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Devouring profit - International Coffee Organization

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many other coffee countries. The second case is Mexico where CBB management is<br />

less than we would expect from the level of dependence on coffee (at least in the<br />

Soconusco area that we visited). Here the Mexican Government has taken the opposite<br />

course to India and dismantled state funded extension services and reduced research.<br />

Hypothesis 3: coffee productivity and level of CBB management are positively correlated.<br />

As we explained, the most severe economic effects due to CBB attacks can be<br />

seen where coffee productivity is high where the potential losses are also higher.<br />

In this case (Figure 17) the most contrasting countries are again Colombia and Ecuador.<br />

Figure 17. Hypothetical relationship (line) between productivity and CBB<br />

management and an estimate of the current situation (names).<br />

Hypothesis 4: the intensity of CBB management is inversely related to the cost of<br />

labour, since IPM methods require more manual labour because of dependence on<br />

cultural control.<br />

Here, in Figure 18, we see considerable variance between theory and practice. We<br />

conclude that wages are a less important determinant than productivity and internal<br />

market development.<br />

6.7 Conclusions<br />

From this exercise we conclude that the state of internal markets and productivity are<br />

the most important determining factors in CBB IPM uptake, followed by the diversification<br />

of the production systems. We do stress that the above exercise is to generate<br />

ideas for future testing, since these relationships are not proven and there may well be<br />

other factors at work. We invite researchers in this field to test the hypotheses and to<br />

try to disprove them.

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