Rescuing Devastated Coffee Growers

Adolfo Franco, USAID

(The author is the U.S. Agency for International Development's assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean.)

In my travels to Central America I have seen with my own eyes the suffering that the collapse of world coffee prices and the severe drought are causing throughout the region. I have seen desperate families and children going hungry or malnourished.

The lack of rain during the last year has created a "drought corridor," running north-south between central Honduras and down into northwestern Nicaragua. Throughout the region there are food shortages, malnutrition and more poverty. The oversupply of coffee on world markets has driven prices to historic lows and caused great hardship to coffee producers and coffee workers in the region. Over the past year, Central American coffee producers lost about $1.5 billion and some 600,000 coffee workers have lost their jobs.

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