VENEZUELA: ‘Where’s the Coffee?’, Ask Consumers

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yensi Rivero

CARACAS, Jun 21 2004 (IPS) - ”Where’s the coffee?” asks Carmen Piñero, who lives in a middle-class district on the southeast side of Caracas, as she stands in front of empty shelves in a supermarket in the Venezuelan capital.

”It’s incredible we can’t even have our little cup of coffee before leaving for work, as we have all our life,” she complains to IPS.

In this South American country, there is normally enough coffee to meet domestic demand and to leave a surplus for export. But at the close of the 2003-2004 harvest, production is down, and there are bottlenecks in the production and marketing process that have led to scarcity of coffee, a central feature of the Venezuelan diet and social life.

A cup of coffee goes by many different names in Venezuela: negrito, marroncito, conlechito, guayoyo, marrón fuerte, marrón claro, con leche oscuro, aguarapado, cerrero.

Over the past decades, Venezuela has produced more than 1.5 million quintals (46 kgs) of coffee a year, of which 1.3 million were consumed domestically.

This oil-exporting country of 25 million has long been self-sufficient in coffee, and a surplus was always left over for export, without major hold-ups in the production and marketing chain.

But since the 2001-2002 harvest, output has fallen to just above one million quintals as a result of the neglect or abandonment of coffee plantations and the drop in production caused by the ageing of coffee bushes and the lack of new investment.

The association of small coffee growers, PACCAS (Associated Coffee Producers), reported the partial or total abandonment of some 70,000 of the total 172,000 hectares on which coffee was produced until recently.

A similar situation is seen in several Central American countries, where 600,000 jobs have been lost in the past few years due to the record low prices that form part of a global crisis in the coffee industry that has affected some 25 million farmers worldwide.

Several crops are governed by a price-fixing system in Venezuela, in which farmers, agribusiness interests and the government reach agreement on a price.

The price set for unprocessed green coffee beans is 46.87 dollars a quintal, and the roasting plants sell the ground beans for 88.54 dollars a quintal.

But Venezuela’s coffee planters complain that they have not been receiving a fair price, because ”for the past six years we have been forced to sell our output at a price far below the international price,” coffee grower Maximiliano Pérez told IPS.

The price of coffee on the New York market stands at around 90 dollars a quintal.

Vicente Pérez, with PACCAS Sucre in eastern Venezuela, remarked to IPS that to stimulate the coffee-growing sector, the end-price charged to the consumer should be nearly doubled, from the current 2.34 dollars a kg to 4.16 dollars.

”That is the direction we should have been moving in, with gradual increases over the past few years, but instead what is being suggested now is an abrupt hike,” said Pérez.

”This is a question of economic survival for 50,000 families” who depend on coffee production for a living.

Most of the day labourers on Venezuela’s coffee plantations earn the minimum wage of 130 dollars a month. In addition, many families grow coffee on small farms of less than five hectares.

There is also discontent among roasting plants, where there is a struggle between large and small companies.

The large companies ”offer their producers up to 104 dollars a quintal, and we can’t afford to buy the beans at those prices,” said a source with the association of small roasting plants.

More than 50 small and medium roasters have had to close their doors, and some 15,000 people have been left without jobs in the past two years.

The big roasters deny accusations of hoarding, arguing that what is happening is that this year’s yield is simply smaller than those of previous years, and claiming they lack the installed capacity to monopolise the roasting and grinding of coffee.

According to the large roasting plants, that is why there is a smaller quantity of ground coffee, ”and when it reaches the supermarkets, it flies off the shelves.”

Given the difficulties of meeting domestic demand, the small and medium roasters propose importing more than 40,000 quintals to get their companies moving again.

But Agriculture Minister Arnoldo Márquez said ”it makes no sense to import coffee when the companies have enough to supply” the domestic market.

The minister added that due to the exchange controls adopted by the government over a year ago, ”the companies can no longer buy contraband coffee at prices lower than those on the national market.”

An estimated 200,000 quintals a year of contraband coffee entered the country between 1999 and 2003.

Another cause of scarcity was that a small part of Venezuela’s production has migrated to Colombia, where prices are higher. Márquez estimated that last year, 120,000 quintals were produced in Colombia instead of Venezuela.

Consumers are paying for the difficulties with weeks of scarcity and empty shelves. Shoppers must occasionally make a trek to distant stores to find coffee, or shell out money for costly gourmet or flavoured varieties.

The scarcity ”has driven a portion of consumers to soft drinks,” said Vicente Pérez, who was referring to a global phenomenon pointed out during International Coffee Week held last November in Costa Rica.

Until the late 1990s, Venezuelans consumed 2.4 kgs of coffee each a year, but that average has dropped to 1.79 kgs.