Colombia's Heart of Coffee Growing Land Plowed Under

350,000 coffee-growing aristocratic Latin American families in Finca Canaan (the promised land in Juan Valdez country of Colombia) have replaced coffee with sugar cane, bananas, and fodder. Between the weak prices due to other world coffees entering the international market, and the berry borer infestation (pest similar to the boll weevil), coffee has become unprofitable in this perfect climate for growing coffee in S. America.

The berry borer has claimed over 1.7 million acres; 60% of Colombia’s coffee region in the last 8 years. Experts expect the pest to reach the entire coffee axis by 2000. The bug burrows through the scarlet berry into its twin coffee beans to lay eggs. Coffee growers had become accustomed to raising a crop that did not require pesticides, and selling it for a reliable price with the federation buying a guaranteed price when the international market was low. The federation created “Juan Valdez” and the ad campaigns that persuaded generations of consumers to demand Colombian coffee, which supplies 15% of world production and ranks second only to Brazil. In 1982 when coffee rust, a plant blight, slipped across the border from Brazil, the federation was ready with a new coffee hybrid, called Colombia, that resisted the disease.

In 1989, when world prices plummeted with the collapse of the international coffee agreement, the coffee federation bought crops and warehoused them, waiting for prices to improve. But prices remained depressed.

Scientists from Colombia and Cornell looked for another hybrid to resist the berry borer as well as the rust. In the meantime coffee growers responded the way growers had in other countries – with heavy doses of highly toxic and expensive pesticides. In El Salvador, where the berry borer arrived a decade ago, growers successfully sprayed their fields at certain times in coffee-growing season. Coffee bushes in Colombia produce year-round, unlike in other countries, and thus the pest always has a place to go to lay eggs and a source of food. Spraying kills not just the berry borer but also beneficial insects. In the long run, you are "just fostering plagues, says Gabriel Cadena, director of National Coffee Research Center in Colombia. To avoid sprays, Columbia has become the only country to raise a certain type of wasp, imported from Africa, which attack the berry borer. A dozen laboratories now raise these wasps to release onto the fields. Since 1990, 200,000 wasps have been released, and other varieties are ready for release.

Results reported are that the wasps do not have enough berry borers to eat and they die. One owner of a 47 acre coffee farm said he was just going to use pesticides. Other growers have become impressed with a fungus that grows in coffee fields and attacks the borer, covering it like a mummy.

The cost of running a coffee farm of 574 acres has increased 30% since the berry borer arrived in 1994. The borer demands more laborers, and more farmers prefer less complicated crops. The economic level of the area has fallen 60% and much of their land is being sold.

Coffee provided millions of jobs as well as financial stability to this country in constant upheaval. Many laborers migrated to cocaine fields where work remains plentiful.

Excerpts from: Los Angeles Times, Business, Jan. 19, 1997