Devouring profit - International Coffee Organization

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6.5 Rural wages
Since CBB control largely depends on cultural control and cultural control depends on
labour, this factor should play an important role when analysing how farmers can afford
to intensify this control measure or not. Table 29 describes the rural wages paid when
controlling CBB.
Table 29. Average rural wage in countries visited (2001
prices).
From the table, it is clear that rural wages are highest in Colombia and lowest in India.
This we believe might be an important factor in farmers’ approach to CBB control.
6.6 Generating hypotheses on
factors favouring CBB control
From the concepts mentioned above and the possible interactions between them, we
can start to pose some hypotheses to guide us in development of CBB management
in relation to broader issues of the coffee industry in producer countries. What follows
is based on our visits and examination of the available data, it is an exercise in hypothesis
generation rather than a statement of fact. On the following graphs, lines depict
our hypotheses and country names our estimation of the true position in these countries.
Hypothesis 1: there is a direct relationship between the state of the internal coffee
market and the level of CBB management. We believe that if quality were rewarded
at the farm-gate, coffee farmers would have more interest in controlling CBB. We
suggest, from our in-country studies that the current situation can be approximated by
Figure 15.
Hypothesis 2: there is an inverse relationship between the degree of diversification of
the farm and intensity of CBB management. Ellis (2000) indicates that there are several
determinants for livelihood diversification such as seasonality in income, coping
and risk attitudes, labour markets, etc., which are all ways of facing difficulties involved
in agricultural production. Figure 16 shows our assessment of the status of
within-farm diversification for the countries studied.