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.