Coffee Growing is a Complex Business

Pasadena Star News
By: Cynthia Kurtz
Published: 2/25/2015

I am one of the 54 percent of Americans over the age of 18 who reach for a cup of coffee every day.  Most of us don’t think much about where that coffee came from or what was involved in delivering this rich aromatic beverage. 

That changed for me while on a recent trip to Guatemala, one of the largest coffee producing countries in the world.  I learned that coffee is a complex business that affects jobs, GDP and immigration.

Guatemala is just south of Mexico.  It covers about 52,000 sq. miles and has a population of 15 million mostly rural people - only four million people live in cities.  The country is known for its Mayan ruins, handcrafts and textiles, volcanoes and coffee.

The trip was planned by Larry and Mireya Jones, owners of Jones Coffee on South Raymond Street in Pasadena.   Mireya is from Guatemala and they have been in the coffee business for decades.  So of course the adventure included a “Coffee 101 Class” complete with a trek into the field to pick coffee beans by hand. First lesson - to make “good” coffee, most of the work has to be done by hand. 

Coffee is grown in eight regions within Guatemala each having a different tasting profile because of the varying types of soils which depends on how close a region is to one of the ,volcanoes, rainfall (which varies from 36 to 200 inches per year), temperature, and altitude.

Growing coffee is hard, risky work.  Insects, weather and fungus are only a few of the variables that can affect the quality and quantity of the crop.  It’s a highly competitive business with Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia, and Honduras major competitors. A good or bad crop in any one country will impact the bottom line for all the others.

Beans sold by the growers are priced per pound of green beans.  Green beans are beans that have been picked, removed from their pods, fermented, cleaned, sorted, graded by size and quality, but not yet roasted. I counted 12 steps from the field to a bag of green beans involving hundreds of workers and requiring anywhere from two to eleven months depending on how long the beans are stored before shipping.

The risk and competitiveness make the market for green beans highly volatile – from a high in 1976 of $3.20 per lb. to a low in 2001 of $0.39 per lb. The current price is around $1.50 per lb.   When beans dropped to $0.39 per lb., many framers couldn’t make ends meet.  Farms closed and the GDP plummeted. 

That affected immigration patterns. Following the 2001 coffee crash a fresh wave of immigrants came to the United States. According to the last census, an estimate 1.1 million people of Guatemalan origin reside in the U.S.  Forty percent live in the west, primarily in California.  Many arrived after 1976. 

Today these immigrants send annually to Guatemala an estimated $5.6 billion  the single largest contributor to the Guatemalan economy - a 10 fold increase from the estimated $560 million sent prior to 1976.

We truly live in world economy  where  changes in climate or production anywhere can affects us in varying and unexpected ways.  Something to contemplate as you enjoy that cup of coffee.