Hard Times for Coffee Farmers

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer

ATZALAN, Mexico (AP) - Latin America is littered with monuments to the boom-bust history of tropical cash crops: the moldering palaces of rope-fiber growers in the Yucatan, Central America's abandoned banana plantations, the crumbling mansions of sugar barons in Cuba.

But no bust has been crueler than the current collapse of coffee prices. Few have sparked such massive displacement of small-scale farmers and crops, or posed such a threat to the environment.

The dream crop for Latin America - labor-intensive, increasingly jungle-friendly and ideal for small family plots - may now be disappearing as a way of life for hundreds of thousands of families.

``Coffee is just being allowed to fall off the bushes. It's not even worth picking,'' said Ignacio Rodriguez Falcon, a 59-year-old coffee farmer in Atzalan, in the lush hills of the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.

Three of Rodriguez Falcon's sons have migrated to Houston, Texas because they couldn't make a living. Six neighbors died in the Arizona desert in May as they fled the coffee bust in search of jobs in the United States.

Some Latin American farmers get just 15 to 25 cents per pound for berries, half what they earned in 1999 - and most of that is eaten up by costs. The drop in world prices came just as trends like shade coffee, which allows jungle to stand over coffee bushes, were catching on.

In Nicaragua, hundreds of coffee workers - almost the entire population of three villages - began a 100-mile exodus in July to the city of Matagalpa, where they set up a shantytown in a park.

``We're in the hands of God, and dependent on the charity of good people,'' said Juana Morales, 36, who came with her three children.

Even Juan Valdez - the fictional straw-hatted Colombian coffee farmer who has appeared with his donkey in ads touting Colombian beans for the last 40 years - is in trouble.

The price drop has led Colombia's National Coffee Growers' Federation to cut back sharply on advertising, though it denies any plans to retire Valdez.

The crisis nearly halved Venezuela's coffee exports and sparked street protests by angry farmers. Plantations in Brazil and Colombia are getting out of lower-grade coffee and focusing on pricier beans, hurting poor nations like Kenya that specialize in high-quality coffee.

Everywhere in the region, governments are doing what little they can, with plans to buy up or destroy surpluses and handing out small aid payments.

But the crisis is likely to transform landscapes of tin-roofed homes tucked amid coffee bushes, banana trees and jungle. Farmers must cut down coffee bushes, and the lush environment they thrive in, to open up fields for planting corn or raising cattle.

``Many are already seeking permits to change their crops,'' said Gov. Pablo Salazar of the southern Mexico state of Chiapas, ``but the environmental damage will be incalculable.''