Due to the rainy season in recent months in the department of Cesar, coffee beans have matured faster than under normal climatic conditions, which requires coffee growers to accelerate the pace of production.
But many of them have lost the harvest, not only because of the conditions of the roads that make transporting the cargo difficult or impossible, but also because there are fewer and fewer people who want to pick coffee.
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“With the roads every year it is the same situation because in many places there is no track plate and the water affects the road. But we have a more delicate issue: there are no pickers, so the coffee is falling, it is being lost,” explained Álvaro Osorio, executive director of the Coffee Growers Committee in Cesar, La Guajira and part of Bolívar.
THE LABOR IS NOT ENOUGH
“Coffee normally has several flowerings, four stages, depending on the rains, and is also harvested, but this time it ripened almost all at the same time,” Osorio added.
The lack of workers has the owners of the coffee farms worried, who employed locals, people from other departments such as Córdoba and Sucre, and even Venezuelan migrants.
“But they have not come, it is very delicate, the labor force here is not enough,” says Osorio, leader of the union that groups more than 10,300 coffee growers between Cesar and La Guajira.
THE REMUNERATION
Pickers receive between $600 and $700 per kilo of coffee picked, in some places they also provide lodging and food during the work period. That is, the remuneration depends on the weight and quality of the mature grains.
Ibeth Ramírez Benitez and her husband have a farm in the El Triunfo village, jurisdiction of the municipality of Pueblo Bello, Cesar. For 29 years they have been working in this economic sector where they started as collectors.
“The first hand has already passed, we are waiting for the second. We need between 15 and 18 workers, the harvest lasts more or less 2 months,” explains Ramírez.
For women, one of the causes of the low staff has to do with the fact that many collectors were working on political campaigns for the most recent territorial elections.
“We also thought that because of the elections they were not increasing, but they have not increased to the extent that we expected,” comments the director of the Committee, who has seen large farms with only 14 collectors when before they had 40.
There is a large part of unskilled labor hired in road infrastructure projects in Pueblo Bello and other producing municipalities in Cesar, such as the rural area of Valledupar and Agustín Codazzi.
“When the coffee is well ripened with water, it doesn’t want anything,” warns Ramírez, who hopes to find enough pickers for the new harvest.
THE PRICE OF COFFEE
“Before there were too many staff and we had to refuse, but now they have dedicated themselves to motorcycle taxis to the sidewalks. Last year we paid $800 per kilo because organic coffee was at a good price, but this year it dropped,” added the citizen.
The domestic price of coffee is approximately $1,400,000 per 125 kilograms, according to the National Federation of Coffee Growers. The pound is trading at just under $2 on the New York Stock Exchange.
The Committee estimates that this year production will be 27 million kilos of dry parchment coffee between Cesar and La Guajira.
EL PILÓN established communication with the Secretary of Agriculture and Business Development of Cesar, José Francisco Zequeda, but the official assured that he is unaware of this situation, but that he will establish contact with actors in the union to analyze the labor and economic impact on the sector.
SHORTAGE
Different studies on the determining factors in the labor shortage in the coffee sector show that this is not a new problem or exclusive to Colombia.
“We thought that this was only going to happen in the Coffee Region, because they always say in the news that there is no one to harvest there, but I never imagined that that would happen to us. There is a lack of people,” said Osorio, who has been in the coffee union for 37 years.
Academics argue that day laborers have migrated toward better-paid activities than those related to agriculture, although employers insist that it is very well-paid work.
While all this is happening, the quality of the coffee that falls from the trees can be affected by being washed away by rain or fermenting and acquiring unpleasant flavors for consumers.
By Andrea Guerra Peña
@andreacguerrap