Trouble brewing in Guatemala's coffee and cardamom fields
Trouble brewing in Guatemala's coffee and cardamom fields
With prices tumbling and disease taking hold, farmers are unearthing a viable alternative to monoculture agriculture
Mark Tran in Raxnam and Rabinal, Guatemala
theguardian.com, Wednesday 16 October 2013 02.00 EDT
If you turn off the main road from the city of Cobán and drive down a dirt road, you will come across a magical green kingdom. Tall bushes of coffee and cardamom grow on the pine-topped hills that recede into the distance. But it is a cursed kingdom. The coffee and cardamom bushes in this village in Alta Verapaz, a department in central Guatemala, are dying from disease. Coffee rust disease – roya in Spanish – is killing the coffee and attacking cardamom.
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Pausing as we squelch along narrow, muddy paths, Rax tugs at a coffee branch to show what the disease looks like. The leaf is mottled yellow and brown instead of bearing its customary glossy green sheen.
Whether or not climate change is the culprit, the village's 124 families – members of the Q'eqchi' indigenous group – also face the problem of falling cardamom prices. Last week cardamom growers formed a roadblock as senior officials arrived to try to defuse the situation.
As the crisis bites, it is beginning to dawn on some that while coffee and cardamom can bring benefits in good years, there are risks involved in basing exports around limited crop cultivation. Guatemala's best coffee beans are shipped abroad, while Guatemalans drink insipid watery coffee. The country's cardamom, meanwhile, is exported mostly to the Middle East.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/oct/16/guatemala-coffee-cardamom-farmers
