Coffee was Ana Fajardo's ticket to the good life.
She traveled in style to European capitals and sent her two daughters to US universities. She was attended by a cook and several maids at her coffee farm, drove in imported four-wheel-drives and was lavished with presents from local bankers at Christmas.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Today, Fajardo has laid off her domestic help, her foreman and her farm administrator, sends her daughters to a local university and has sold her city apartment. She says banks now refuse to give her loans.
"Coffee allowed us to live very well in the old days. Now coffee is loss-making," said Fajardo, 40, a third-generation grower.
Thousands of Colombian coffee growers are predicting farm closures, bankruptcies and social unrest as international prices wallow at all-time lows.
Toiling under mounting debt, many growers in the Andean nation's once-affluent coffee regions are abandoning their crops. Small numbers are even uprooting coffee trees to grow coca -- the raw material for cocaine.
For 100 years, coffee has been at the heart of Colombia's economy and culture. It created a prosperous rural middle class and spurred the industry and banking sectors. It also paid for schools, roads and electricity in rural areas, creating islands of peace in a country ravaged by a 37-year war.
But now, growers say, a global coffee glut that has forced prices down for four years is bringing the heyday of Colombian coffee to a bitter end.
"The age of coffee is over," Fajardo said.
Coffee-blessed land
Blessed with three Andean ranges and volcanic soil, Colombia offers perfect conditions for coffee, which was introduced here by Spanish Jesuits in 1723.
Its high-quality washed arabica beans -- individually hand-picked by farmers -- are coveted by coffee connoisseurs around the world for their rich flavor and acidity.
Coffee brought wealth to a country struggling with enormous gaps between the rich and poor, setting up a welfare state in Colombia's central coffee belt.
But under the weight of a world glut, coffee prices on the New York's Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange have slipped from a high of US$1.37 a kilogram in May 1997 to historic lows of just US$0.1964 a kilogram on Monday.
The country's 500,000 farmers say prices are ruinous. Production costs in Colombia are hovering around US$0.42 per kilogram.
Deep in the coffee belt, the bounty created by coffee is still apparent, although beginning to fade.
World War II-era jeeps piled high with coffee bags hum along well-paved roads outside Manizales, the tidy capital of Caldas, the country's No. 2 coffee region. Most farms have electricity and running water, and growers send their children to schools and health centers paid for by coffee.
Juan Valdez, the smiling fictional spokesman for Colombian coffee for more than 40 years, smiles down from roadside billboards that draw attention to public works projects, such as bridges and aqueducts, which have been funded by coffee.
Dying way of life
But little by little, job opportunities in the coffee industry, from tasters to technicians, are growing scarcer as coffee plantations have been forced to shrink or close.
The coffee-laden jeeps and the pickers who can be seen beating among the vast hillsides of glossy green coffee trees with their bags of scarlet beans may be, industry officials say, part of a dying way of life.
Weeds are invading areas where coffee once grew. Some farms have hung up "for sale" signs. The health, education and recreation facilities funded by coffee profits are being reduced, and some are threatened with closure.
Unemployment in Manizales has reached 20 percent and crime is rising. Leftist guerrillas and outlawed right-wing militias are encroaching in towns long spared from a war that has claimed 40,000 lives in the last decade alone.
Some growers in areas in Antioquia, Caldas and Risaralda provinces are turning to coca and poppy -- the source of heroin -- adding to a drug production scourge in Colombia, the world's No. 1 producer of cocaine and a growing if still modest provider of heroin.
Last August, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's largest rebel group, commandeered a truckload of coffee in northern Caldas. Dressed in combat fatigues and carrying automatic assault weapons, they sold the cargo later to bewildered officials at a coffee cooperative.
"Coffee brought running water, health services, education and fair salaries. Thanks to coffee, we didn't have problems with armed groups," said grower Luis Bernardo Montes, a member of Coffee Growers Cooperative in Manizales.
"This has been like an island. But if the crisis continues to deepen, we will be sure to have problems. The armed groups arrive as the quality of life deteriorates," Montes said.
In 1950, coffee accounted for 80 percent of Colombia's export revenues. The National Federation of Coffee Growers, a private association of producers that buys most of Colombia's harvest, owned a bank and a shipping company to move its exports.
But the end of a consumer-producer world accord in 1989 and the emergence of new producers such as Vietnam has plunged Colombia's growers into their worst crisis.
The Federation was forced to sell the bank and shipping fleet and to reduce subsidies to growers.
Last week, local news magazine Semana carried a front-page story proclaiming "Farewell to Coffee," and analysts say only cost-effective and competitive producers will survive in today's globalized coffee market.
In September, the government announced US$53 million in aid over the remainder of the year and US$97 million next year.
The money will go to maintaining domestic coffee prices paid to growers, funding coffee sector scientific research and to reducing the deficit of the National Coffee Fund -- expected to finish this year US$100 million in the red. It will also pay for a program to renew the country's aging coffee trees.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has