Let’s Make It All Local

The papers here have been buzzing the last few weeks with the overnight draconian steps of the government to limit imports. The government is implementing import substitution-protect local industry and make every thing possible local. It doesn’t sound bad in theory. But this policy is going to have a lot of consequences-maybe higher prices, less choice, and lower quality, at least in the short run. Because of a trade deficit and zero control over monetary policy (Ecuador is on the US dollar), the country could literally run out of dollars if it doesn’t:

• increase exports or the value of current exports
• decrease imports
• find dollars somewhere else

So, with oil prices declining, and oil being the main source of revenues for the government, and imports increasing in the last few years, the government has gone into crisis mode. The first signs were the ridiculous and sudden halting of imported meat and french fries for fast food companies like McDonald’s and Burger King. They did this under the pretense that they did not meet the new standards and certifications the government is now requiring for all imported goods. This standards and certifications requirements was another shotgun measure to slow imports-but they didn’t give any one any forewarning, and industry created quite a stir. No one is importing anything that can be made cheaper here and of better quality. Even many imported goods are of equal or better quality and cheaper. Just one small example, Baskin Robbins Ice Cream (imported) is $8.00 a quart. Locally made ice cream from Cyrano/Corfu, a well-known gourmet shop with presence all over Quito, is $10 a quart. So how the government believes that overnight, the country is suddenly going to start producing all the goods it needs of top quality at a competitive price (due to the new standards and certifications the govenrment is requiring) is anyone’s guess. And how they’re going to do it for the same or lower price as imported goods-well, that’s an even bigger question. The most likely outlook for the next six to twelve months is this:

• There will be a lack of replacement parts and imported goods in many sectors. I’ve already heard of speculation because nobody’s sure just how far this is going to go.
• Many imported foods, cosmetics, appliances, and other items will start becoming scarce due to hoarding and speculation.
• Local goods will slow start to replace some imported items, at a higher cost and probably of lesser quality.

 

You Want What?… For My Chocolate Business

We are now in the process of drawing to get our health permit renewed. You never know when things are going to change, and this year the whole process, both with the municipality and with the Ministry of health has changed. The municipality tells you one thing, you ask them for clarification, and they tell you another thing. Maria called an office we were directed to yesterday, and talked to six different people without getting a clear answer. Now, were at the Ministry of health office miles away from our location, and Maria is trying to figure out if we can move ahead with the Ministry of health permit even though we don’t have our municipal permit.

You see, before you can apply for your Ministry of health permit, you have to get your municipal license renewed. But the municipality says but getting your municipal license renewed can take up to 180 work days. However, your ministry of health permit has to be renewed within the first six months of the year not later than July 15. So even if you started the renewal process for your municipal license on 1 January, it might not be ready until the September. That would mean there’s no way to get your ministry of health permit renewed in the legal time allowed.; therefore, we will be fined $1,500. Of course, no one seems to know or care what anyone else is doing, so you can never figure out if what you’re doing is correct or not.

Update soon.

 

Start Following Us On destination-ecuador.net

Ok, we are officially up and running on destination-ecuador.net. I kindly request that those that followed me here register on the lefthand side of the new blog for RSS or subscription by email. I’ll leave this blog up for some time but there will be no new postings here.

 

See us Now at www.destination-ecuador.net, NEW URL

We’re moving over to a new platform and the new domain for the blog will be www.destination-ecuador.net. Please check there for new updates coming soon. We’re also working on moving our RSS subscribers over, though we haven’t figured it out just yet. We’ll be enhancing the new blog in the coming weeks.

I’ll keep the blog up here for several more weeks, and announce again here when we’re about to shut down.

 

Healthy Chocolate

Most of the year goes by without having to deal with too much corruption, but permit renewal is one period when I sometimes ask myself just why I put up with it. Every year around this time, we have to renew our health permit. It doesn’t matter that we already run a clean shop, abide by higher than normal hygiene, and do our best to make sure our products are safe and clean. The authorities are willing to recognize that. What they’re not willing to do is let anyone get away with being law abiding without paying a hefty fee, which is really all that matters to them.

This year, as usual, things have changed since last year. Instead of simply getting our health permit renewed, we now needed an inspection from the Fire Department. Last year we were supposed to have a fire department inspection, but in spite of contacting the fire department and setting up an appointment, they never showed up and never issued a permit.

But our “expediter” who is actually the same guy who issues the health permit from the Ministry of Healthy, insisted it was necessary that the inspection be carried out. He needed the inspection report from the FD before he could issue the permit.

After waiting several weeks, a man from the Fire Department showed up when we were out of town. This he made clear to us on his second visit; his motive for making this clear was cash. Since most government agencies don’t have budgets for things like transportation, it had cost him to come once and cost him again to come twice, and he insinuated that some kind of “compensation” should be given for having had to make two trips, since had to pay cab fare, or bus fare, to arrive.

During his inspection, he noted that we needed a 10 pound chemical powder fire extinguisher, in addition to the five pound one we already had, properly situated emergency evacuation lights, and smoke detectors in all four rooms of our workshop. He sat slowly making his notes and purposely forging an uncomfortable silence, obviously waiting for some offer of cash which would just make this all easily go away.

What he got was acceptance on our part to comply with the request, and no cash. He wasn’t happy about it. The form he left us noted what was needed; once we had put in place the requested items, then he or someone else would be back to re-inspect and have the form signed off on by the head of the fire department. But he didn’t really want to come back-he wanted the cash so he wouldn’t have the onerous burden of actually having to do his job.

We called our “expediter” at the Ministry and told him we had the inspection report. He told us straight-out we really didn’t need to actually comply with the requested items on the report. A copy of it sent over to him would suffice; my guess is he knows the fire department chief and would get it signed off on, probably sharing with the Chief a portion of the “fee” we pay him to get the permit issued.

At the same time, he sent us a form to sign off on stating that we would comply with the request in the Fire Department’s report within 90 days, and if we did not do so the Health Ministry had the right to revoke our permit. But of course, he is the Health Ministry, or at least he is the official in charge of enforcing the Health Ministry’s issuing of permits-so this form will probably just end up buried deep in some rusty file cabinet in some shadowy and dusty half-abandoned file storage closet in the Ministry. Ah, such is corruption!

 

Full Photo Set of Hacienda Guantupí and Hacienda Limón

See the full photo set here.

This is where the chocolate for www.aequarechocolates.com starts!

 

Aequare Chocolates Live!

You can now purchase our products online at www.aequarechocolates.com.

You can also visit and purchase from our store on Foodzie

 

Hacienda Limón

This morning at Hacienda Limón we went over to see fermentation and drying. Samuel does a “pre-drying” where he takes the harvested cacao, lets it dry for 4-8 hours on the patio, and then begins fermentation. This is sort of his “signature” fermenting process; he claims it helps remove the agua sangre, a phenomenon that occurs here in Ecuador with a buildup of liquids after several hours of fermentation. He claims that by pre-drying, it helps eliminate the acidity that “agua sangre” creates. He’s being working with cacao processing for well over a decade and research on cacao for more than two decades, and this is his theory.

He showed us a small batch of beans he had fermenting just for demonstration purposes, since harvest is basically over.

And the last batches of already fermented beans were drying on the patio, soon to be packed up.

We did some tasting of beans from local farms prepared on site. First, the bean were roasted by hand, then peeled by hand. Then the beans were ground in a small lab grinder right on site.
We then did the tastings of the pure liquor.

You can definitely recognize differences in each one, some being surprisingly much more palatable than others.

There´s a small house of concrete and bamboo where we stayed, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen and small living area on an open patio. We got lots of bug bites, though it was nice to hear all the bug music at night.

 

Where does chocolate come from?

We left Santo Domingo this morning around 10:30 and arrived in Quevedo around noon. After a quick meeting with Samuel, we headed for lunch first. Maria and the kids then departed with Anita, Samuel’s employee, to Hacienda Limon, while Samuel and I headed off to Hacienda Guantupi.

Just outside of a small town called Buena Fe, we drove maybe 5km down a dirt road that got narrower and narrower along the edge of the Rio Gallina, one of the tributaries that later forms the Rio Quevedo. The road finally ended because the river had risen the last two weeks and the erosion had wiped out the possibility of going any further, since banana trees blocked the rest of the way.

We walked maybe 500m from where we parked to a place where the river bank was just a flat beach, no longer an eroded bank, and met a long river canoe with an outboard motor that took us across the river. Just two weeks ago, the river had been maybe 2 meters higher than it was today.

After crossing, we got in another pickup which we used to cruise around the farm and check out the cocoa plants. Samuel and Hugo, the farm manager, showed me Witch’s Broom and Monilla, two different diseases that affect the cocoa plants. We drove up into the hills where a couple of local workers were cutting down the weeds with weed wackers.

We then proceeded to the main farmhouse, a building of bamboo and cement constructed on stilts one story above ground, from which we could see most of the farm. The area has rice paddies, banana fields and cocoa, along with corn as well, but only cacao is grown on Samuel’s land.
Since it’s the end of the harvest season right now, there was no cocoa to be seen drying. We picked up about a dozen 180 pound sacks of recently fermented cocoa, that Samuel was taking to be dried at his other farm, which were loaded into the pickup.

Hacienda Guantupí is 180 hectares, all cacao nacional here. We all stopped at the edge of the farm where Samuel showed me some old growth cacao, trees at least 30 to 40 years old that had not been pruned, at least 50 feet high. Some of these trees were Venezuelan trinitario cacao, brought here back in the 30s, with red pods, whereas the nacional has a much yellower fruit.

We headed back to the canoe, and I watched as one man proceeded to load at least 10 180 pound sacks by himself into the canoe. The others helped schlep a sack onto his back, he’d walk the 100 meters or so over some wooden planks laid on top of the mud that had formed at the river’s edge from the previous week’s flooding, and carry them to the canoe one by one.

Boarding the canoe to go back across, I noticed one of the guys wearing an AIG shirt. So fitting for these times.

They dropped Samuel, Hugo, and me at the same point they had picked us up at, then headed downriver another 500 meters or so to where the pickup was parked and the road ended…or started, depending on how you look at it. From there, between 3 or 4 men, they hoisted the sacks of cacao the 6 feet or so up the eroded river bank’s edge, and then loaded it into the pickup.

I kept wondering what that wet, fruity smell was while I was standing around watching all this, then finally realized it was the fermented but not yet dried caco in the jute sacks.

We left Buena Fe and headed back to Quevedo. Traffic was slow for a few minutes…a beer truck had lost several cases of beer on the road and they were cleaning up the broken glass as we passed.

After stopping briefly at Orecao’s offices, we headed to Hacienda Limon. Taking a dirt road off the main highway, we drove, and drove, and drove some more. It was at least an hour in. We passed through mature palm oil groves-the pinging of the rocks on the bottom of the car echoed as if we were in a cave. It was all shade in the mature groves. Other sections had recently planted African Palms, only 1 or two meters high. In other sections we passed bananas, rice fields, more bananas, then cacao.

It was nearly sunset when we finally arrived here. It’s a long way from anywhere.

 

Quito-Santo Domingo-Quevedo-Quito

We drove down to Santo Domingo today, on our way to Quevedo tomorrow. Given all the bad press the road to Santo Domingo gets, I would have thought it was a lot worse. There are several sections where the road is just one lane due to recent landslides, but once you get past the first 50 kilometers, the landslides and constant switchbacks and hairpin turns end. It’s the trucks that make the going slow most of the way. Of course, it’s nonetheless a dangerous road; if you’re not paying attention or happen to come around a corner just when someone has decided to pass irresponsibly, which is the rule rather than the exception, you could find yourself plummeting several hundred, if not over a thousand feet, down vertical cliffs, with the only thing to break your fall some heavy cloud-forest type foliage-and yes, it has happened, cars or buses suspended just part way down the cliff-and if you’re not so lucky, though that depends on how you consider it, you’ll have your fall broken only by hitting bottom and plunging into some serious rapids.

We installed ourselves with the kids at the Hotel Zaracay on the edge of town. After a little while in the pool and a walk through the bamboo groves-the bamboo is at least 100 feet high and easily as thick as your arm-we took a drive through town. Santo Domingo, while somewhat disorderly like so many places in Ecuador, is really a thriving city with people swarming through the streets, avenues of tall, that is four-plus story buildings, and lots of traffic. There’s a new shopping center, major supermarket, and cinema-supposedly there is a lot of drug trafficking and thus money running through the area.

Tomorrow we’re off to Quevedo and Samuel’s cocoa plantation for two nights. Probably won’t have internet there so check back in four or five days when we return to Quito and I can post again.