Coffee Farms Urged to Use Old Methods

Most of Latin America’s small coffee farmers earn between $500 and $2,000 a year, not enough to feed a family of four.

The fruit from shade trees--and any other products grown underneath them--can help fill out their diet by providing walnuts, palm fruits, oranges, bananas, lemons, avocados. The trees also provide firewood.

These products give impoverished farmers a buffer when coffee prices fluctuate. Coffee futures, which now sell for about $1.15 per pound, have ranged from 50 cents to $2.60 per pound during the last decade.

Seeking to raise the income of small farmers, Central American governments and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S. AID, for decades encouraged farmers to use high-tech methods to grow more coffee.

But the high cost of chemical fertilizers and herbicides and hybrid plants that die after a few seasons--and the debt farmers must take on to buy them--have caused U.S. AID to switch back to promoting coffee grown in the shade.

Don Derga, a U.S. AID agricultural officer for Latin America, says farmers can get a higher price for organic coffee and may get tax credits because of the plants’ ability to remove greenhouse gases from the air.

Martin Keller, a Guatemalan whose 1,500-acre farm is certified with an ECO-OK seal from the New York-based Rainforest Alliance, employs 1,500 people during the growing season.

The ECO-OK seal means the coffee was grown using minimal chemicals, under trees that keep the soil and bird life in place, processed without releasing the beans’ acid directly in streams, and with safe working conditions.

Even though he’d sell more coffee by clear-cutting his farm and going high-tech, Keller thinks that ecological techniques are more profitable in the long term.

“My grandfather saw the way people were cutting the forests and clearing the hills for corn, which was stupid, since two years later there is no soil left,” he says. “Personally, knowing I have a better product that preserves the environment means I can sleep better at night.”