Devouring profit - International Coffee Organization

CBB is a complex pest because it can cause different types of loss. Normally coffee
farmers are aware of one or maybe two, but in reality it can cause up to three types of
loss. Duque (2000) made an assessment of the economic importance of this pest.
4.1 Categories of losses
caused by CBB
Drop of immature berries: CBB may cause considerable shedding of young berries.
In Colombia it has been observed that berries less that 90 days old can drop easily if
they are attacked by CBB. Unfortunately we do not currently have measurements for
this damage though a project by Cenicafé is under way to quantify this effect.
Loss in weight: because of pest damage, the quantity of ripe cherries required to
obtain a certain amount of parchment coffee can vary. For instance a normal proportion
is 5:1, e.g. 5 kilograms of ripe picked cherries to make 1 kilogram of a tradable
standard of parchment coffee, e.g. the Tipo Federación standard in Colombia. Farmers’
comments informed that with high CBB attacks this proportion can rise from 5:1
to 6, 7 or even 8:1, which translated in economic terms, means heavy losses. Saldarriaga
(1994) observed that at high infestation levels, large amounts of ripe cherries were
needed to get 1 kilogram of parchment coffee, e.g. for a coffee plot with no control
carried out, she found for the period June to August 1992, that the relationship reached
17:1. Likewise when visiting the project in Mexico, we interviewed a farmer (Mr.
Estanislao) about coffee and CBB management. He told us that under normal conditions
2 baskets of ripe coffee should yield 1 kg of parchment coffee but with CBB he
now needed up to 3 coffee baskets to obtain 1 kg of parchment coffee. So the farmer
had reasoned out that this loss was due to CBB attacks.
In the above cases, the farmer understands the weight loss effect because he processes
his coffee to the parchment stage (dried to 12% humidity) where he can confirm
the quality of his coffee and probable causes of defects by simple visual inspection.
The problem arises when farmers sell coffee cherries, where the true damage level
may be much harder to determine. In this case the buyer, who often buys by volume,
not weight, would most likely adopt a ‘worst case scenario’ and pay the farmer a low
price that would include a tacit discount for the likely quality of the resulting parchment
coffee.
Loss in quality: in Colombia, the National Federation of Coffee Growers has defined
standard rules to buy coffee from farmers. These rules aim to ensure that Colombian
coffee meets a certain quality in order to attract a favourable international price. Coffee
that meets the established norms gets the full official price (Tipo Federación).
A bean that has been the host of a developing brood of CBB is clearly defective and if
present in roasted coffee will cause a decline in organoleptic (taste and aroma) quality.
The authors do not know the threshold for detection although Montoya (1999), studying
different types of damage in coffee, found that if the percentage of beans with
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