-May 6,2019-
Coffee price is now near half of what it fetched a year ago, down to 88 cents a pound.The number of Guatemalan families taken into custody at the southern US border, many of them from Huehuetenango, a major coffee-growing region in the country’s western highlands, has gone up 87% since 2016.
From the Houston Chronicle and Catholic Relief
If you’re reading or watching your morning news with a cup of coffee, you hold in your hand one of the main reasons a record number of migrants are risking their lives to get into the United States along our southern border.
Plummeting worldwide coffee prices likely are the last straw for thousands of poor coffee farmers in Central America. In Guatemala, for instance, farmers already had lost 60 to 80 percent of their maize and bean crops last year to drought, according to surveys contacted by our organization, Catholic Relief Services. Those are the staple crops families depend on for food.
Many poor Guatemala farmers grow coffee as a cash crop to supplement what they cultivate to eat. But when they took their few bags of coffee beans to market over the past few months, they received a price around a dollar a pound or lower — far below their costs. The international price of coffee is at a six-year low. This is the result of multiple forces: a large harvest in Brazil, a ruthlessly efficient commodities future market, and other factors.
It’s important to understand the specific motivation for the recent surge of migration to the U.S. border. Although the threat of gang violence motivated Central American city dwellers to migrate in the past, the current wave is coming largely from impoverished rural areas, especially in Guatemala.