High-End Coffee and Smallholding Growers in Guatemala

Kencaf

Edward Fischer and Bart Victor of Vanderbilt University have a relatively new article in the Latin American Research Review on High-End Coffee and Smallholding Growers in Guatemala that I found quite interesting.

Here's the abstract:

Coffee production in Guatemala has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last twenty-five years. Changing tastes among northern consumers have driven new demand for high-quality Strictly Hard Bean coffees that are grown above 4,500 feet. As a result, many of the large, lower-altitude plantations long synonymous with coffee in Guatemala have abandoned production, moving into rubber, African palm, and other crops. At least 50,000 mostly smallholding farmers in the highlands have begun growing coffee to fill this market niche.

Building on a capabilities approach to development, this article examines how smallholding Guatemalan producers' desires for a better future orient their engagement with this new market. Most of these small producers live in very modest circumstances with limited resources and opportunities. Yet, as they describe it, coffee represents an opportunity in a context of few opportunities, an imperfect means to a marginally better life.

While reading the article, I began to wonder whether the roya that is hitting Central American coffee has impacted coffee production across the board or whether the effects are felt differently at different levels of elevation. While in Kenya, I was also wondering who benefits from Central America's hardship. Coffee and tea are some of Kenya's most important exports.

Also, many of the farmers that have entered the high end coffee market over the last twenty years in Guatemala have done so almost as a side business. They are not committed to coffee production so much as they are doing it to provide a little extra for their families. Many of these new producers are indigenous people in the Western Highlands, the source of a great deal of out-migration to the US.