"Coffee Country" explained

In my previous post, I explained that I was heading to "Coffee Country" but I didn't really explain "Coffee Country" very well.

When the average American thinks of coffee, they probably think of Colombia and the image of Juan Valdez with his trusty steed.

I'm here to break the hard truth to you.

First, Juan Valdez was a fictional character created by the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia. Second, Brazil produces five times as much coffee as Colombia.  It grows more coffee than the rest of the Americas combined.

Brazil produces 32 percent of the world's coffee. The second-leading producer, Vietnam, produces 13 %. 

The state of Brazil where I was working, Minas Gerais, grows 50 % of country's coffee.  The state is about the size of France and has a few main coffee-growing regions. The eastern part of the state, where I was, rises and falls with world coffee prices.

Coffee accounted for over 98 percent of the crops planted in the area where I was and 97 % of the GDP. 

The NGO that I was working with has been working for many years in agroecology and diversification projects in the area. They recently had an intern from Italy who was researching whether it was more economically viable to do agroecology or to plant coffee in the convention way with pesticides.

He is still putting the finishing touches on his paper but the gist of his conclusion was that it makes more economic sense to diversify your crops and produce agroecologically. The farmer might produce less coffee, but he/she will save by not having to by costly inputs and will gain by the sale of the other products. It was obviously more complex than the brief summary I just wrote, but that was the general idea of his work. He interviewed and surveyed several farmers to find out about their production levels in the last few years and showed that in relation to the historical price of coffee.

In many ways, you could describe the monoculture of coffee production where I was in Brazil to the monoculture of banana production in Arenillas. The biggest difference between the two, I feel, is that the small coffee producer in Brazil has access to export markets, whereas the small-scale banana farmer in Ecuador cannot access bigger markets and is forces to sell to local markets or work as a day laborer for the big banana companies.