Coffee Slump Makes Quake Recovery That Much Harder

This is a city that coffee built. And now it is a city that an earthquake has torn down.

Even as residents struggled Thursday to deal with the horror of the disaster, they wondered how they will be able to rebuild Colombia’s coffee capital in the midst of a price slump in the vital agricultural export.

“This is a catastrophe on top of an economic crisis,” said Nestor Ocampo, the director of cultural development in Calarca, a nearby coffee town that also suffered massive damage in Monday’s magnitude-6 earthquake. “The possibility of using resources from here to rebuild is impossible. We are going to be dependent on national and international help.”

After the earthquake, which left at least 881 people dead and 3,410 injured, President Andres Pastrana declared the region a disaster area. On Thursday, a day after he flew here to supervise the relief effort, he declared an economic emergency as well.

“Now is the time that all Colombians are going to give back to those who for years, with their own hands, have picked coffee beans which have brought us peace, progress and employment,” Pastrana said the day after the quake.

Coffee has been the backbone of the Colombian economy for most of this century, only overtaken by oil as the country’s No. 1 export in the last few years, according to the government. Colombia is the world’s biggest coffee producer after Brazil, and the beans bring the country about $2.2 billion a year.

“We need the help of the whole world. We’re talking about the livelihoods of 30,000 families that disappeared in 30 seconds,” Mario Gomez, a member of the Assn. of Coffee Exporters, said Thursday. “The outbreaks of violence demonstrate that if we don’t have a solution soon, this can become a serious security problem.”

The problems facing survivors have multiplied. While the aftershocks have stopped, shortages of food and water have sparked looting. On Wednesday, nightfall brought a different form of looting as armed bands moved about the blacked-out parts of Armenia, breaking into houses. These looters are believed to have come from as far away as Cali, more than 100 miles to the southwest, in order to pillage this ruined city.

On Thursday, thousands of riot police and soldiers fanned out across the city.

“We want to help life return to normal in Armenia,” Defense Minister Rodrigo Lloreda said.

Pastrana on Thursday imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew until further notice, as well as a ban on liquor sales and a prohibition on bearing arms. All of the roads entering the area are now controlled by roadblocks, which are turning back nonresidents and potential troublemakers.

“I will not tolerate criminals coming here from other places and causing chaos in this region of honest hard-working people which has always been peaceful,” Pastrana said.

Armenia boomed when coffee prices were strong and is a product of the general prosperity that coffee country once enjoyed.

“Armenia and [nearby] Pereira are cities that grew up during the coffee bonanza in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” said Carlos Pinilla, an economist at the Colombian Coffee Federation.

But in 1989, after the lifting of an international accord on coffee prices, many small producer countries sold their entire inventories, and the market was flooded. Lower prices abroad and at home made the business difficult.

In real terms, coffee was worth about twice as much then as now. Yet Pinilla said no single product can be expected to rebuild a city, even in the best of times.

“It would have been much easier if it had happened during the coffee bonanza--but I still don’t think they would have been able to do it,” Pinilla said. “This city wasn’t built in five or six years. The material losses are incalculable.

“The city must be built over.”

Javier Fernando Rincon, the owner of a 20-employee garment shop destroyed in the earthquake, said despairingly: “For the past three years, the economic situation [here] has been critical--and now this.”

Darling reported from Armenia and special correspondent Lawrence from Bogota.