Devouring profit - International Coffee Organization

Table 27. Internal market structure and development.
In the table, a high degree means a well structured coffee market, organised cooperatives,
where quality standards are operating and coffee quality is established,
there are transparent rules for buying coffee, etc. A low degree means poor market
development, quality is often not rewarded, the intervention of various intermediaries
is significant, and CBB present in the coffee is normally ignored at the point of purchase
from the farmer and consequently universally low prices pertain.
6.4 Coffee productivity and
diversification
Coffee productivity is another key aspect that is important in CBB control. From the
simulations made in the Chapter 5 we could see that when productivity is higher the
CBB impact in terms of absolute economic loss is higher as well. Thus under low
productivity conditions we suggest that there would be less favourable conditions to
encourage CBB control.
We deduced that when the production system is more diversified, and hence income
also, interest in CBB control is reduced. The possible reason is that when there are
labour constraints, people usually prefer to use it to more directly generate extra
income rather than on controlling CBB (especially if markets are not rewarding for
quality).
Table 28 describes coffee productivity and our estimation of diversification for all the
countries involved in the project.
Table 28. Estimated productivity and diversification of the production systems.
67