Organic, Fair Trade Only Option for Mexican Coffee Growers

Mexican farmers must cope with coffee glut

By TESSIE BORDEN Gannett News Service

Published in the Courier News January 2004

TAPACHULA, Mexico -- By this time of year in Mexico's Chiapas state, farmers and laborers have spent months harvesting the coffee crop, moving from bush to bush in the shadow of the Tacana volcano, selecting the berries that yield the beans that flavor your morning java. They are men like Armando Lorenzo Dominguez Rodriguez, a small producer of coffee who farms almost 5 acres of rich soil near Ejido Agustin de Iturbide, north of the border town of Tapachula.

For the past five years, Dominguez Rodriguez, along with 25 million other coffee growers around the world, has been fighting a losing battle that threatens the growers' already meager incomes.

Gourmet coffee may be more popular than ever in the United States thanks to
Starbucks: Retail volume sales of coffee rose 37 percent from 1997 to
2002.

But in Mexico, more and more coffee farmers are abandoning their crops because wholesale prices set largely by multinational companies are at historic lows.

Many farmers immigrate to the United States. Some die.

Of 14 immigrants who died trying to cross the Arizona desert near Yuma on May 24, 2001, 12 were coffee farmers.

"For us, planting coffee has been a religion," Dominguez Rodriguez said. "We have given it all our faith."

In the past three years, Dominguez Rodriguez and his fellow farmers have made no profit from their coffee. It sells for half of his production costs.

The problem extends across Mexico. In the past three years, coffee production nationwide has fallen 40 percent, exports have fallen 55 percent and farmers' incomes have fallen 70 percent, said Fernando Celis, of CNOC, the coordinating agency for Mexico's coffee farmers.

Blame a host of factors, including an unbalanced market dominated on one side by multinational giants Sara Lee, Kraft, Nestle and Procter & Gamble, and on the other by thousands of small isolated landowners who, individually, have no power to demand better prices.

Add to that aggressive competition from Brazil and Vietnam, the world's
No. 1 and No. 2 coffee producers, respectively. Both countries are flooding the market with what the industry considers beans of poor quality.

The result: Farmers who once made a decent living growing the world's second-most-valuable legal commodity now have to look for niche markets or immigrate to feed their families.

Gonzalo Rosales Jimenez, who is past retirement age, used to fend for himself.

These days, he walks miles before dawn from Agustin de Iturbide to his small mountainside plot to pick arabica, caturra and robusta beans that he will sell to a middleman for 50 cents a pound. He works with only one hired hand, all he can afford.

A few miles away, Wilmer de Leon Cinto, a 9-year-old Guatemalan, helps his mother and older sister fill boxes of coffee berries at the 108-acre Santa Elena farm, one of several specialty coffee producers in the area. Members of Wilmer's family get paid $4 to $6 for each 150-pound box they fill.

Santa Elena has a long history in Chiapas. Patriarch Johan Bernstorff arrived in Chiapas in 1912 as a migrant laborer and eventually bought the coffee-growing land that he passed on to son Everardo Bernstorff Perez.

Like the farmers at Agustin de Iturbide, Bernstorff Perez has seen his earnings drop. Where once he got $3 per pound of unroasted dried coffee, he now gets about $1.20 a pound.

So Rosales Jimenez and Bernstorff Perez mounted a last-ditch effort to save their businesses: They went organic. They know American and European consumers are willing to pay more for quality coffee that's free of chemical pesticides, so they can demand a higher price at the wholesale level.

The coffee crisis has prompted groups concerned with social justice to find ways to help farmers.

Among them, Oxfam, an international anti-poverty group, promotes social responsibility through fair-trade products: specially certified and labeled coffee, cocoa and other products that are of high quality, often organic and come from small producers.

from the Courier News website www.c-n.com