Coffee Calamity
Falling coffee prices have hurt coffee-producing nations worldwide. But on one Nicaraguan coffee estate, the glut has led to homelessness and hunger for workers whose families had been there for generations.
Los Milagros, Nicaragua » Even when they lost their jobs and their bosses destroyed the only food they had, the peasants stayed in the homes their families had occupied for generations.
But when the babies began to get sick and the adults were weak with hunger, they finally left, setting out on foot through mountains so high they were gazing down at the clouds.
They walked for three days. And when they reached the nearest city, Matagalpa, the tattered group set up camp in a municipal park. There they waited for someone – anyone – to help.
“It’s not easy to grab your sick children and get on the move,” said Jose Angel Perez, 35. “But when the kids start clinging to you and saying, ‘Daddy, I want food,’ you have to do something.”
The events that sparked the hunger and homelessness of the people of Los Milagros – “the miracles” in Spanish – were unwittingly set off more than a decade ago by bankers in Washington D.C. and politicians in Paris.
In an effort to help Vietnamese peasants develop a new cash crop, both the World Bank and the French government invested heavily in the Asian country’s coffee industry.
The industry flourished, and Vietnam is now the world’s second largest coffee producer, after Brazil.
But Vietnam’s success has been at the expense of the world’s coffee industry, sending prices plummeting from Congo to Columbia, Ethiopia to Ecuador, Indonesia to the Ivory Coast. With the falling prices, coffee farms that had been profitable for generations began to fail. One of those was Los Milagros, a 500 acre estate atop a mountain in central Nicaragua.
In August 2000, the company that owned Los Milagros stopped paying workers their daily wages – $1.48 for men, $1.11 for women, and 55 cents for children – saying it had no money.
Many of the peasants had nowhere else to go. They kept working in exchange for a daily meal of rice and beans and the promise of pay when things got better.
“We ate little and took the rest home for our children,” said Justo Cesar Mendoza, 28.
But in November, the company defaulted on the mortgage, and Nicaragua’s private Finance Bank repossessed the plantation just as workers were harvesting the last of the year’s crop.
The bank sent in administrators with a new mission: to spend only 42 cents on the production of each pound of coffee.
The onsite administrator, Jaime Ortiz, said even that would be operating at a loss, but stopping production would lower the value of the plantation the bank was trying to sell.
The workers say Ortiz rounded them up one morning and told 15 of them they would stay on the job. The rest, he said – 480 workers and their families – would have to leave.
“They lined up all the men and chose the ones closest to them,” Mendoza said. “They told the rest of us to leave. They said they didn’t have money to support us.”
Ortiz denied firing anybody. When asked about Perez, he said Perez was fired – for disobeying orders, he said – but insisted nobody else had gone.
After Mendoza was laid off, he and the others stayed in the crumbling wood-plank stables that they called home, surviving off a patch of plantain that grew in the coffee fields.
After a few weeks, Mendoza and others said, Ortiz ordered the plantains chopped down, figuring starvation would drive them off. Ortiz denied there were ever plantains on the farm. With nothing to eat, the group left.
Thousands more Nicaraguans from coffee plantations across the country have made similar exoduses, and the highways of the countryside are lined with black tarps strung up by the new homeless.
The people of Los Milagros live in a litter-strewn park in Matagalpa and beg for rotten vegetables from merchants in the central market.
A few charitable groups have given donations of rice, beans, or crackers, but during a recent visit, nobody had brought anything for five days.
Mendoza’s 2-year-old daughter, Reina Epifania, sat on the ground atop a dirty empty burlap sack, crying and coughing in weak spurts. Mendoza took her to a public clinic, where a doctor said she had parasites and anemia, but Mendoza can’t afford to buy the medicine the doctor prescribed.
“What can I do with a prescription if it’s only paper?” he said. “She can’t eat paper.”
– Niko Price, Associated Press
From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 4, 2001