#Coffee

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The week Santos lost Colombia

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Colombia’s farmers’ strikes are into their 10th day as roads remained closed across the countryside. The crisis shows no sign of abating, as rice farmers and oil workers joined the protest, and food shortages hit the capital Bogota.

Serious questions are being asked about the Santos government´s ability to govern a country now in open revolt. Last night pots and pans were noisily bashed by thousands across the nation´s main cities as people took to the streets in solidarity with farmers and against a government they see as negligent and out of touch.

For months farmers have warned the Casa de Nariño of their strike plans, but the government has refused to take steps to prevent a crisis it now looks incapable of resolving.

How can the government have lost control of a situation they knew about so far in advance?

Anyone with a passing knowledge of crisis management understands the following:

  1. Don’t belittle the problem
  2. Don´t lie
  3. Get your opponents on side, don’t antagonize them
  4. Don’t fuel the fire
  5. Act swiftly and decisively.

President Santos, commander-in-chief of a nation of 47 million, appears oblivious to this.

Last Monday, Santos boasted the “country is under control”, on Tuesday the protests had not “been of the scale (farmers) had hoped”, and on Saturday, despite over 40 road closures across nine departments, deaths, imprisonments, and rocketing food prices, the President bizarrely claimed “this national strike does not exist”. Sure, he backtracked a few hours later in a hastily arranged and unprofessional looking press conference, but the damage was already done – Santos sounded not only insensitive but mendacious.

Nearly 20 thousand police have been deployed since the start of the protests, but the president´s words have only made their job harder as crowds have swelled and the sense of injustice hardened.

The government is pitting itself against the nation. The authorities have hardly helped themselves by their heavy-handed policing. Amateur footage has emerged of policemen smashing into houses, stealing food, and brutally attacking – what look like on television at least – defenseless citizens.

No police general has taken the blame, no sword has been fallen upon.

While the battle rages, a uninterested calm hangs over the presidential palace.

How is possible that the government has so far failed to produce a single solution to the problem?

How is possible that the first time Santos sat down with protesting farmers was yesterday evening, eight days into the strike?

How is it possible that the government has failed to deliver on the promises it made months ago to the farmers of Boyacá?

How is it possible that the agriculture minister is still in his job?

Santos is in danger of appearing like the captain of the Titanic unwilling even to reassemble the deckchairs.

All this should worry Santos a lot more. If, as is expected, he decides to run for re-election next May he would do well not to alienate Colombia´s entire rural population.

The problem for Santos, though, goes beyond just what has happened this week. There is a narrative forming around him – that he is disinterested and disconnected from the real Colombia. I have heard analysts begin to call Santos the Alice in Wonderland president.

To his critics Juan Manuel Santos lives in a world of fancy cocktail events, of gentlemen´s clubs and posh country retreats; coming face to face with the poor and uncultured campesino (peasant farmer) is rather beneath him.

Whether this perception is fair or not is largely irrelevant. If Santos wants to avoid a deeply embarrassing defeat next year, he must change – and fast. Colombians might be able to live with a posh president, but not one who looks like he is incapable of making decisions and keeping crises in check.

Monday night, as the protests grew on the streets of Bogota, Cali, and Medellin and elsewhere, I was struck by how joyous and even relieved people looked. It was almost as if Colombians were coming together in defiant and peaceful rebellion. We haven´t reached a tipping point yet, this is not the same as the “indignados” of Spain, or the mass movement in Brazil just two months ago, but something, just something might be happening. Lord knows, it´s about time Colombians started to demand more from their governors.

This article was written by the Editor for Colombia Reports

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Colombia´s outlook positive despite January trade deficit

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For the first time in three years Colombia’s balance of trade figures for January saw a deficit with export figures of US$4.948 billion outweighing imports of US$4.735 billion, according to Colombia’s national statistics agency DANE.

For an export-led economy such as Colombia’s such figures could be cause for concern. However, looking at the overall numbers for the past 12 months, a healthier picture emerges with Colombia’s exports remaining strong.

Indeed, a balance of trade surplus in 2012 of US$5 billion and exports of $60 billion – a figure almost double that of three years ago – demonstrate continued growth of Colombia’s export industries. Traditional export industries that have contributed to this growth include petroleum, which rose $3.2bn in 2012, and ferronickel, up US$58m in 2012.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in light of the recent strikes, Colombia’s coffee industry saw a decline in 2012 against a background of plummeting global prices in the commodity in recent times.  Disconcertingly though, figures from DANE released recently showed that in spite its status as the fourth largest coffee producer in the world, 80% of the coffee consumed in Colombia is in fact imported – mostly from Ecuador and Peru.

As such, the decline in exports is unlikely to be offset by the domestic market, heaping more misery onto coffee farmers who already find it virtually impossible to make a decent living growing the product.

The coffee industry aside though, should the trends seen in 2012 continue this year then Colombia can look forward to another year of healthy economic growth.

Category: Economy, News Review
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Threat to coffee growers, grounds for concern?

In this guest piece, Barry Max Wills, a writer, and coffee farmer,  explains why Colombia´s top legal export is in trouble. And he asks why the government isn´t doing more to help the industry.

In June 2011, the United Nations listed the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Today, the guardians of that heritage, the Colombian coffee farmers, are facing economic ruin, with some 550,000 families losing their livelihoods and Colombia losing a resource that has generated export earnings and projected a positive image of the country internationally for more than 150 years; and nobody in Colombia seems to care.

In general terms, we grow the best coffee in the world. I say ‘we’ because I am one of those 550,000 … a coffee grower, a card-carrying member of the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia. My partner and I farm in Caldas and produce the fine, mountain-grown Arabica coffee that has made Colombia famous. The dilemma we face, along with our fellow cafeteros, is that, at the current price, as determined by the international commodity markets and manipulated by rapacious middlemen, we lose money on every pound of coffee we sell.

Colombia was once second only to Brazil in annual coffee production, but has been overtaken by Vietnam and Indonesia, who grow predominantly the cheaper, lower grade ‘Robusta’ variety, which is less sensitive to the conditions in which it is grown and the care with which it must be handled. The result is an oversupply of coffee, but a shortage of the high grade Colombian.

Why?

Three things:

1. A steadily declining coffee price that has halved in fewer than 12 months, forcing many out of the business;

2. Excessive rain in 2011, courtesy of La Niña, which disinclined the coffee trees to reproduce by way of blossoming and producing beans;

3. Excessive dry in 2012, courtesy of El Niño, which prompted the trees to produce flowers but then damaged the beans as they formed, as well as encouraging the coffee borer pest known as ‘broca’.

So here we are, unable to produce it any cheaper, and operating at a continual loss. Quality comes at a cost. We still have to fertilize if the situation is not going to be further aggravated; we still have to weed by hand; we still have to pick by hand; we still have to pay our workers every Saturday. And because coffee is dealt in USD, we are even being punished by a strong Colombian Peso.

Money is in incredibly short supply in our towns, and businesses, shops, taxis etc. are all suffering. Farm owners can’t pay their mortgages, and workers are fearful of, if not already, losing their jobs. We have one friend, a long time coffee grower, facing imminent ruin, who attempted to take his own life. We worry that there will be more.

Cafeteros have staged protest marches asking for help from the Government. The country is booming isn’t it? The Minister for Agriculture responded by saying that coffee is no longer a business in Colombia (oil and minerals are the blue-eyed darlings now), and the President of the Federación de Cafeteros (FNCC), who represents us, is alleged to have said that coffee growers are just beggars.

Well I am not above a little begging, so on behalf of 550,000 dedicated farmers, who devote their lives to creating a world class product of which Colombia can and should be immensely proud, I beseech the Colombian government to help us get through this crisis. The FNCC have offered a very small rebate against fertilizer at some, so far unspecified, time in the future, but if we don’t get help now, there is a good chance that there won’t be anything to fertilize.

All that will be left is that UNESCO World Heritage Site listing. Maybe it could be sold to a consortium of the Japanese and the Disney Corporation and be redeveloped as a tourist attraction featuring quaint practices of the past. It could be called Coffeeland.

By way of a coda, we had to go to Manizales for a seminar and while there had coffee in Café Juan Valdez, which is owned by the FNCC … by us. The staff wears t-shirts emblazoned with “Trabajo en la tienda de caficultores de Colombia” (I work in the shop of the coffee growers of Colombia).

I bought a 500 gram pack of coffee beans from Caldas … Manizales is the capital of Caldas … our coffee grows in Caldas. It cost 25,000 Colombian Pesos. One week earlier we were receiving CPO 55,000 for 12.5 kilos of coffee from the farm. You do the maths.

Moreover, this is less than half we were receiving last year, yet the retail price remains the same. In fact, as far as I am aware, all around the world, the retail price always stays the same no matter how much less we receive for our hard work.

I am sure there is a reason for this. I am probably just being naïve. After all, I can’t believe the body that represents us, that relies on our coffee for its very existence, would gouge ever-greater profits from our plight.

At the risk of offending the Colombian Tourism Board and its new initiative …

Who risks losing an industry that has helped build and define the country?

Who seems not to care if more than half a million families cannot afford to feed, clothe and educate their children?

Who needs to support its coffee farmers while they are just an endangered species, and not leave it until they are extinct?

The answer is Colombia.

A fair trade?

Category: Guests
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