Coffee production in Puerto Rico has fallen to half of what it was just four years ago:
Coffee production in Puerto Rico has fallen by half in recent years, according to harvest statistics released Thursday, as the island struggles to find workers to pick the beans despite widespread unemployment.
An estimated 80,000 pounds (36,000 kilograms) of coffee was collected during the 2010-11 harvest, the Puerto Rico Coffee Buyers & Growers Association said. That’s down from 90,000 pounds (40,800 kilograms) in 2009-10 — and from 178,000 pounds (80,700 kilograms) in 2006-07.
The industry earned $23 million this past harvest, compared with $35 million the previous one. In all, coffee producers left some $25 million on the table as hundreds of thousands of plants went unpicked, association president Abel Enriquez said.
“It is worrisome,” Enriquez said. “Our industry is declining at a dizzying pace.”
Once a prominent producer of coffee prized around the world for its high quality, Puerto Rico needs as many as 14,000 workers to fully harvest the mountainside plantations in the island’s central and western regions.
But officials were able to find only about half that many last year, Agriculture Secretary Javier Rivera said — even though unemployment is nearly 17 percent in the U.S. Caribbean territory, higher than in any U.S. state.
Read more from the Associated Press via the Washington Examiner, as well as in this report from Caribbean Business Puerto Rico:
There appears to be no easy solution to the perennial lack of pickers, [Agriculture Secretary] Rivera Aquino acknowledged.
Like the overall population of Puerto Rico, the island’s coffee pickers are getting older, with the average harvester topping age 50. At the same time, fieldwork isn’t much of a draw for the younger end of the labor pool.
“We don’t see a lot of young people coming out to work on the farm,” Rivera Aquino said.
…
Coffee growing has been declining for years as farmers abandon their crops due to rising labor and production costs.Coffee was grown on roughly 4,000 farms in 2009, compared with 9,000 in 2002, said William Mattei of the Association of Puerto Rican Agronomists. Less than an estimated 40,000 acres were farmed in the past year, compared with nearly 50,000 acres in 2007, he said.
“These are alarming statistics,” Mattei said.
[Photo: Jose Oquendo]
