Wednesday, August 07, 2002

An oversupply of coffee beans deepens Latin America's woes

By PETER FRITSCH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

LA DALIA, Nicaragua -- Antonio Luna thought he had seen the worst life had to offer during the 1980s, when his village in Nicaragua's coffee-rich northern highlands sat in the crossfire of a guerrilla war between U.S.-backed "contra" rebels and the Marxist Sandinista government.

That was before this May, when his family's home became a plastic tarp pitched along the roadside here. Huddled with about 3,000 other unemployed coffee pickers, Mr. Luna is a hungry refugee from a potentially more devastating conflict than any he has known before: a global brawl over the $55 billion coffee market. The fight has left the world awash in java and has driven inflation-adjusted prices for beans to their lowest levels in more than a century.

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