Poor Farmer

Dan D’Ambrosio USA TODAY June 26, 2013 WATERBURY, VT. -- Ricardo Puente is a worried man. Coffee drinkers may soon have reason to join him. Puente, president of Apecafe in El Salvador, a cooperative of more than 400 coffee farmers, has been watching closely as "la roya," a fungus, has devastated coffee plantations across Central America this year. "We think outbreaks of violence and famine can occur in some cooperatives as a result of this situation," Puente said in a recent interview from San Salvador, where Apecafe is headquartered. The price of coffee has yet to go up in the United States as a result of the fungus, also known as coffee rust disease. But Lindsey Bolger, senior director of coffee for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters here, said that could change next year. "The consumer should be worried about the long-term implications of rust because it could severely limit the depth and breadth of coffee they love," Bolger s...

From Diane McCarthy and Ayesha Durgahee CNN June 19, 2013 (CNN) -- Tired of seeing developed nations take the lion's share of profits from his countrymen's coffee crop, Ugandan businessman Andrew Rugasira decided back in 2003 that it was time for a new business arrangement. Uganda is Africa's second-biggest exporter of coffee beans, currently producing around 3.4 million bags per year . Yet instead of being refined locally, the vast majority of the country's raw beans have been traditionally exported in the consuming countries of the West for processing. But Rugasira's vision was to create a quality Ugandan coffee company that would be able to place a finished product on the shelves of both local and international supermarkets. A trained economist, he devised a business model encouraging local coffee farmers to sell their beans to him at a fair price. His company would then roast, package and brand the final product, whilst the profits w...

By Leslie Josephs and Alexandra Wexler The Wall Street Journal June 12, 2013 Some investors smell opportunity in the biggest coffee-market bust in more than a decade. Coffee-bean prices have fallen 54% in the past two years. The drop has been so steep that longtime coffee farmers are considering other uses for their land, in a move that some investors are counting on to reduce a coffee glut and drive a price rebound. Prices for arabica coffee on the ICE Futures U.S. exchange fell to their lowest levels since September 2009 on Wednesday. These prices, which reflect roasters' wholesale coffee costs, settled at $1.2275 a pound, down 3.9% on the day, the biggest one-day drop since April 23. Retail prices have declined less sharply. Benchmark arabica coffee prices are approaching the cost of production in top grower Brazil, and already have fallen below that point in other countries including Colombia, growers say. "It is impossible to go on," sa...

By Brandon Keim Wired June 11, 2013 A disease called coffee rust has reached epidemic proportions in Central America, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers and the morning pick-me-up of millions of coffee drinkers. Caused by a leaf-blighting fungus, possibly exacerbated by growing practices and climate change, the disease leaves coffee plants spindly and barren, their precious fruits unripened. “Where people have been using heirloom varietals for a century, you just have trees without leaves,” said David Griswold, president of Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers . “We’re already into the flowering cycle now, then it takes nine months to incubate the beans. You can see from the flowering what the losses will be. It’s just twigs. It’s as though you’re walking through a forest of twigs.” The effects haven’t been felt yet among coffee drinkers in developed countries, but history gives a sense of the problem’s potential magnitude. Englan...