Devouring profit - International Coffee Organization

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Colombia or Honduras for instance and may be due to the greater land concentration
with a very few farmers having very large estates; we were told that the largest coffee
farm in Latin America is situated in Guatemala.
A smallholder description: for the present project, a survey was carried out to typify
smallholder coffee farmers (García, 1998). This diagnostic was done in 1998 for 62
farms in the departments of Suchitepequez, Retalhuleu and part of Quetzaltenengo,
and included 31 farms from “La Chocola” community. Mean farm size was 1.1 h,
average farmer age was 46 and 84% of them had only incomplete primary school
education. These figures suggest that functional illiteracy may well be high amongst
Guatemalan coffee farmers. If confirmed this is an important disadvantage since it is
well known that increasing educational levels correlate well with improvements in
farm management.
The average size of coffee farmers’ families was five. Again if confirmed nationally,
this could mean that the traditional notion of abundant labour availability does not
apply any more; during the visit several extensionists commented on labour scarcity in
coffee regions. The survey showed that 55% of the farmers relied solely on family
labour while in the remaining 45%, the farmers contract farm labour. Since IPM strategies
involve many activities and interventions in order to manage the pests, this
implies extra labour needed to carry out the control measures proposed. If rural labour
becomes scarce, this would increase difficulties in controlling CBB.
Despite Anacafé’s efforts, just 22% of these smallholders were trained in coffee management
and this is a key barrier to promote IPM strategies. Moreover, only 38% of
them had had access to credit, with another 38% responding that they had not requested
it and the other 24% stating that they could not obtain credit. This situation
could be due to both lack of collateral and possibly also high interest rates. A common
occurrence is to sell coffee cherries through intermediaries. Almost 94% of them use
this channel to sell their coffee despite the Chocola community having infrastructure
to carry out the post-harvesting processing. This decision has implications for the gross
income of the farmers, which will be lower than if they process the coffee themselves.
Coffee farmers diversify their income by growing and selling bananas: almost
50% of them had this extra income.
Rural Wages: the legal cost of a day’s labour is 31.50 Quetzals 25 , equivalent to
US$4.0. However some farmers do not pay this salary and many rural workers give up
the bonus, incentives and the payment corresponding to Sunday, in order to get a job
easily. The day’s wage is structured as follows:
a. Wage = 21.62 Quetzals
b. bonus + incentives = 5.38 Quetzals
c. 7 th day = 4.50 Quetzals
Total = 31.50 Quetzals
25 Quetzal is the Guatemalan currency, US$1 = 7.7 Quetzals