Coffee’s New Crisis

By Heather Putnam

Heather Putnam is Associate Director of the Community Agroecology Network (CAN), an international sustainable development organization working in Mexico and Central America. Heather was at UVM in July as an instructor for the International Agroecology Shortcourse. We were inspired by her perspective and asked her to share an update on CAN’s recent work.

Many of us depend on coffee every morning to wake us up, but how often do we think about the folks who work farms as small as a half hectare to produce the amazing black brew that we drink?

The coffee crisis in the late 1990s–early 2000’s raised consumer consciousness of the volatility of the coffee market and the subsequent vulnerability of smallholder coffee farmers in places like Nicaragua, Mexico, and Uganda. Across the U.S., university students, coffee roasting companies, church groups, and nonprofit organizations rallied to promote fair trade as a solution that offered farmers a minimum price for their harvest, guaranteed social investment in their communities through a built-in price premium, and supported farmer organizations. As a result of the mobilization from that crisis, fair trade grew exponentially over the last decade and is now a recognized retail brand among consumers.

Coffee Leaf Rust

But now, small coffee farmers are facing a new crisis that threatens their livelihoods and their communities: coffee leaf rust, commonly called “la roya” in Latin America, is a fungus that infects the coffee bush’s leaves and has devastated up to 80% of some farms I have seen in Northern Nicaragua. How should we respond to this new crisis?

Since the full onset of the coffee rust crisis in Mesoamerica last year, various forums and events have been staged to explore the extent of the crisis, its impact, and possible solutions.

Actual efforts to address la roya among smallholder farmers are many but dispersed:

  • Coffee cooperatives are attempting to promote renovation (the replanting of coffee fields with grafted plants or seedlings—an expensive effort for an entire farm), but have little access to credit to support these efforts, and are not actively promoting management practices that will assure the sustainability of renovated coffee in the future.
  • Fair Trade USA created a fund to support recovery efforts
  • Governments are boosting aid to coffee communities to prevent outmigration to cities and the spread of the economic impact of the crisis to urban areas.
  • Chemical companies are promoting chemical treatments that are not only detrimental to ecological and human health, but also inaccessible to smallholder farmers and frighteningly profitable to those companies.
  • Sustainable Harvest’s Roya Recovery Project is providing a practical guide to farmers to increase coffee’s resistance to the rust and reduce its spread.

For many reasons, smallholders are the farmers that are primarily impacted by la roya. They often do not have access to the resources or knowledge needed to improve soil fertility that supports coffee’s natural resistance to the fungus, know how to properly manage shade to control the rust, nor know how to manufacture artisanal fungicides that could help control it at the farm level.

Adding compost to coffee plant

What we need is a consensus on agroecological strategies and combinations of techniques uniquely suited to smallholders’ context and resources that conserve and promote agroecological knowledge to manage la roya without contamination at the regional scale. This must be followed by a large-scale integration of these techniques into farmer training programs and coffee renovation programs. Simply promoting renovation does not assure long-term sustainability, nor the ability of smallholder farming families to adapt to a changing environment through agroecological management practices.

Researchers affiliated with the Community Agroecology Network (CAN) are seeking allies to work towards identifying the best combination of sustainable and certified organic management practices that can be shaped into a larger proposal for experimentation and implementation. Our goal is to integrate food security efforts on a regional scale with organizations working with smallholder coffee farmer organizations in Mesoamerica. With the right tools, we believe we can provide smallholder farmers with the resources they need to protect their livelihoods and keep coffee flowing into your favorite morning mug.

Posted in: Economic, Environmental, Social.