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.
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