Gustavo Palencia, Sofia Menchu and Maytaal Angel

EL LAUREL, Honduras/LA LAGUNETA, Guatemala (Reuters) – The four sons of María Bonilla and Esteban Funes all embarked on the treacherous journey north, one of them aged 10, preferring the life of an unauthorized migrant in America to a coffee farmer in Central America.

“I would go to America if I did not have my mother. It’s much better. “Here, no one’s solvent,” Bonilla, 40, said. She is still trying to win the lottery and make a profit on her farm El Laurel in northeast Honduras.

Many of the thousands of Central American coffee farmers are not paid for their work. They produce delicate arabica beans that make the best coffee. As they give up, more migrants are moving to Mexico from Central America. This is a trend that U.S. statistics show has been increasing.

Francisca Hernández, 48, told Reuters that about a tenth of the 1,000 coffee farmers in her hamlet of La Laguneta in southern Guatemala had left this year for the United States. She also included her son, aged 23, who was trying to cross the border to America with his coyote or people smuggler.

He finally crossed the border in February and is now working in an Ohio restaurant, where he sends about $300 per month home.

According to the SICA intergovernmental group, periodic migrant surges have been observed from Central America’s coffee industry. This sector is where almost 5,000,000 people rely to for their survival.

According to interviews conducted with over a dozen local coffee growers, three heads of national and regional coffee institutes, as well an executive at an U.S.-based international association for coffee, this year’s harvest has proven particularly disastrous.

After years of suffering losses from declining world prices, and losing business to Brazil for many years, coffee leaf rust has now ravaged farmers.

This fungal disease has been revived thanks to the extreme humidity caused by hurricanes Eta (late 2020) that pounded Central America, decimating crops and dislocating hundreds of thousands.

“When coffee is not doing well, that’s when you see big migrations from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua,” said René León-Gómez, executive secretary of PROMECAFE, a regional research network formed by the national coffee institutes of Central America.

In the area, hand-picking coffee in labor-intensive ways is an everyday way of life. Production has declined by 10% since 2017 and is likely to drop further this season. The global coffee market will be more dependent upon mass-produced, automated producers such as Brazil and less vulnerable to high prices if severe weather strikes the country’s crop.

The decision of farmers to migrate north is a last resort, León-Gómez said. He said that they have been working hard for many years to produce at a loss and sometimes also work on bigger farms in order to survive.

They are killing themselves. This is the truth.

STEP NORTHWARDS

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that they had made 1.7million apprehensions of Mexican border officials in their last fiscal year, which concluded on September 30th. This is the most ever recorded. This was more than twice the 2019 level and four times as many as the COVID-19-lockdown numbers last year.

Although the CBP doesn’t break down immigrants by job type in its migration statistics, the latest data provided to Reuters exclusively by the Honduran Coffee Institute (IHCAFE), gives an indication of how large the number.

An institute survey of 990 Honduran coffee growers revealed that at least 5.4% had reported having one or more family members leave for the United States in any three months, May, June, and July 2019.

The number of immigrants would almost double if the same thing were done in Mexico’s coffee growing sector. This is roughly 6% of illegal Hondurans who attempted to cross into the United States from Mexico during the period covered by U.S border data.

Since the entire family did not migrate, this survey could reveal a higher number.

Although the Honduran government does not provide migration statistics for this year (though anecdotal reports by coffee experts across Central America and farmers suggest that a comparable, or even higher proportion, of this year’s migrants is coffee farmers),

Bonilla stated that almost all of the coffee-farming families living in El Laurel in the state Olancho have had members move over the last four years. Meanwhile, about 10 families have left their farms and moved north.

CBP data on apprehensions does not include people who successfully cross illegal border.

This group includes Hernández’ son and Bonilla’s four sons, who have all set off northwards since 2018 in search of a better life.

ROYA WREAKS RUIN

Since ancient times, coffee picking has been an integral part of the lives of people living in remote, poor areas of Central America. This region is home to about 15% of the world’s arabica beans, which are smoother-flavored coffees that many coffee connoisseurs prefer over robusta.

    Yet output has plunged 10% in the four years since October 2017, industry data shows, as farmers accumulated losses amid falling world coffee prices. Industry data indicates that production is likely to drop another 33% this season, despite strong global demand.

Due to the drought and frost in Brazil, prices recovered by the middle of the year. Some farmers even managed to make ends meet for the 2020/21 season which ended Sept. 30.

But the coffee farmers and government officials who were interviewed acknowledged that the struggle to earn a living in the coffee industry will continue, despite the fact that Central America’s output is still declining due to the resurgent Roya virus.

Profits are determined by output. This is because the lower costs of inputs such as seedlings and fertilizers can be offset with higher economies of scale.

Roya was first discovered in this region in 2012. By 2014, more than half the coffee crop had been damaged. It has since been largely controlled.

    The humidity brought by the two hurricanes of 2020, which themselves wreaked $3.3 billion worth of damage to regional economies, boosted the prevalence of the disease from low single digit percentages of coffee plants in the 2019/20 season to 15-25% in 2020/21, according to industry data.

Eugenio Bonilla is a coffee farmer in El Laurel, aged 56, and brother of Maria. He said that his production was almost half as high in 2020/21 due to Roya.

“If the trees are in poor condition, it is pointless that coffee prices have improved,” he stated.

Eugenio claimed that eight years ago, some farmers from his hamlet were suffering losses.

They have razor thin margins, and about half of the world coffee price goes to middlemen.

When world coffee prices averaged $1.41 per lb in 2019/20, for example, Bonilla said he and his fellow farmers received just 15 lempiras ($0.6238) per lb of coffee that cost them around 20 lempiras ($0.8317) to produce.

It’s THE ONLY Way!

Many Central American coffee farmers spoke out about their fearful debt spirals.

“They start selling their things,” said José Magaña, 60, a farmer from the state of Santa Ana in El Salvador. They sell their stuff if they are small coffee growers and have two or three oxen. A medium-sized coffee farmer might sell a house and other items to help him work his farms.

The bank took Carlos Landaverde’s Santa Ana farm earlier in the year. According to the 44-year old, he didn’t fear any of the potential perils associated with migrating along his family.

He said, “It doesn’t matter.” It’s the only path.