A few months ago, in the offices of Anacafé in Guatemala City, the II Cumbre de la Roya was held, 2 years after the initial meeting. The objective of the meeting was to take stock of what has happened since the first meeting and to see how the Central American coffee sector was recovering from […]
I’m going to be honest with all of you. I don’t have a lot of material to work with on this topic. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about this and looking all around Central America for examples of private investment in coffee farms. We all know about the pioneering work of Root […]
Last week, El Salvador’s president announced a federal program to subsidize the renovation of the country’s coffee fields by replacing aging coffee trees with seedlings. It is a rare and welcome case of government investment in region where the phrase abandono total (no translation necessary) is the most common answer I get from smallholder coffee farmers when I ask them about state support for the coffee sector. (The timing couldn’t have been better — days later Tropical Storm Agatha rolled into Central America, destroying coffee and other crops and creating an immediate need for renovation.)
