Puerto Rico recently held its first national Coffee Congress:
A group of coffee farmers, senators, mayors, and agricultural department officials participated in the First Coffee Congress held at the Adjuntas Municipal Coliseum on Friday.
Sen. Luis Berdiel Rivera, president of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said that “we will not allow Puerto Rico to run out of coffee as happened with the sugarcane industry and to continue to lose about 50 percent of the coffee production which generates between $40 and $80 million annually,” said Sen. Berdiel.
Meanwhile agronomist Carlos Flores Ortega said that the main problems facing the coffee industry in 2011 were a shortage of labor, the high cost of labor, the effects of the coffee berry borer, and the increased costs of production such as pest controls, fertilizers, and pesticides.
Flores added that other problems included the availability of quality seeds, reduced incentives, difficulty in financing, investment in technology, and price controls by the Department of Consumer Affairs.
…
Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz stressed the need for labor hands to harvest coffee and an aggressive marketing program to export the grain and to create jobs, even for students.
Read the full article from the Puerto Rico Daily Sun.
As mentioned in this previous Green Antilles post, coffee production in Puerto Rico has fallen by 50% over the last four years, causing concern amongst farmers and agriculture officials.
[Photo: Jose Oquendo]
