In an effort to bring "fair trade" prices to private coffee farmers in Nicaragua, Richard Niesenbaum, a Muhlenberg College biology professor from Allentown, recently traveled to the South American country to lend a hand in this year's harvest.

For a 13-day period beginning Jan. 6, Niesenbaum lived in El Roblar, a community in the Yasola Sir region of Nicaragua. He traveled there with a group of Fair Trade activists to support a program that brings fair trade prices for coffee and other products to small-scale farmers.

Niesenbaum said it is next to impossible to get a fair price for products from developing nations. The Fair Trade Harvest program is designed to benefit the lives of small-scale farmers who are not paid sufficiently for their crops.

By selling their products through Fair Trade Harvest, a program sponsored by Global Exchange, a farmer is able to obtain an adequate income to support his family and sustain a better lifestyle, Niesenbaum said.

Niesenbaum stayed with a family of farmers and helped them harvest their coffee field over a two-week period.

"(The house) had one room on the first floor, basically two rooms on the second floor and a kitchen for all 12 people to live in," he said. Despite the poor living conditions, Niesenbaum said that by Nicaraguan standards, his hosts would be a wealthy family.

"The work that goes into producing a cup of coffee -- 'those grains of gold' -- is incredibly intensive work," he said.

After sleeping on a 1-inch mattress surrounded by a mosquito net, Niesenbaum started work well before the sun appeared over the mountains.

"I would wake up to the sound of pounding tortillas with corn," Niesenbaum said, making a pounding noise against his desk.

By 5 a.m. Niesenbaum said that he would eventually "mosey" himself out of bed to grab some beans, tortillas and coffee for breakfast.

"Once the sun was up, we would go out to the shade-grown field of coffee and I basically strapped a basket on to my hip and worked side by side with this family picking coffee for about six hours," he said.

Since Niesenbaum worked in a shadowed field, he and the family or farmers were not forced to grapple with the scorching sun.

"The shade over the coffee is not only good for the coffee, but it is also good for the environment," he said. Niesenbaum further noted that this shade also helps foster the growth of organic coffee, a crop that garners the most profit.

"A lot of the time you're alone with yourself. This allowed me to rally reflect on what I was doing. It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on issues of sustainability."

Looking back on his experience in the field with the family, Niesenbaum described the relationship with the other workers as one of mutual respect, where they accepted him as a willing and able worker.

"It (the field) was really filled with a lot of camaraderie," he said. "There was a lot of teasing and a lot of fun."

After the six-hour work day in the field, Niesenbaum would return to the house with the family for lunch around noon.

"At lunch I would come back and we would eat more beans and tortillas and coffee," Niesenbaum said. "Then the family spent the afternoon processing the coffee. This means sorting the beans based on quality, taking the pulp off the bean, then fermenting and drying."

On days when he was not involved in the processing of the freshly-picked coffee he would spend the afternoon exploring the area.

"I would usually take a chunk of time off in the afternoon," he said. "Maybe go with the kids and go hiking or climb to the top of a mountain to see the view, visit another family or see other people in the program."

Two weeks of working and resting with this newfound family in such close quarters still tugs at the corner of his mind.

"I feel this intense desire to return to them," Nisenbaum said. "I would like to show them my family and I would like to take my children there to experience it."

In order to give farmers a fair price for their crops and a means to support their families, Valerie Orth, organizer of the Fair Harvest program, said that there needs to be structural change in global trade.

"The way to that is to increase the involvement of consumers at all levels of the industry," Orth said.

Through Niesenbaum's work with the Fair Harvest Exchange's self-sustaining coffee farmer program, Global Exchange is able to address two problems at once. No only are they providing volunteers to come and help the farmers harvest their crops, they also send volunteers who will come back to the U.S. and spread the word about Fair Harvest.

Copyright 2004 The Express-Times.