by MONICA FIRL
I begin each day with my usual routine: enjoying a morning cup of organic fair trade coffee and wondering how millions of small-scale coffee farmers across Latin America are getting through the current leaf rust crisis—or “Roya” as it’s called in Spanish.
I’ve worked in different niches of the coffee industry since 1994 in both production and marketing projects with small-scale farmers, while living in Central America and Mexico, and now in direct import, communications and production improvement projects from Montreal. In two decades, I’ve never seen anything quite as devastating as the current production crisis—which according to the International Coffee Organization (ICO) is expected to cause an estimated loss of 2.5 million 69-kilogram sacks of production, or $550 million of financial loss in farmer income.
The initial industry reaction was a call to summit meetings. A first emergency gathering sponsored by some of the world’s largest coffee companies and research organizations, was held in Guatemala in April 2013; the second was in El Salvador in November 2013. But while experts theorize about whether or not climate change is the culprit and share their findings on plant-DNA research, small-scale coffee farmers wait impatiently for viable relief plans.
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