La Jornada
February 13, 2001
By Luis Hernández Navarro (translated by Victoria Furio)
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The coffee groves are full of berries without hands to harvest them. Red carpets of coffee beans not picked on time blanket the hillsides.
It is wealth that is lost because the beans have no value. The producer cannot go without hiring pickers. Between November and March, depending on the altitude of the groves, the beans ripen. All hands of the peasant farmer family are dedicated to their harvest. Children leave school, women leave the house and the backyard to move to the small plantations, but they don't suffice. They must pay others, often indigenous families of producer regions, to complete the needed labor force, unless they want the crop to be lost.
The small coffee producer must make a monumental effort to obtain the day laborer's pay. Most of them only receive money after the harvest is over. They must obtain credit through their organizations, if they belong to one, or fall into the hands of the "coyotes", shady dealers, or the loan sharks. But it turns out that they can't do that. The pickers receive 14 pesos per can of coffee berries weighing 15 kilos. The producer that is not a processor is forced to sell the kilo for only one peso 30 cents.
An invisible chain binds the coffee producers that live and work in the mountains of southern Mexico to the Stock Market in New York. The destiny of the peasant farmer families devoted to coffee production is decided in the building located at number 8 Broad Street in New York, adorned with the sculpture of a woman wearing a winged hat, the symbol of Hermes, the god of commerce and thieves among the ancient Greek. There, a handful of Investment Funds, big businessmen and speculators, decided that the price of coffee must come down because there is more supply than demand.
In the coffee-growing communities there is sadness. The price of the bean dropped to $62 dollars per 100 pounds on the international market; for years it remained between $120 and $140 dollars. On top of that, Mexican coffee is punished with a fine of between eight and ten dollars, supposedly due to problems in quality. The cost of production of those 100 pounds runs between $70 and $80 dollars. Which means, if the arithmetic is right, that the producers invested more than they will receive in this cycle. In other words, they will lose money; for many, the only money they would receive this year.
The coffee crisis is dramatic for the country and for the families that live from the production and harvest of the bean. More than 283 thousand producers work in the sector, 200 thousand of them--the majority indigenous--with plots barely 2 hectares in size. Close to 750 thousand day laborers are employed during the harvest season.
Migration, theft, violence and the desire to plant drugs have grown in the towns that live from the bean. In many there is a temptation to cut down the coffee grove and produce corn in order to survive. If the tendency continues, the economic and social disaster will become an environmental catastrophe. The coffee bush grows on hillsides along with trees that provide shade; it usually serves as a buffer zone for forests and woods. Cutting down the coffee trees--which take four years to begin to produce fruit--in order to get 600 kilos of corn per hectare, which is what is obtained on inclines, will erode the soil and deforest the green areas.
Despite the seriousness, the new government has done very little to alleviate this situation. The generosity it showed in subsidizing the industrialists who use gas has been absent among the coffee growers. It approved an emergency program in which it will invest a mere 300 million pesos, that is, a thousand pesos a year, 80 per month per producer. The assistance will continue until March, when the harvest reaches its end, without taking the producers' organizations into account. It agreed to participate in a program to destroy 100 thousand sacks of poor quality beans aimed at raising prices, which to date it has not done. But it continues to allow the big companies like Nestlé to import low-quality coffee, even though national production can easily supply the market.
A curious irony: either due to aversion of the peasant farmer world or to being new, a government which talks about giving great importance to micro-business has left the small businessmen of a product that brings dollars into the country, creates jobs and protects the environment at the mercy of a deregulated market.
The alarm signals have gone on in the Mexican countryside. The coffee growers have sent the country a distressing S.O.S. The new government officials would do well not to disregard this message. The Chiapas rebellion of 1994 was fed by the coffee crisis that began in 1989.