Portside Date: May 5, 2014

Date of source: May 5, 2014

A Coffee Crop Withers

Fungus Cripples Coffee Production Across Central America

By Elizabeth Malkin

New York Times

May 5, 2014

SAN LUCAS TOLIMÁN, Guatemala — When coffee rust attacked the farms clinging to the volcanic slopes above this Mayan town, the disease was unsparing, reducing mountainside rows of coffee trees to lattices of gray twigs.

During last year’s harvest, Román Lec, who grows coffee on a few acres here, lost half his crop. This year, he borrowed about $2,000 for fertilizer and fungicide to protect the plants, as he did last year. But the disease returned and he lost even more.

“There are nights when you cannot sleep, thinking how to pay back the money,” said Mr. Lec, 65.

A plant-choking fungus called coffee rust, or la roya, has swept across Central America, withering trees and slashing production everywhere. As exports have plunged over the last two years, the effects have rippled through the local economies.

Big farmers hire fewer workers to pick the ripe coffee cherries that enclose the beans. Smaller farmers go into debt and sell livestock or tools to make up for the lost income. Sales fall at local merchants. Teenagers leave school to work on the farm because their parents can no longer hire outside help. At the very end of the chain are the landless migrant workers who earn just a few dollars a day.

“If you frame this in terms of everyone that is connected to the economics of coffee, it’s a very serious problem,” said Roberto de Michele, a specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank who is based in Guatemala City.

The coffee rust has spread far and fast, driven by higher temperatures in the region that have allowed the fungus to thrive at higher altitudes. Many experts say climate change is largely to blame for the shifting weather patterns.

The economics of the business have added to the farmers’ plight. After years of low coffee prices, smaller farmers could not afford to replace aging coffee plants, which have proved more vulnerable to the rust’s attack.

“There was nothing to hold it back because the farms were in very poor shape,” said Maja Wallengren, a coffee expert based in Mexico.

The trouble here is just one of several factors that are pushing up prices in the global commodity market, increases that may carry over to supermarket shelves and the specialty coffee houses that sell the high-grade arabica coffee for which Central America is known. Market prices have risen 70 to 80 percent since November, driven mostly by drought in Brazil, the world’s largest producer.

In Central America, the pain is acute. Four million people there and in southern Mexico rely on coffee for their living, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. Twenty percent of the half-million jobs in Guatemala directly tied to the crop have already disappeared, estimated Nils Leporowski, the president of Anacafé, the country’s coffee board.

The rust outbreak has pushed many families to the edge of survival.

“Roya has exposed the depth of the social and economic problems in terms of people’s vulnerability to the market and to climate change,” said Peter Loach, the Guatemala director of Mercy Corps, an aid agency. “What makes it different and complicated is that it’s a slow-onset natural disaster over two to three years.”

Even in good years, José Obispo Tax Talé, 34, had to scrimp to feed his eight children. In the past, his work as a day laborer on coffee farms would give him just enough money to rent land, buy fertilizer and grow corn for food.

Since the coffee rust hit, farmers are hiring fewer workers and paying less. So Mr. Tax had to borrow about $1,300 to grow corn. “Sometimes, you get desperate,” he said. “You want to work, but there is none.”

This year, the lean season, when food supplies run out for the poorest farmers, started two months early, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a monitoring service, because of falling coffee earnings and reduced corn yields over the last couple of years. Forecasts of irregular rainfall this summer raise additional concern.

“Year after year, these families are confronted by layers of vulnerability,” said Anne Valand of the World Food Programme, who estimated that as many as 300,000 Guatemalans could need emergency food aid later this year. “Bit by bit, the layers are becoming thinner.”

As the coffee rust has taken hold, farmers have been spending much of their time and money trying to fight the disease by spraying fungicide, replacing or cutting back old plants, and managing the shade trees that filter sunlight and appear to reduce the spread of the rust.

“People are scared of the roya,” said Nicolás Leja, who farms about seven acres in plots in San Antonio Palopó, a nearby municipality. He pruned his trees and sprayed fungicide, but it proved futile. He has lost as much as 60 percent of his production over the last two years.

Instead of hiring four workers for the harvest as he usually does, he relied on extra labor from his 18-year-old son, who put off plans to study medicine.

Read more here.

Nepal Rural Field Workers Uncertain under Climate Change

Laurie Goering for TRF – Thomson Reuters Foundation – WNN EarthWATCH

April 28. 2014

WNN/TRF) Kathmandu, NEPAL SOUTHERN ASIA: Life is a daily challenge for the families of this village of terraced maize fields and tin-roofed homes tucked in the steep green foothills of Nepal’s Himalayas.

Monkeys living in the forests around Majhthana carry away many of the vegetables the community grows, and the men who once chucked rocks at them to protect the fields have gone off to dangerous, low-paying construction jobs in the Middle East in an effort to support their families.

The rocky riverbed that runs through town is dry much of the year – except when increasing extreme rainfall leads to flooding that sweeps away homes and fields. Hail, always a problem before the monsoon begins, is getting fiercer, villagers say, and warmer temperatures are for the first time bringing irritating mosquitoes. And the landslide-prone, just-passable earth road leading to town means getting produce to market – or children to school – is an uncertain affair.

But there’s a scent of progress in the air in Majhthana, and today it is citronella.

With outside technical assistance and start-up funding, plus plenty of local labour, the community has begun growing hardy citronella grass and mint on the landslip-prone verges of the forest, and substituting chamomile flowers for one crop of rice or maize in their fields each year. Monkeys won’t touch any of them, villagers say.

The harvested plants are then distilled in a steel tank set up in the village, becoming fragrant oils that can fetch up to $50 a litre – 10 times more than traditional crops – and, crucially, can be easily transported for sale.

“Kathmandu buyers even come here if the volume is sufficient,” said Bhoj Raj Bhurtel, who chairs the village’s new oil-producing cooperative, which involves 69 families farming 20 hectares of land. The oils are raising family incomes by $100 to $150 a year – a boost of 10 to 15 percent, said Luke Colavito, the Nepal director for iDE, an international non-governmental organization focused on rural livelihoods. It helped bring the project to Majhthana with funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

‘JUST A FIRST STEP’

But the oils – and a new water pipe that taps a spring uphill to supply the village with clean water for drinking, irrigation and oil production – are only the start of what community members say they need to adapt to worsening impacts of climate change, and the host of other problems the isolated village faces.

“This is just a first step – one part,” admitted Bhurtel, a slight, serious man with graying hair. “It’s giving us income and relieving us from the monkey problem. But a lot more needs to be done.”

Mountainous, persistently poor Nepal is ranked fourth in the world for vulnerability to the effects of climate change, behind only Bangladesh, India and Madagascar, according to a 2011 assessment by Maplecroft, a global risk assessment firm.

Just 10 days ago, an avalanche on Mt. Everest – linked to climate change by Nepali newspapers – killed 16 Sherpa guides, effectively shutting down this year’s climbing season on the world’s highest mountain.

This week Nepal plays host to an international conference on community-based adaptation to climate change, aimed at finding ways to more effectively develop, fund and carry out changes that could curb worsening climate vulnerability around the world, including in villages like Majhthana .

POOR ALREADY PAYING

Right now, the money available for such shifts – from governments and donors – is far too little to protect communities from extreme weather and other threats, experts say. Ensuring what is available is used effectively, isn’t wasted or stolen, and goes to the right kinds of projects – those the communities themselves want –remains an enormous challenge.

While world leaders look for ways to supply a promised $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations curb their emissions and adapt to climate change, “the poor are already paying the costs with their labour and their time,” said Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies.

That’s evident in the hills of Majhthana. The village women, who do much of the field work, say planting the new oil crops has been hard work, though the strange plants do seem to be holding up against the monkeys and the hailstorms, and use less water than traditional crops. Their root systems also hold the steep hillside soil, reducing the risk of landslides, Colavito said.

Having access to piped water also now saves women the long hilly walk to fetch water from the nearest spring – a big relief and time saver.

To read more, see the full article here.