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Currents
in
Specialty Coffee
Market Trends,
Producing Regions
& A Look at a
Year in Coffee
 Coffee
Losses
One Farmer's Life
in Coffee
Roaster Meets
Grower
A Relationship
in Coffee
Craft Roasting
Specialty Coffee's
Past & Future
Codes of a
Fundamentalist
Cupper
The Pursuit of
Great Coffee
Fast Coffee
How the Espresso
Machine Came to Be
Espresso
Exposed
Why the Average
Espresso is Not What
It Seems to Be
Calling the Shots
Will American Baristi
Ever Earn the Respect
They Deserve?
Adventures in
Turk Kahvesi
Navigating the
Traditions of Coffee
in Turkey
The
Latté Gambit
Seattle &
the American
Coffee Scene
Coming of Age
in Coffee
A Consumer's
Journey Into Coffee
Connoisseurship
Where Do We Go
From Here?
Gimme! Coffee
Ithaca, New York
Diva Espresso
Seattle, Washington
The Sentient Bean
Savannah, Georgia
From the Publisher
From the Editor
Coffee Resource
Directory 2002
Advertiser Index
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Coffee Losses Across Borders
One Farmer's Life in Coffee
by Krystell Maya Guzman
photos by David Griswold
Squeezed in a coffin-like compartment under a fast-moving vegetable truck, Jose
Alberto feels like he is suspended in mid-air. Only one foot separates him from
the road that is a blur beneath him. The cold seeps in from everywhere. Small
for his age, he had to fit into a box nailed to the underside of an 18-wheel truck.
There are 50 others piled above him, crouched in a compartment lined with tomato
and banana crates. He is luckier than the rest to be squeezed into that space—above,
there is barely enough air to breath. From where he lay, he can see feet moving,
making the boards creak that are only three inches from his face. They had to
hide everyone well to cross through Mexico, the worst part of the trip. The United
States migra (immigration) is not as bad as the Mexican federales that would beat
or torture people before throwing them back to Guatemala. For 25 hours they travel,
instructed not to speak or move. Jose's fear almost overcomes his will to reach
"El Norte."
Jose is from the mountains of Atitlan, Guatemala, where his birth
determined his fate. He was born beneath a coffee tree on a rainy day in December
1972. His parents were picking coffee cherries on the one hectare they had inherited
from five generations back. The rain began to pour, and as his mother felt a sharp
pain, she fell to her knees, freshly picked coffee cherries scattering around
her. "My mother laid on the soil that held the roots my family had worked for
so many years," Jose recalls. "She was wet, with only the tree leaves to cover
her from the downpour. I was brought into the world on top of a blanket of red
coffee cherries."
Jose and his family were luckier than most farmers because they
owned the land on which they cultivated coffee. His father's grandfather had worked
as a laborer for a large German coffee producer. He was chosen to be the intermediary
between the owner and the workers, because he was one of the few who spoke Spanish
as well as the more commonly used native Indian language. When the owner passed
away, he left Jose's great great grandfather a small piece of land to cultivate
his own coffee. At the time, farmers planted coffee according to ancient traditions—using
the sun, rain, soil, and spiritual powers to coordinate the time to plant, prune
and pick. Ceremonies and celebrations marked all major farming activities, and
diseases and plagues were dealt with by hand, calling on the wisdom of elders.
For most small growers, coffee has historically been a farm product
like any other that is sold in the local market; no exceptional prices or major
income is normally received from its sale. Like the Albertos, they work their
farms together as families, planting new seedlings, transplanting, cleaning, picking,
and processing. Many producers choose to grow coffee because it can be stored
and sold throughout the year. Larger plantation owners usually purchase the crop
of the small growers, although they still pay very little and often cheat growers
by manipulating the scales. Jose's family was an exception, choosing to see their
farm as a business—selling smart, re-investing and profiting from its growth.
The use of family labor in small-scale coffee production maintained
a low production cost for growers until fertilizers were introduced in the '50s
and '60s. "When my father was growing up, men in suits sent by the government
came to tell [the growers] that they were farming wrong," Jose says. "They told
them that if they purchased a magic liquid, they could work less and grow more
coffee. At first [the farmers] didn't believe them, but they offered a free trial,
and after a while, word got around that Jose had fewer bugs to fight, and Juan
had no more plagues, and Miguel's plants were fuller and brighter. By the time
harvest came around, the trees gave so many more cherries that the farmers almost
didn't know what to do with them all."
Coffee growing, along with all other agricultural products, drastically
changed with the introduction of fertilizers. Governments throughout Latin America
partnered with companies of mutual interest to proliferate the use of fertilizers,
and producers were aggressively pursued and convinced that they needed to buy
fertilizer in order to grow better products. For small family growers this meant
a rise in production cost, from five to 10 cents per pound, because all of the
labor was assumed by the family. But for large growers, the production cost went
inversely down because of the amount of labor they could eliminate with widespread
fertilizer application. Most farmers found the money to purchase the special juice,
and fertilizers became the norm for coffee growers.
But during the late '80s and early '90s, the price of coffee fell
so low that many growers could not afford fertilizer, and they were forced to
investigate a new trend called café organico. By that time, Jose's father had
managed to triple the size of the family farm to three hectares by re-investing
income from increased coffee sales. They lived better than most families, but
they were unsure how long they could survive the low prices.
Just in time, entrepreneurs wanting to cash in on a new consumer
trend arrived from the city to tell Jose's family that if they had organic coffee
to sell, they would pay them a better price for their coffee. Organic was a new
word for many coffee growers—as far as they could tell, it simply meant increased
labor. Before, it would take one person to apply fertilizer; now, five people
were needed to create and maintain a continuous supply of compost that was individually
applied to each coffee tree. And wherever the soil was at too much of an incline,
it was necessary to build retaining walls around the base of each tree to prevent
soil erosion. But the entrepreneurs guaranteed farmers that the extra work would
bring higher prices. There were few other options.
Once all of the farmers had begun to transition to organic methods,
they had to start a paper trail. Producers with minimal education, many of whom
could barely read or write, were instructed by organic certifying companies to
fill out 10-page applications complete with zoning maps. They had to track when
it rained and keep logs of every farming activity carried out on their plants.
After the paperwork was in order, producers paid all of the expenses and fees
for a certifying company to arrive and inspect the farm. During the early '90s,
this could cost from $5000 to $30,000.
The Alberto family's elevation in production provided the capital
they needed to start the certifying process; the rest would be payable over time
with proceeds made from coffee sales. Within three years, Jose's farm was certified.
This turned out to be the greatest stroke of luck his family had ever experienced
on their coffee farm. "The price of coffee reached $2.80 per pound, when we had
become accustomed to a constant 50 to 70 cents," Jose says. "We had plenty of
organic coffee to sell, which provided us with an extra 50 cents over the going
market price."
The location of the family's farm always made for good coffee of
desirable characteristics, but as a certified product, it was considered especially
valuable. Before they could pick the cherries, the family had sold all of the
harvest. They had never made so much money, and Jose's father insisted that they
re-invest in the farm. So in preparation for the next harvest, they automated
their wet mill, where the cherries were pulped and laid out to dry.
After 1994, Jose's farm had doubled in size and production, providing
a much larger income. The family was respected as great growers, and the name
of their farm, "Nueva Luz," was attracting buyers from around the world. It was
a high time in the market for all coffee growers, who decided to plant more trees.
By 1998, the price of coffee had climbed to three dollars per pound, plus any
organic premium. "We were the richest family for miles," Jose says. "I bought
the first truck our community had ever known—a brand new white Dodge that only
government officials had at the time. Our small one-room house transformed into
a two-story house with eight rooms."
So much good fortune convinced the family to become independent
exporters, believing they could sell their coffee directly to the United States
and Europe. Most exporters use their own dry mills to peel the parchment off the
green beans and separate them by size or color. By 1999, Jose's family was ready
to build their own dry mill, which required purchasing large machinery for grading
and separating the beans, building a larger warehouse and improving their drying
patios. They added a sales office with export capability to administer the sale
of coffee directly to customers. A significant investment was required—their
own capital along with a large amount of credit from the bank.
Then as quickly as things had begun to look up, they began to deteriorate.
The beginning of the new millennium brought declining coffee prices. All of the
coffee trees that had been planted throughout the world between 1994 and 1998
was coming to maturity around the year 2000. This dumped a huge amount of coffee
into a market that did not have the demand to support the supply. Growers like
Jose began to worry, but they had no idea that the worst was yet to come.
In 2000, Jose's family received the money they needed to expand.
Their plans were in motion, the patios were expanded, the machinery was purchased
and installed, the warehouse was rebuilt, and the wet mill was upgraded. All the
work was finished in time for the beginning of the 2001 harvest. They would start
paying back their debt to the bank with the profits they would make from the sale
of their coffee. "Holding my breath, I would check the price of coffee every day,
only to find that it was getting lower and lower," Jose says.
The price of coffee plummeted to 44 cents per pound, the lowest
it had been since before Jose was born. Although they had a few regular customers,
the family's farm expansion had quadrupled their production without securing any
new buyers. An extra 10 cents had been added to their 70-cent production cost
to repay the financing they had received. With stable market prices between 80
cents and a dollar, they could sell their coffee locally and still make the money
needed to repay their debt. But they were not alone—millions of other coffee
producers found themselves in the same situation. Banks in all Latin American
coffee-producing countries began to foreclose on land, repossess property, close
down businesses, and even throw farmers in jail. "The first time I saw my father
cry was in the warehouse sitting on a pile of coffee sacks," Jose recalls. "I
knew it was over. He said, 'We have to repay the debt, and the bank wants to take
everything away—even the land that has been in the family for generations.'"
The family's only choice was to resell their machinery at a loss
and sell the warehouse to a fertilizer company. The sale of half of the family's
land kept the bank at bay for a while. "I had to do something to keep the rest
of the land that had been in our family for so long. I'd rather die than see my
father give it up," Jose says. "I needed to make money, and the only thing I knew
how to do was farm. But in my country that would take me nowhere. That is when
I decided to go to 'El Norte.'"
In a warehouse in Mexico City, Jose and the others are able to
get out of the truck, only to find a man and a woman lying motionless in a corner
of the compartment. The ventilation device in the truck had broken five hours
into the trip, making the air inside the compartment unbearably hot and thick.
Fifty people crouched in such a small dark space could barely breathe for 20 hours.
The bodies had to be buried near the warehouse in order to avoid problems for
the smugglers.
The travelers are driven to a house where they are given food and
told to stay in one room without making any noise. There isn't enough room to
lie down, so that night they all sleep sitting up. In the middle of the night,
the "coyotes" come to get the travelers 10 at a time, loading them in vans, off
to Tijuana. Once there, they are taken to another house to stay until the chosen
coyote says it is safe to cross. "At three in the morning, we were taken to the
desert and told to walk," Jose remembers. "We walked until we could no longer
feel our feet. People fell, only to be yelled at by the coyote to get up or the
migra would get us."
In United States territory, they arrive at another house, where
they are not allowed to sleep for fear that someone will snore and the noise will
lead to their discovery. They take turns kicking each other when one can't help
but fall asleep. Eventually, they arrive to the airport in downtown San Diego,
where, after obtaining fake IDs, they part ways, each setting out for his or her
destination. "Even on the plane I was still scared," Jose confesses. "I had never
been out of Guatemala, much less on an airplane. After we took off, all I knew
was that I had made it to the other side."
The coffee crisis has devastated millions of coffee producers throughout
the world. Coffee was once the only industry that provided many of today's immigrants
into the U.S. with a small income working as farm owners or laborers. Now farms
are being abandoned or sold, and families are being separated because of the punishing
state of the coffee industry. "I thought I could quickly recover what we had lost,"
Jose says. "I thought I would be rich again, like everyone that came to 'El Norte.'
In reality, it took me a month to find a job, and the only thing I could get was
washing dishes in a café for minimum wage. It's going to take me a lot longer
than I had thought. I wish I was back on my family's farm watching the coffee
flowers bloom, but for now, I'll just keep washing other peoples' dirty coffee
cups."
Krystell Maya Guzman is founder of Kafe
Jade, a consulting company that specializes in building a bridge between origin
and market. Her programs teach producers how to enter into the coffee market by
developing informed and competitive businesses.
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