Fungus Cripples Coffee Production Across Central America Context for RI 2014 BT1 Micro CSQ

SAN LUCAS TOLIMÁN, Guatemala — When coffee rust attacked the farms

clinging to the volcanic slopes above this Mayan town, the disease was unsparing,

reducing mountainside rows of coffee trees to lattices of gray twigs.

During last year’s harvest, Román Lec, who grows coffee on a few acres here,

lost half his crop. This year, he borrowed about $2,000 for fertilizer and fungicide

to protect the plants, as he did last year. But the disease returned and he lost even

more.

“There are nights when you cannot sleep, thinking how to pay back the

money,” said Mr. Lec, 65.

A plant-choking fungus called coffee rust, or la roya, has swept across Central

America, withering trees and slashing production everywhere. As exports have

plunged over the last two years, the effects have rippled through the local

economies.

Big farmers hire fewer workers to pick the ripe coffee cherries that enclose the

beans. Smaller farmers go into debt and sell livestock or tools to make up for the

lost income. Sales fall at local merchants. Teenagers leave school to work on the

farm because their parents can no longer hire outside help. At the very end of the

chain are the landless migrant workers who earn just a few dollars a day.

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“If you frame this in terms of everyone that is connected to the economics of

coffee, it’s a very serious problem,” said Roberto de Michele, a specialist at the

Inter-American Development Bank who is based in Guatemala City.

The coffee rust has spread far and fast, driven by higher temperatures in the

region that have allowed the fungus to thrive at higher altitudes. Many experts say

climate change is largely to blame for the shifting weather patterns.

The economics of the business have added to the farmers’ plight. After years

of low coffee prices, smaller farmers could not afford to replace aging coffee plants,

which have proved more vulnerable to the rust’s attack.

“There was nothing to hold it back because the farms were in very poor

shape,” said Maja Wallengren, a coffee expert based in Mexico.

The trouble here is just one of several factors that are pushing up prices in the

global commodity market, increases that may carry over to supermarket shelves

and the specialty coffee houses that sell the high-grade arabica coffee for which

Central America is known. Market prices have risen 70 to 80 percent since

November, driven mostly by drought in Brazil, the world’s largest producer.

In Central America, the pain is acute. Four million people there and in

southern Mexico rely on coffee for their living, according to the Inter-American

Development Bank. Twenty percent of the half-million jobs in Guatemala directly

tied to the crop have already disappeared, estimated Nils Leporowski, the

president of Anacafé, the country’s coffee board.

The rust outbreak has pushed many families to the edge of survival.

“Roya has exposed the depth of the social and economic problems in terms of

people’s vulnerability to the market and to climate change,” said Peter Loach, the

Guatemala director of Mercy Corps, an aid agency. “What makes it different and

complicated is that it’s a slow-onset natural disaster over two to three years.”

Even in good years, José Obispo Tax Talé, 34, had to scrimp to feed his eight

children. In the past, his work as a day laborer on coffee farms would give him just

enough money to rent land, buy fertilizer and grow corn for food.

Since the coffee rust hit, farmers are hiring fewer workers and paying less. So

Mr. Tax had to borrow about $1,300 to grow corn. “Sometimes, you get

desperate,” he said. “You want to work, but there is none.”

This year, the lean season, when food supplies run out for the poorest

farmers, started two months early, according to the Famine Early Warning


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Systems Network, a monitoring service, because of falling coffee earnings and

reduced corn yields over the last couple of years. Forecasts of irregular rainfall this

summer raise additional concern.

“Year after year, these families are confronted by layers of vulnerability,” said

Anne Valand of the World Food Programme, who estimated that as many as

300,000 Guatemalans could need emergency food aid later this year. “Bit by bit,

the layers are becoming thinner.”

As the coffee rust has taken hold, farmers have been spending much of their

time and money trying to fight the disease by spraying fungicide, replacing or

cutting back old plants, and managing the shade trees that filter sunlight and

appear to reduce the spread of the rust.

“People are scared of the roya,” said Nicolás Leja, who farms about seven

acres in plots in San Antonio Palopó, a nearby municipality. He pruned his trees

and sprayed fungicide, but it proved futile. He has lost as much as 60 percent of

his production over the last two years.

Instead of hiring four workers for the harvest as he usually does, he relied on

extra labor from his 18-year-old son, who put off plans to study medicine.

The changing fortunes of Guatemala’s small farmers raise the question of

whether some of them should continue to grow coffee at all or instead should

switch to food crops. Some say they could not make the change even if they wanted

to.

“Beans and corn don’t grow well here,” Mr. Leja said, pointing at the steep

hillside. “The coffee income is very important. It pays for corn and beans.”

The latest epidemic of coffee rust began in Central America three years ago. It

spread rapidly last year, prompting most governments to declare states of

emergency. Last year’s harvest fell 15 percent in Guatemala, and neighboring

countries had losses as big and even bigger. Export figures suggest that

Guatemala’s harvest this year has fallen an additional 10 percent.

Nobody has escaped. Guillermo Ríos, a midsize producer who grows coffee on

37 acres near the Mexican border in Huehuetenango, said he had sprayed

fungicide four times and managed to limit the outbreak to just 10 percent of the

plantation.

“My priority is to rescue what I invested,” he said in a telephone interview.

But his profit was minimal, and the higher costs have halted his plans to add


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plants on additional land he owns. He will hire fewer workers than he expected.

While rust hit Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, the outbreaks were

contained at lower altitudes. This rust outbreak has advanced to the highest

altitudes, including the steep slopes here around Lake Atitlán. Rising temperatures

and extreme weather, like flooding, have encouraged roya’s spread, said Ana R.

Ríos, a climate change specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank.

With the changing conditions, the industry is intensifying efforts to breed

varieties that are resistant to rust and heat stress while maintaining their quality.

But the research is only beginning, and it may take 25 or 30 years before resistant

hybrids reach farmers, said Leonardo Lombardini, the deputy director of World

Coffee Research at Texas A&M University.

“The problem is that farmers are struggling and also the climate is changing

rapidly,” Mr. Lombardini said. “The window of climate conditions for arabica is

relatively narrow.”

Researchers are also growing plants from seeds collected all over the world

and sending them to different countries for field trials to see where they thrive.

That should give farmers who do not have much money to invest some assurances

that when they replace their old trees, the new ones will be productive.

In the meantime, the priority is returning the farms to health.

Guatemala’s agriculture ministry provided small farmers with fungicide last

year, although many complained that it reached them too late or that it was not

enough. Others simply sold it. The government has increased the amount of

money in a fund to provide low-interest loans to $100 million and extended it to

2026. The fund had only $28 million when the measure was approved last fall.

“The coffee here is positioned for its quality like the wines of France,” said

José Sebastián Marcucci, Guatemala’s vice minister of agriculture. “The majority

of coffee comes from the small producers. I hope that they can be motivated.”

With help from Anacafé, the government is showing farmers how to prune

and replace their trees. They also plant beans and vegetables between the coffee

seedlings to provide food while they wait three years for them to start producing.

More and more farmers are listening. Servando Santos, 56, the manager at

the San Miguel Integrated Agricultural Cooperative in Tzampetey, said he fought

off the rust by spraying fungicide, using fertilizer and controlling the shade over

his plants. “You have to adapt to the roya,” he said. “You have to make friends with


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it.”


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Fungus Cripples Coffee Production Across Central America Context for RI 2014 BT1 Micro CSQ

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