nity. Canada then sells the cof­fee in green and roasted form at a pre­mium based on the Organic and Fair Trade cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, plus the “Beyond Fair Trade® premium.

The key ele­ment toward ensur­ing a long-term com­mer­cial rela­tion­ship between Thailand and Canada is that the vil­lage in Thailand also owns 50% of the Canadian company!

The results at Doi Chaang – the cof­fee com­pany – and Doi Chang – the vil­lage – are dramatic.

Because a great deal of money was now flow­ing into the vil­lage, Wicha rec­og­nized that the vil­lage had no expe­ri­ence at cash man­age­ment. He reg­u­larly brings a finan­cial expert to the Coffee Academy to edu­cate the farm­ers on sound finan­cial busi­ness prac­tices. Instead of buy­ing big screen TVs, every­one seems to own a new 4×4 pick-up. They found out that it is much eas­ier and faster to drive the freshly picked cher­ries to the vil­lage owned pro­cess­ing plant than to walk them down. The gov­ern­ment has built a two-lane heavy load high­way to the plant, and the entire vil­lage is elec­tri­fied. The farms all prac­tice water waste man­age­ment and are all cer­ti­fied organic. New cap­i­tal invest­ments have been made to add 25,000 kilo Penagos semi-washed pro­cess­ing mills. The vil­lage is using their Fair Trade pre­mium to pur­chase advanced med­ical equip­ment for the local “hos­pi­tal” and as a result, the Thai gov­ern­ment has agreed to fully staff the facil­ity with doc­tors (prior to this it was only staffed with nurse practitioners).

Doi Chaang Coffee grows pre­mium cof­fee on farms all above 1200 meters that is processed in a state of the art plant owned by the grow­ers of the vil­lage. They have expanded into organic honey from their own hives and are con­struct­ing a facil­ity to pro­duce organic cof­fee and honey based soaps, lotions, and cosmetics.

The next goal of Wicha and com­pany is to con­struct an acad­emy to ser­vice all the chil­dren in Doi Chang and the sur­round­ing com­mu­nity. Ground has bro­ken for a build­ing that will serve 450 stu­dents includ­ing dor­mi­to­ries for stu­dents who have no home. The Doi Chaang Foundation in Canada is work­ing hard to raise the funds for this new ben­e­fit to the community.

Wild Civets of Doi Chaang

One of the pre­mier prod­ucts of Doi Chaang is Wild Civet Coffee. I will spare us all from the jokes regard­ing these unique lit­tle “wet mill” proces­sors except to say that the civets at Doi Chaang seem to do an espe­cially fine job of it. I sus­pect that there is a “Garbage in-Garbage out” ele­ment to it. These civets are din­ing on some of the best cof­fee in the world.

What makes the civets at Doi Chaang espe­cially unique how­ever is that they are com­pletely wild. Unlike some of their brethren, these lit­tle noc­tur­nal guys have free range of the cof­fee farms once the sun goes down. You do not really under­stand the dis­tinc­tion of “wild” until you try to sleep in a hut in the mid­dle of a cof­fee plan­ta­tion while out­doors, the trees are alive with fully caf­feinated wild ani­mals that look to be a cross between a cat and a rac­coon. Civet cof­fee has become so valu­able that wild civets are rare. They typ­i­cally are caged and fed cof­fee their entire lives. In truth, this prob­a­bly is just fine with the civets since their entire life plan seems to be eat­ing, and then poo’ing cof­fee. But it just feels bet­ter know­ing that the civets at Doi Chaang are eat­ing what­ever cof­fee they choose and then return­ing to their dens and fam­i­lies at the end of a long night of work. Doi Chaang’s civet cof­fee con­sis­tently earns scores in the 90’s and has been picked up by some of the finest spe­cialty retail­ers in the world.

Sometimes life really is strange.