Market Focus : Organic Business Brews in Salvador : Small coffee farmers battle skepticism and corporate pressure in hopes of earning higher incomes ‘naturally.’

Pausing in the shade cast by thick forests of green coffee trees, Fidelina Mejia ponders the new project and says she is not completely sure that it makes sense.

Here’s the plan: The farming cooperative that Mejia has labored for since 1980 will forgo the time-honored use of pesticides and chemicals and turn instead to the production of organic coffee.

“We don’t know how it will work,” the 41-year-old mother of five says during a break from picking red-brown coffee berries. “We’ll just have to see if the coffee grows.”

Joining a regional trend, the farmers of El Salvador are slowly moving into organic agriculture, a field that promoters say will help Central America’s devastated ecology and ultimately earn better incomes for small farmers. Organic cashews, soy, vegetables and bananas are being cultivated throughout Central America.

But supporters of organic farming in El Salvador have their job cut out for them: They are fighting both skepticism among peasant farmers who believe chemicals are necessary and resistance from big agrochemical companies controlled by some of this country’s most powerful families.

After 12 years of civil war, parts of El Salvador are ideal for organic farming, experts say. Because of the fighting, huge lots of land were fallow for a long time, unworked and, most important, untouched by pesticides and herbicides.

With the market for organic products growing worldwide, and prices up to 30% higher than for non-organic crops, prospects seem especially appealing in this densely populated country where land is scarce. Organic farming is labor-intensive work.

Where pesticides, herbacides and other chemicals have been used in El Salvador, the application has often been excessive, with little care for the environment, U.S. experts say. The result is a toxic nightmare for both the land and the people working it. Many peasants cannot read the warning labels or directions on dangerous chemicals, such as paraquat, a herbicide that can damage lung tissue when inhaled .

“From an environmental point of view and from a health point of view, there is a real necessity for developing (organic farming) in El Salvador,” said Michael J. Davis, president of EarthTrade Inc., a New York-based import-export firm that is promoting several organic projects in Central America.

“You’ve had a huge amount of chemicals pumped into an ecosystem that in the best of conditions would have trouble dealing with it and in El Salvador has proven disastrous.”

Here in San Jose El Salto, the 1,200-acre San Simon farming cooperative voted to switch to organic methods and hopes to be certified early next year by international agencies that inspect the land, farming techniques and handling of the produce.

Cecilio Ortiz, vice president of the co-op, said the farmers have their doubts that using material such as leaves, grass, ashes and vegetable refuse as mulch will protect the plants and condition the soil. But they’re willing to try, he said.

“People understand that if you use too much chemicals, it will stop the land from producing,” the 38-year-old Ortiz said. The co-op has also begun raising wasps to attack coffee weevils, tapping the biological aspects of organic farming.

San Simon is located in rolling hills in southwestern El Salvador, on what was once a large hacienda. Part of the hacienda was given to the peasants in a 1980 agrarian reform, but the war took its toll among the workers, cutting drastically into harvests. The co-op once had 250 members; today it has 70. Many fled the fighting or were killed.

“Those who did not have a place to take refuge had to stay, and we had to have courage,” Ortiz said.

“Little by little, we picked the coffee each year,” said Argelio Calderon, 50, the co-op’s machete-wielding watchman.

Many of the new organic farmers are former guerrillas and, as part of U.N.-brokered peace accords that ended the bloody conflict in 1992, were given a plot of land.

At the oddly named Saigon cooperative, on the skirts of the Guazapa Volcano north of San Salvador, about 280 former rebels and their families have embraced organics.

“We are convinced that to have a production that has value in the international market, it has to be quality and not quantity,” said Carlos Ernesto Sorto, an eight-year guerrilla veteran. “We are convinced that in our country, it’s organic coffee farming that has the most value.

“The soil is very eroded, unable to support big plantings. It (organic farming) helps the environment and it helps restore soil that has been the victim of pesticides and poisons.”

The farmers at Saigon--named for an infamous police lieutenant said to have ordered numerous killings in the area--took over their 150-acre parcel two years ago. They say they have already noticed an improvement in the crop. “It is greener and there is more coffee,” Sorto said.

Organic coffee is still a tiny portion of El Salvador’s overall production. Only six farms--about 3,500 acres--have been certified. But it is growing. El Salvador exported 100 tons of “green” beans last year and expects to increase that by half this year. Salvadoran organic coffee is sold under the label Cafe Pipil.

“The numbers are getting there a lot faster than people want to believe,” said Stanley Kuehn, the director in El Salvador of the Cooperative League of the United States of America, which was contracted by the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide training and technical assistance. Kuehn and other experts working in organic projects say it has been an uphill battle to wean farmers away from chemicals.

But an obstacle even greater than the skepticism has been the powerful business interests that control the agrochemical industry. Kuehn reported several cases of co-ops that were trying to go organic being pressured into using chemicals, and he said banks have been known to condition loans based on the use of pesticides: no chemicals, no loans.

Among the families that dominate the industry are those of former President Alfredo Cristiani and Ricardo Montenegro, who was finance minister until last month.

There are few regulations governing the use of pesticides in El Salvador. Consequently, many farms suffer “chemical drift,” where sprayed pesticides contaminate crops beyond the ones they were intended to protect.

Kuehn said a cotton crop that in the United States would get three to five applications of insecticide will usually receive more than 30 in El Salvador. Untrained and illiterate peasants will casually wash out fumigation equipment in streams or handle poisons with unprotected hands.

“It is catastrophic for the environment,” he said.

During the war, American groups opposed to U.S. policy in Central America orchestrated a major boycott of Salvadoran coffee. But now it’s almost chic. The biggest markets are the United States and Germany.

The San Diego-based Elan International Organic Coffees imports organically grown Salvadoran beans and ships them, with beans from other Latin American countries, to 260 roasters across the United States. That the coffee comes from El Salvador can be a selling point.

“It’s kind of a novelty,” Susan McDevitt, an Elan sales representative, said. “We talk to (customers) about the fact that it comes from El Salvador, where there was 12 years of civil war, and that they can support the farmers.”

The owners of the Humboldt Bay Coffee Co. of Eureka, Calif., praised the coffee.

“Up here on the northern coast, organic coffees are very popular,” said Humboldt Bay’s Jane Hall. “(The Salvadoran organic) is a very good coffee. It has an extremely good flavor, very pleasing to the palate.”

Her colleague John Hall said his only problem is that he can’t get enough of the stuff. Production levels are still low and are seasonal. The harvest has just started, meaning coffee won’t be on shelves for a while.

Hall said Humboldt Bay often blends the Salvadoran product, using it as a component in organic espresso, or sells it straight.

“There was a certain appeal when we first came out with Salvadoran organic--this was coffee coming from plantations that had been part of the peace settlement--we generated interest with that at first,” he said. “Now it stands on its own as a quality coffee.”

Top Coffee Producers

1993-’94 crop (in thousands of 60-kilogram bags)

Brazil: 28,500

Colombia: 12,000

Indonesia: 7,500

Mexico: 4,150

India: 3,350

Ethiopia: 3,300

Guatemala: 2,800

Ivory Coast: 2,700

Uganda: 2,700

Vietnam: 2,500

Costa Rica: 2,475

El Salvador: 2,200

Source: USDA Foreign Agricultural Service Circular Series, June 1994; National Coffee Association of U.S.A. Inc.