Hunger, disease grip coffee areas

Hunger, disease grip coffee areas

Reuters, London

Families in the coffee regions of three continents face hunger and sickness as market prices remain locked at their lowest in 36 years.

"Our life has become very hard in the past year. We don't eat well and our children cannot go to school," D'An, a peasant coffee farmer, told a Reuters correspondent in Ivory Coast.

D'an survives on meagre quantities of rice and hasn't eaten meat for months.

"It's a waste of effort to try and treat all the family -- we can't cope with pregnancies and malaria attacks," he said, gesturing towards a moaning baby covered with blotches.

Mexican grower Roberto Martinez told Reuters, "There are people dying because of this crisis -- their source of income has dried up, they haven't the money to pay for food or medicine."

Across the coffee-producing world, farmers are amassing crippling debts as revenues fall way short of their needs.

"In previous years, I paid my son's college fees with the money I made from selling coffee. But now the price is not enough to buy rice for my family," Indonesian grower Wijadi, who owns a small plantation in a mountainous area in Lampung, said.

The market price of coffee -- which is the second biggest traded commodity after oil and employs some 20 million people worldwide -- has slumped in the past two years under the weight of surplus supply.

Prices of barely US$400 a ton compare with levels above $4,000 in the heady days of 1994.

And the price of one cup of coffee in London or New York is about equal to the weekly income of a coffee farmer in Africa.

Central America's problems are compounded by devastating drought.

Coffee there was once known as the golden grain because it accounted for so much of each country's export revenues, but today most farmers are steeped in debt and their families are going hungry.

In Colombia fears are growing of deeper social unrest and violence as farmers uproot coffee trees to grow coca -- the raw material for cocaine.

"If prices don't go up soon there is going to be a social explosion," grower Divaniel Granada said. "Many of us have been forced to sell our homes, and banks refuse to give us loans."

Honduras estimates a $180 million drop in coffee revenue this season, while Guatemala says it will lose $200 million.

In El Salvador legislators are considering aid options as producers warn of a potential $30 million loss in revenues in the 2001/02 harvest, which began in October.

Thousands of Panama's indigenous coffee pickers expect starvation conditions at the close of this year's harvest unless prices recover.

"Without immediate aid, 20 percent of small-to-medium scale farmers could disappear this season...and thousands of coffee pickers will suffer the consequences," Norberto Suarez, president of the National Coffee Exporters and Processors Association, said.