Guatemala Fears 10 Pct of Coffee Lost to Hurricane
Date: 23-Dec-05
Country: GUATEMALA
Author: Mica Rosenberg
Coffee farmers had originally forecast losses of up to 6 percent but are reporting greater damage now that they are harvesting their crops.
"There are losses in the harvest," Anacafe chief Jose Angel Lopez told Reuters. "But apart from that, there are losses in infrastructure."
He said some farms are paying to repair roads and need to coordinate with local authorities to rebuild access routes.
Stan's heavy rains and landslides killed up to 2,000 people across Central America, and Guatemala was hardest hit. Many coffee plants were wiped out and the fruit knocked from trees.
Before the storm, Guatemala had expected to export about 3.37 million 60-kg bags of coffee in the 2005/06 cycle.
Lopez said the long-term damage would not be significant, but recovery will be slow for small producers with few resources for reconstruction.
"There are some farms that were wiped out and now all that's left is stones. You can't plant anything," said Jeronimo Bollen, founder of Manos Campesinas, a farmer-support organization in the western department of Quetzaltenango.
"Basically we are talking about people that have lost their main source of income for years to come," he said.
Some producers are also contending with defects in crops that survived the storm, with beans damaged by high summer temperatures not seen since the El Nino weather pattern hit the region in the late 1990s.
HIGH TEMPERATURES
Francisco Anzueto, a scientific researcher for Anacafe, said maturing beans were damaged by high temperatures in July and August during flowering - the transition from flower to cherry and the development of the cherry.
The result is fruit that looks ripe and normal on the outside but inside beans are shriveled, a defect only detected after growers remove the pulpy outer shell during the fermentation process.
"The problem with the burned grains is that from the outside the fruit looks good," said 43-year old Juana Balux, who has worked since the age of eight picking coffee on a collective of small-scale indigenous farmers in the department of Solola.
"But when you break it open that's when you see it is ruined on the inside," she said, pointing at the red cherries in a plastic basket tied around her waist. "We have never seen such a low harvest."
The high-altitude coffee producers in Balux's cooperative in mountain ranges near Lake Atitlan estimate 22 percent of their harvest will have the defective beans.
Anacafe says the damaged beans are only found in specific regions and may affect less than 1 percent of the national crop.
"It is a very localized phenomenon," said Anzueto. "There is wide variation in every region and even within the same farm there are certain areas more affected by the problem than others."
