“A lot of farms are being abandoned,” says Sonia Vásquez, an organic coffee grower on the slopes of San José, south-west Honduras. “A lot of people are migrating — many can no longer make ends meet.”
Over the past six years Ms Vásquez, 46, has seen her crop devastated by disease — a coffee tree fungus that has ravaged parts of Latin America. Now her business has been wrecked by tumbling global prices — the value of her crop has shrunk by almost a third over the past year, falling well below break even.
Yet this should be a boom time for growers like Ms Vásquez based in the “coffee belt”, the region over the equator between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Consumers are drinking more — from drip coffees to vanilla lattes to cold brews — than ever before, but Ms Vásquez and other farmers from Peru to Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia to Ecuador are struggling. Prices of arabica beans — 60 per cent of the market — have fallen to a near 14-year low of around 90 cents a pound on the Intercontinental Exchange.