Food for thought in Guatemala

Our merry group of coffee travellers – I’m moving around with four staff from other New Zealand coffee companies - is working its way through Guatemala. We’re taking a short and relaxing weekend break before heading upcountry to meet with one more coffee co-operative.

We’ve already met with two co-ops here. As usual on trips like this, I find that as conversations develop between us and the coffee farmers we meet, different topics often come up in the discussion which become the ‘theme of the day’; one day it might the problems farmers are having with the weather, on another it might be the importance of remittances from family members who migrated illegally to the United States in search of better incomes.

Aparicio Lopez Arana, a genial coffee farmer in his early sixties who sells coffee to us through the Guaya’b co-operative, welcomed us onto his land and started to tell us his story. Prompted by one of his comments, the subject quickly settled around the challenges that he has in keeping nutritious food on the table all year round for his family.

Like Aparicio, hundreds of thousands of farmers throughout Latin America earn such little income from the sale of their coffee that the months immediately prior to the next harvest – and their next payout – are tough. Their money has almost run out and they endure what they know to be ‘los meses flacos’ – ‘the lean months’. With no money to buy anything but the most basic of food items, the nutrition of their families suffers. A recent survey found that two-thirds of coffee farming families in Central America endure between 3 and 8 months of restricted diet every year.

“When we hardly have anything to eat – beans, eggs, not much else – we feel frustrated. We want to eat better but we can’t. In this time we don’t eat meat at all, and we often can’t afford rice. We can’t buy milk and we need it if we want my grandchildren to get calcium into their diets. Instead of milk they drink coffee, even the little ones. They’re too small – they don’t eat enough food and they don’t get enough vitamins”, he explains. “The first thing I would buy if I had more money would be better food, like corn, rice and a little more meat. Even during the best of times we can still only afford to eat meat once or twice a month”.

It’s a vicious circle; people who don’t eat enough calories can’t work hard, while children who go without meals can’t concentrate properly in class. If we can, by paying higher prices to Aparicio for his coffee, help to eliminate this problem for his family then we will be helping to remove one of the key obstacles that hinders development in this part of the world.