By Lorenda Reddekopp
Wilson Tzunún pulls a brown, skinny branch off a coffee plant and snaps it in two. The coffee plants around us are all in varying stages of death.
The cause is roya. It’s a word that’s almost become a curse in Central America. It’s a fungus, a leaf rust that first shows up as yellow spots on the leaves of coffee plants. Then it curls them up and causes the round coffee fruits to drop to the ground before they can mature.
“It’s something that right now we can’t control,” said Tzunún.
He’s a member of the Campesino Committee of the Highlands in Guatemala. The group helps some of the smallest coffee producers in this country export their organic coffee.
The Guatemalan government has declared the coffee rust a national emergency. So have the governments of Honduras and Costa Rica.
The dried-up, dead plants are an unusual sight, when everything else in this humid region of Western Guatemala is lush and green.
“The roya that attacked before, six to eight years ago, it was controllable,” Tzunún said. “We’ve seen that this is much stronger.”
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| Coffee Grower Juan Calel |
“It didn’t give us anything,” he said, looking out from under his straw hat. “We don’t know what we’re going to do with this situation, because there’s nothing. Everything was lost.”
Calel is in his 70s and his kids have all left home. Coffee provides his entire income, to support him and his wife. He said it’ll be harder to get by now, but he’s more worried about his neighbours.
“There’s a couple with seven kids, young ones. How are they going to support them all?”
That same concern exists throughout this region.
Nils Leperowski is president of the National Coffee Association in Guatemala. “It’s a problem that goes from Mexico down to Peru.”
He goes through the numbers for Guatemala: 70 per cent of crops have damages. Of the 276,000 hectares of coffee in this country, 193,000 hectares are infected with the fungus.
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