Bolivian coffee

THE BOLIVIAN COFFEE INDUSTRY

Bolivia is a small player: it ranks 38th on the list of coffee-producing nations, even behind the U.S., which ranks 35th. In the last few years, the country’s coffee has made great strides, in part thanks to the Bolivian Specialty Coffee Association (ACEB), and an event called the Cup of Excellence.
The best Bolivian coffees have a very sweet, very balanced cup; aficionados assert that they have a deep berry in flavor; my own impression is that they are nutty, with a hint of caraway. They’re creamy and sweet, one coffee roaster has noted, and a comment on a NYC site about the Coffee Foundry on West 4th Street noted the nutty taste of their Bolivian mix. The proprietors there note that the beans grown at a higher altitude are denser, and thus roast more evenly. Again, a personal impression is that the taste of the Bolivian beans is more noticeable in iced coffees.
The very geography of much of Bolivia is designed to produce coffee, but has also contributed to the country’s struggle to produce consistent specialty coffee. Most farmers de-pulp the coffee at the farm, and then must truck it over the mountains to La Paz at a whopping 12,500 feet, where they deliver it to centralized co-ops or intermediaries. Because the beans were half-processed, they were still wet and would freeze and then thaw again on their way over the mountain. But recent developments in the industry have changed that, and most coffee is not processed locally to avoid such problems.
Bolivian coffee is almost 100 percent arabica, mostly of the typica and criolla varietals. More than 90 percent of the coffee grown in Bolivia is produced in the Yungas area, a tropical region in La Paz with altitudes between 1,600 and 5,200 feet. Other important growing regions are Cochabamba, Santa Cruz and Tarija and Beni.
Before 1991, most farms were owned by wealthy land owners, who had Brazil’s native people work for them. In 1991 a governmental land reform forced the larger landowners to return the farms back to the families who had originally owned them. These small farms, which range in size from 3 to 20 acres, now produce the majority of coffee (estimates range from 85 to 95 percent), despite the fact that often, only a small percentage of the land is dedicated to coffee.
“The Bolivian coffee industry has been fine-tuning itself by producing quality in the cup and improving post-harvest techniques mostly at the wet- and dry-milling stages,” says Marcos Moreno, agribusiness and marketing advisor for the Market Access and Poverty Alleviation (MAPA) project, a USAID-funded project that provides technical assistance to coffee growers in Bolivia. “This is a young coffee industry in the hands of more than 23,000 small growers who are learning to make better coffee and bring home a steady income.”
“It is not a miracle what has been happening lately in Bolivia, but it is the result of hard work on behalf of coffee growers that want to showcase what they can produce and turn around the misconception that Bolivian coffees were a bag full of unpleasant surprises,” Moreno adds.
Most smallholders use little or no fertilizers or pesticides. The coffees are typically hand-picked and washed, and then sun- or machine-dried. New projects, such as those funded by the U.S. to eradicate drugs, helped build coffee processing plants in the main growing regions so that the wet coffee would no longer need to be trucked into La Paz.
Along with ACEB, the U.S. government spent $150,000 to bring the Cup of Excellence program in Bolivia in October and December of 2004. In the first year, 13 Bolivian coffees earned the Cup of Excellence designation. First prize, with a score of 90.44, went to CENAPROC, a co-op that received more than $11 a pound for its coffee. In addition to inspiring more farmers to participate in coming years, the hope is that the potential of this type of money will continue to turn farmers away from coca acreage and into coffee. However, at around $2 a pound, coca still pays at least double the current price of coffee.
Bolivia has all the ingredients to be a high-quality coffee producer, such as altitude, fertile soil, and a consistent rainy season. However, the rugged terrain and lack of infrastructure and technology make post-harvest quality control a challenging task. Funds from development agencies are working to establish processing facilities in rural areas so that farmers have access to the resources that will help ensure quality beans, while also adding value to their product.
Within the entire industry, 28 privately owned firms control more than 70 percent of coffee export trade. The remaining percentage is traded by Bolivia’s 17 coffee cooperatives. Both the private and cooperative sectors are members of the Bolivian Coffee Committee, or Cobolca. Most of Bolivia’s (green) beans are exported to the US, the EU, the Russian Federation, and Japan.
The global coffee crisis has produced devastating effects for Bolivia’s rural farming population, as well as the economy as a whole. With coffee prices reaching as low as $0.40 in early 2002, many producers have been unable to cover the costs of production. Despite a price spike in 1997, coffee production and its value on the international market has been decreasing steadily since the early 1990s. The role of coffee in the national economy fluctuates based on the highly volatile international commodity price, or New York “C” price. In 1997, Bolivia exported 6,725 metric tons of coffee (green) and received $26,040,000, meaning that each metric ton was worth approximately $3872. However, in 2003 coffee exports (green) totaled 4,453 metric tons and returned only $6,389,000, thus valuing each metric ton at a mere $1,4237 . This staggering price disparity reflects (on a smaller scale) the natural boom and bust cycles of the coffee economy, making small-scale farmers extremely vulnerable to cyclical price shocks.
In the past few years specialty labeling (Fair Trade, organic, and shade grown) and the cooperative movement have been gaining momentum among various rural commodity producers. Many cooperatives have united under this movement, yet others are incapable of paying the certification costs, which are considerable in the context of such poverty. ANTOFAGASTA, established near La Paz in 1992, was one of the first cooperatives on the Fair Trade register that sells a portion of their coffee through Equal Exchange’s Fair Trade market.

Open House day at the Bolivian Consulate

On Wednesday, 30 June, from 5:30 - 7:30 pm, there will be a reception at the Bolivian Consulate in New York. Interested parties including journalists, playwrights, professors and students are invited to attend, meet diplomats, meet the founders of Amigos de Bolivia, and take away some information packets.
The consulate is located at 211 East 43, Suite 1004, New York, NY, 10017.
Learn about the orchids, birds, mining and other industries, or just sip come Bolivian coffee or coca liquor!
For more information contact Carlos Reyes at carlosreyes99@rocketmail.com

Handel in Bolivia

An article from the Guardian about music in Bolivia caught my eye....

Bolivia's soaring symphonies

One of Kurt Masur's mentees, American conductor David Handel's novel approach and ongoing fame fills concert halls wherever he works. Eleven years ago he moved to La Paz, Bolivia, where he's been radically transforming the local Symphony Orchestra. Since his arrival audience attendance has rocketed and he has achieved an extraordinary reputation among conductors in Latin America. He describes what music means to him and Bolivian society

Guardian Weekly
Thursday 30 April 2009 09.00 BST

I grew up in Buffalo, New York and went to the University of Michigan before becoming an assistant conductor at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. I was there with Kurt Masur, who made an enormous impact on my way of thinking, especially in the sense of an orchestra's role in a community. Now I am totally dedicated to the orchestra in La Paz.
An orchestra is a team effort, everybody is involved and everybody has something to contribute. My contribution during the course of these years has been mostly directing it, trying to professionalise the ensemble – the intention is trying to professionalise the institution so as to reflect other orchestras in other parts of the world.
Of course an orchestra is not a Bolivian invention, it is not a North American invention either, it comes from a certain part of the world at a certain point in time and the idea in La Paz was to create the finest orchestral organisation we could.
The orchestra was pretty rustic but now I'd say we have a dignified group. We have a longer rehearsal cycle because we have musicians that have other jobs. Many of them are professors at the National Conservatory, some give private lessons, some divide their time between chemistry and the symphony, and we even have a doctor in the orchestra. It's a professional symphony orchestra, but one that is still in a state of transformation.
Musically it is at a completely different level. In part because we have more musicians on staff and musicians of a higher level, but also because we have inculcated a sense of discipline and order and work ethic. Having said that we have been doing so with a really wonderful and open spirit, a collegiate spirit between friends and colleagues.
The environment we've created allows my colleagues to express themselves, and have reason to challenge themselves, and dedicate themselves to the music they rehearse and perform every week.
Bolivia is a demographically and geographically diverse country. We play in every part of it; we have annual tours to every region, as well as an annual festival in southern Bolivia which involves musicians from all neighbouring countries, and from Europe and North America. This offers our musicians the opportunity to make contact with other musicians, and that has really contributed to the level of the group.
We de-centralised the orchestra from the state bureaucracy. This means we created a legal structure where we have economic independence, the liberty to hire musicians and to grow the organisation. We created the National Symphony Foundation, a private sector organisation which raises money and helps with volunteer activities. The biggest contribution during so far has been the building we are in now, the Centro Sinfonico, of which we are very proud, and we are one of the few orchestras in Latin America that has its own concert hall.
Our repertoire is diverse and innovative, in the sense that we've tried to project the aspirations of our musicians and the aspirations of the public, as well as open doors and reflect musical backgrounds from all parts of Bolivia. In that sense we've grown our institutional library, with more than 100 new works – either original commissions or arrangements of traditional Bolivian music.
If we think about Beethoven's country dances and Mozart borrowing from affectations of Turkish music, you can see that the idea of borrowing from other musical and cultural sources has always been around, it was a question of applying it here. Think about 20th century musical figures: Alberto Ginastera and Lopez Bouchardo in Argentina; Leonard Bernstein and George Gerschwin in the US. All of them were very important musical voices and important, let's say, expressions, orchestral expressions of their respective cultures, so why not, try to create that dynamic here.
When I arrived there was no connection between the orchestra and the contemporary composers who were living and working here. So one of my tasks was to launch an open call to all composers, announcing that, 'works are welcome, the orchestra will perform them'. By starting that way we have created a very dynamic relationship with all our composers.
I think the orchestra reflects the diversity of the country. If one analyses what an orchestra is beyond its musical role, it's an idealised social paradigm, that is to say it's a little bit authoritarian in its structure, a little bit vertical, but when the public attends a concert they perceive right away that it is a paradigm– a dream of how a civil society can work.
The audience sit down in front of the music stands and have ideas put in front of them but they have different interpretations of how it might be brought together. We have a conductor, a concert master, and various leaders in the orchestra, who bring it all together through coordination and hard work in concert – and we hopefully arrive at the harmony and conclusion the composer hopes for.
We have musicians from all different backgrounds, whether it's Quechua, Aymara, Spanish, North American, Chinese, Brazilian, and we have a young lady from Uzbekistan; and I think that is inspiring for the public in a society where there are so many, let's say, intercultural tensions.
I think a symphony orchestra has a role in any society. Bolivia actually has a long tradition of orchestral music and ensemble play, obviously dating back to the Spanish colonial times. Archives found in several parts of the country reflect this tradition. In fact, I think it was 'L'elisir d'amore' [The Elixir of Love by Donizetti], a very important nineteenth century opera, that was first performed in La Paz, Bolivia, before Buenos Aires, I'll tell you. So there is a long history.
The country today has over nine million inhabitants, and growing, so we tend to repeat all the programmes, three, four, five, times. So our work is relevant. Statistics demonstrate that a symphony orchestra has a place beyond anyone's assumptions.
• David Handel talked to Andres Schipani during a rehearsal in La Paz. Handel has twice been a fellow of the prestigious Fulbright Program, and is laureate of the Chicago Artists International Program. He has received numerous awards including two Rackham awards and the UNESCO/Pro-Santa Cruz National Prize in Culture.

PINK RIVER DOLPHIN RESCUE

Just in from AP, a story on the stranded dolphins in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia:

Bolivian scientists are trying to rescue a group of pink river dolphins that have become stranded on a river clogged with mud.
Biologist Mariana Escobar says the nine freshwater dolphins migrated to avoid turbulent floodwaters on their home river, only to find themselves stranded on a connecting river by sediment deposits from the flood.
Scientists say they may use helicopters to remove the dolphins from the Paila River.
Biologist Noel Kempf said Tuesday that the dolphins are in good health for now.
But two newborns and another youthful dolphin still cannot survive and learn to fish in the unusually strong currents of their native Rio Grande. The dolphins have long beaks and can grow to 8 feet (2.5 meters) long.