Devouring profit - International Coffee Organization

70
many other coffee countries. The second case is Mexico where CBB management is
less than we would expect from the level of dependence on coffee (at least in the
Soconusco area that we visited). Here the Mexican Government has taken the opposite
course to India and dismantled state funded extension services and reduced research.
Hypothesis 3: coffee productivity and level of CBB management are positively correlated.
As we explained, the most severe economic effects due to CBB attacks can be
seen where coffee productivity is high where the potential losses are also higher.
In this case (Figure 17) the most contrasting countries are again Colombia and Ecuador.
Figure 17. Hypothetical relationship (line) between productivity and CBB
management and an estimate of the current situation (names).
Hypothesis 4: the intensity of CBB management is inversely related to the cost of
labour, since IPM methods require more manual labour because of dependence on
cultural control.
Here, in Figure 18, we see considerable variance between theory and practice. We
conclude that wages are a less important determinant than productivity and internal
market development.
6.7 Conclusions
From this exercise we conclude that the state of internal markets and productivity are
the most important determining factors in CBB IPM uptake, followed by the diversification
of the production systems. We do stress that the above exercise is to generate
ideas for future testing, since these relationships are not proven and there may well be
other factors at work. We invite researchers in this field to test the hypotheses and to
try to disprove them.