The unstable nature of worldwide coffee prices has motivated these farmers to find a niche that would protect them from large drops in coffee prices: the organic and fair-trade markets.
More organic coffee is grown in Chiapas, a southern Mexico state slightly smaller than South Carolina, perhaps than anywhere else in the world. Sixty-four percent of the land devoted to organic-certified production in Mexico is in Chiapas, and Mexico is the world’s leading producer of organic coffee, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2013 GAIN report on Mexico.
This idea has allowed groups of indigenous farmers to create cooperatives and unions, systems through which hundreds of families pool their harvests together to export in large volumes. These groups worked together to obtain fair-trade and organic certificates and now process and export their coffee, which ends up in posh cafes all over the world.
Saramanco Gutierrez belongs to the Maya Vinic cooperative. This year the price paid to its farmers has averaged about 45 pesos per kilogram, a little less than $4 for a kilogram — 2.2 pounds — of coffee cherries. It is a higher price than usual because worldwide coffee prices rose dramatically this year, nearly doubling from mid-February to mid-March. Usually farmers are paid 29 to 35 pesos per kilo, Maya Vinic director Mariano Perez Vasquez said.
“It isn’t enough to support their families for the whole year,” Perez Vasquez said. “It’s annual work to clean it, care for it and, when the harvest comes, to cut it with their families. We don’t have schedules. We leave at 6 in the morning and, if we have to, we don’t return until 6 in the evening. Here we are poor, and we have to work from sun to sun. That’s what the indigenous have always done.”
The rust fungus that is just now hitting the highlands where Maya Vinic’s members live will greatly reduce the amount of coffee that producers are able to harvest and sell. It also means the infected plants will need to be removed and replaced with new, young plants of a strain that is able to resist the rust.
It will likely be five years before farmers who were hit hard, like Saramanco Gutierrez, are able to reach their full production volumes again.
Source: azstarnet.com/business/national-and-international/mexican-organic-coffee-a-big-troubled-enterprise/article_6b79dc56-b39c-5880-b873-919729610e72.html
