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On the road

part 1: by mule

 

After the coffee beans have been dried at Pamela and Pablo's farm, they begin their long journey across the Andes, down to the coast and then north to the port of Callao, near Peru's capital, Lima.

 coffee route

The beginning of the journey

The very first part of the journey is to get to the road. The coffee is put into sacks and carried by mules, along steep paths through the forest, until it comes to the road. In fact, the name of the place they arrive at is Punta de la Carretera, which means the end of the road, the place where the road stops. But for the coffee beans, it is just the beginning of the journey.

From Punta de la Carretera, Gregorio and David travel on with the mules for about an hour, until they come to the settlement of Putina Punco, where the coffee co-operatives are located. Some of the farmers do not have mules, so they have to carry their coffee on their backs - and some of them have to walk for two days to get to Putina Punco.

The coffee farmers' cooperatives

The cooperatives are organizations started and managed by the local coffee farmers themselves: they work together to collect, pack and transport their coffee beans to the coast. They also have a short-wave radio, so that they are in direct contact with Lima and can find out about coffee prices on the New York Coffee Exchange.

Gregorio explained that before the coffee farmers founded the cooperatives, they had to sell their coffee beans to powerful middle-men.

"They committed a kind of violence against us. They treated coffee just like anything else, with ruthless self-interest and indifference to its quality, and the price they paid was very low... That didn't suit us. That didn't suit us at all."

So the coffee farmers got together and decided to transport and sell the beans themselves, but it was very hard work. Gregorio again:

"It was a very difficult struggle and we had to make many sacrifices, building our own warehouses, our own communications, transport and so on. However low the price of coffee may fall we shall maintain our Co-operative to the last, after all the sacrifices we made to set it up."

 

NEW YORK COFFEE EXCHANGE: the place where most of the coffee from Latin America is traded

MIDDLE-MEN: people who buy something in order to sell it to someone else for a profit

 

 

WAREHOUSE: a building where something is stored until it is sold or transported

Hard times

Not all the coffee farmers are able to keep going when coffee prices fall, and times become even harder than usual. From 1989 to 1993, coffee prices were very low and a lot of farmers left their farms. Putina Punco became like a ghost town. However, 1994 brought high prices for the Peruvian farmers* and, since then, people have slowly started to return. But life continues to be hard and unpredictable.

Hugo, a young official for one of the cooperatives, had this message:

"Tell your readers so far away on other continents that thousands of people here in this valley depend on the coffee they buy. You have seen how things are; how hard, how very hard we try to produce coffee of good quality for them. Tell them that we receive minimal payment for all our efforts."

 

GHOST TOWN:a town where people no longer live

UNPREDICTABLE: you don't know what will happen

DEPEND ON: (v) if you depend on something, it is completely necessary for you.

MINIMAL: (adj) the very lowest

* Unfortunately, the reason that Peruvian farmers got high prices for their beans was that many coffee crops in Brazil were destroyed by frost that year.

FROST: (n) white, powdery ice
The article from which this was taken, appeared in the September 1995 issue of the New Internationalist.

© 1995: the New Internationalist
Image of mule from Arttoday

NI: Global Issues for Learners of English > The Issues > Coffee > On the road: by mule > On the road: by truck

 

Last Modified: 17 March 2000