Mexican Farmers Ruined By Flood Of Cheap Coffee
People in Veracruz are desperately seeking jobs in America

August 3, 2002
by david adams

THREE years ago Esteban Romero’s small coffee plantation high in the cloudcovered uplands in southeast Mexico produced just enough money for the family of six to get by. Now prices have fallen so low, to barely 30peso a lb, that his fields lie almost unattended and two of his three sons have emigrated to the United States in search of work.

“The truth is we’d be better off just dropping it completely,” said Señor Romero, 72, whose family has been growing coffee as long as he can remember. “Why bother, it’s only losing money?” Until recently, coffee was one of Mexico’s chief exports, selling at more than £64 a bag (100lb). Today the price has plunged to £29 a bag, its lowest value in more than a century.

Analysts blame increases in production elsewhere, mainly in Vietnam and Brazil. Since 1995 Vietnam has tripled its output of low-quality robusta coffee, thanks to a “misguided” World Bank loan.

The resulting market glut has been a godsend for the giant international coffee houses and some supermarket distributors. For everyone else, however, it has brought only ruin, especially in the impoverished highlands of Mexico, Central America and Colombia, recognised as the source of some of the world’s best- tasting high-altitude coffee.

Development groups are trying to steer the high-quality Arabica coffee producers towards the better-paying market for organic and “specialty” coffees in Europe and the US. But analysts say that that market is small and requires expensive investment. To meet tough standards farmers must decontaminate land, which can take up to five years.

“It’s very hard for us to compete with the big companies,” Javier Murrieta, who owns 247 acres in Veracruz, said. “The industry is too greedy.” In some parts of southern Mexico, young men are leaving coffee fields in droves to search for work in the cities, or paying polleros — people-smugglers — up to £12,800 to cross the US border.

“We estimate that 30 to 35 per cent of coffee workers have emigrated,” Roberto Muñoz, at the Veracruz Coffee Council, a government-backed industry association, said. In Veracruz’s coffee regions of Coatepec and Huatusco, lorries with 40 to 50 passengers leave for the border once a month.

In Señor Romero’s unpaved street, his wife, Flora, 60, listed at least 35 young men who had left in the past three years. “Now it’s their wives who are leaving, and even the kids,” she said.

Cristina Nuñez, an anthropologist at Veracruz University, said: “The coffee situation is utterly unsustainable for the growers. The only thing that is sustaining the region are the remittances the men send back home every month.”

Experts worry about the environmental effects of farmers clearing coffee fields. Upland Arabica coffee is grown in the shade of hillside forests. In Veracruz the invasion of cornfields and sugar cane on the Orizaba volcano’s slopes is changing the landscape.

The economic desperation has claimed lives. In May last year 14 Veracruz men were killed by heat exhaustion as they tried to enter the United States by walking through the Sonoma Desert in Arizona. In November at least 67 people died, mostly unemployed coffee workers, in a mudslide at an illegal open-pit goldmine in central Colombia.

In Mexico, the world’s fourth-largest producer, coffee export income has gone from £513 million to £160 million in three years.

A national census has shown that coffee cultivation, which once provided jobs for three million people, has dropped from almost two million acres to 1.3 million in recent years.

Robusta coffee has all but wiped out the economy of northern Nicaragua, where British farmers helped to introduce the crop. Since April 30,000 small producers have laid off most of their 150,000 workers.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-372875,00.html