Guardian · 13 days ago

Historic Harvests and sky-high Prices – So Why can’t Colombia’s coffee-growers Hire pickers?

Record coffee prices and historic harvests have brought unexpected hardship to Colombia's fourth-generation farmers like Mary Luz Pérez Arrubla, who watched 10% of her crop rot on the ground for lack of pickers. "I had to gather the coffee from the ground," she says. "It seemed that there was more of it lying on the floor than still on the branches." While coffee fuels 3 billion cups a day worldwide, barely 10% of the profit reaches the small farmers who grow most of the world's beans -- families working an average of just 3.5 acres each, unable to afford the machinery or innovations that might save them, yet too rooted in steep mountain slopes to industrialize like Brazil's vast plantations. The choice emerging is stark: transform into artisanal producers of specialty coffee that commands premium prices, or join the exodus to cities that has already claimed a quarter of Colombia's coffee workers in a generation, leaving those who remain -- increasingly over 60 -- to wonder if a culture recognized by UNESCO can survive when goodness and tradition cannot compete with livable wages.