By: John E. Peck, executive director, Family Farm Defenders
In August 2005 I had the unique opportunity to participate in a sister city delegation to East Timor, a small island nation of about one million people north of Australia. Since Feb. 2001, Madison Wisconsin has enjoyed formal sister-city ties with Ainaro, a district capitol in Timor’s southern mountains. This grassroots solidarity relationship stretches back over a decade to 1992 when concerned Madison residents formed a local chapter of the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) to support the indigenous independence movement seeking to overthrow Indonesian occupation. When Portugal abandoned its colonial empire in 1975, Indonesia staged a brutal invasion of East Timor with the tacit approval of the United States, Britain, Australia and other western powers, leading to the genocide of close to a third of the nation’s people. In 1999 East Timor finally won its independence through a U.N. sponsored referendum but not after Indonesian troops and their paramilitaries committed mass atrocities and destroyed 70-80% of the nation’s infrastructure. For many Timorese, political independence remains bittersweet as long as the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity remain at large.
Today, East Timor remains among the poorest nations in Asia, with half of the population illiterate, the majority of infants underweight, formal unemployment exceeding 30%, and the average worker earning barely 50 cents per day. While the influx of U.N. personnel and World Bank money following independence has jumpstarted the economy, the primary beneficiaries of this largesse – as in Iraq - appear to be consultants, prostitutes, speculators, mercenaries, and other carpetbaggers. The Peace Corps has dispatched 70 volunteers to the country and USAID has spent over $10 million per year since East Timor’s independence, still much of the heavy development lifting has been left to other donors - Australia is upgrading water systems and Japan is now repairing roadways, while Cuba sent medical doctors and Brazil sent literacy trainers.
When we met with the district head of Ainaro he was almost embarrassed to tell us that “only” 80% of voters had cast ballots in the last election and that “just” three women were elected to local office. Of course, he was even more shocked when we told him that in the U.S. less than 50% of the people now bother to vote and under 25% of elected officials are women at the state and federal levels. Nonetheless, the United States is intent upon “teaching” East Timor the value of women’s suffrage for the democratic process, the need for peaceful competition among political parties, and the role of independent monitoring in election cycles.
Like most nations in the global south, East Timor’s semi-subsistence economy revolves around agriculture. Centuries of colonial neglect by first the Portuguese and later the Indonesians left a silver lining for East Timor’s peasant majority (85% of the population) with independence. Largely bypassed by the “Green Revolution” and its chemical-intensive market-driven monocultures, East Timor now finds itself a de facto “organic” nation at the dawn of a 21st century on the doorstep of Australia and ripe for the shift towards a sustainable fair trade development path. Yet, at the same time, East Timor has not been able to escape the neocolonial trap of engineered dependence upon foreign food and corporate control over its limited cashcrop exports.
Traditionally, Timorese relied upon indigenous crops such as taro, sago, millet, mung beans, pigeon peas, sorghum, yams, and upland rice for their subsistence. When the Portuguese arrived in the 16th century they quickly introduced other food crops from the Americas such as squash, cassava, maize, peanuts, potatoes, and tomatoes. It was not until the 1960s, though, that Timor began its insatiable craving for paddy rice. This crop was promoted heavily under Indonesian occupation both to farmers as a “modern” hybrid and to consumers as an “elite” staple. Timor’s markets today are bursting at the seams with bags of rice from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand, often smuggled in so as to avoid a 12% import duty. The country can ill afford to source two thirds of its domestic rice consumption from abroad, especially as it drives local rice farmers bankrupt, and leads poorer families to spend up to 57% of their total income on an imported staple. Permaculture advocates in East Timor are now working with farmers and consumers to “rediscover” the true value of native crops – not just in terms of mitigating trade imbalances but also improving nutrition, conserving soil, and protecting biodiversity.
On the other side of the planet, about as close as the average person in the U.S. gets to East Timor is through a cup of coffee. Another colonial introduction to the island centuries ago, East Timor retains a reputation for being among the highest quality coffee poroducers in the world. For years, Indonesia held a monopoly over the Timorese coffee market, and kept prices artificially depressed. With trees now reaching 40-50 years old, many of which were neglected during the armed struggle, Timor now faces the daunting challenge of rejuvenating its coffee stands , even as many of the critical shade trees are also succumbing to disease.
Since independence Cooperativa Café Timor (CCT) has been expanding the fair trade coffee export market for East Timor’s 45,000 coffee farmers, thanks to support from the World Bank and USAID. In turn, Starbucks has been the major buyer of CCT coffee, paying Timorese farmers a “fair trade” price of between $1.26 and $1.41 per pound for coffee that later retails in the U.S. for $12.99 per pound. Starbucks has shown an especially keen penchant for East Timor coffee, buying up to half of CCT’s output and even dispatching a film crew to the island this last summer. In the U.S. Starbucks heavily promotes its “Arabian Mocha Timor” blend, though rumor has it that most of this coffee comes from Indonesia and not East Timor. In an obvious attempt to capitalize on public sympathy for East Timor, Starbucks has also launched its first ever single origin brand - “Timor Lorosa’e” – for sale in its outlets throughout Australia and New Zealand.
While East Timor earns about $25 million annually from its cash crop exports – mostly coffee – this could soon change with the conclusion of negotiations with Australia over the division of revenues from oil development in the contentious offshore reserve known as the Timor Gap. Australia has already extracted over $1 billion worth of oil from the disputed territory since 1999, and is now offering Timor $4 billion over the life of the project, projected to generate close to $40 billion total. Whether or not East Timor will steward or squander its expected oil revenues, following the “bad” example of Nigeria or the “good” example of Venezuela, remains to be seen. In hopes of heading off the prospect of the former, a local nongovernmental group, L’ao Hamatuk, sponsored a reality tour to Nigeria’s “Shell-Shocked” Ogoniland (captured in the 1993 BBC documentary the “Drilling Fields”) for seven East Timorese activists in Dec. 2003. Regardless of whether this oil windfall proves to be an economic boon or a bust, the family farmers of East Timor will still face the challenge of corporate globalization as external forces pressure them to sacrifice their hard-won community food sovereignty for the sake of export-driven development.
