Colombia: As Climate Changes, Colombia’s Small Coffee Farmers Pay the Price

Jul 11, 2019 | Richard Schiffman, Yale Environment 360
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In the last 18 months, Colombia has lost nearly 100,000 acres of coffee plantations, more than 4 percent of the land under coffee cultivation, according to a statement issued last week by Colombia’s National Federation of Coffee Growers (Fedecafé). Since the 1990s, the total land under coffee cultivation has shrunk by 20 percent, Fedecafé said. The federation largely attributed the most recent exodus to the ruinously low price for coffee on the New York exchange. The migration of younger laborers to higher-paying jobs in the cities and abroad is also a factor, notes Diana Carolina Meza Sepulveda, a professor of agro-industrial development at the Technical University of Pereira.