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Puerto Rico bets on a coffee comeback
Thousands of rural families in Puerto Rico's rugged central mountains want to rebuild their traditional coffee economy after the devastation of Hurricane Maria. And one year on, they're betting on a dedicated group of millennials to get the job done, writes Tom Laffay. If they don't succeed, it could mark the end of coffee in Puerto Rico, forcing these last families to leave the island for good.
Puerto Rican coffee farmers lost an estimated 85% of their crops, or some 18 million coffee trees valued at $60m (£46m), and many have lost their homes in the wake of hurricanes Irma and María. [...] On average, 80% of coffee trees were destroyed by Hurricane María.
[...] ConPRometidos is an NGO run by millennials with a mission to create a stable, productive, and self-sufficient Puerto Rico, harnessing the energy, ideas and finances of the island's young diaspora. It began its work about six years ago in tapping into the know-how of young exiles in order to help address some of the problems they had left behind.
The hurricanes presented a new challenge but the plight of the coffee farmers caught the group's eye. They are soliciting a $3m grant from the Unidos por Puerto Rico Foundation to fund a five-year, island-wide project that aims to provide much needed relief to the island's coffee sector. The island can produce 240,000 quintales (100lb) of coffee but is only hitting 40,000, says the organisation's 30-year-old co-founder Isabel Rullán, which means it's importing coffee unnecessarily. Increasing production could bring about $65m dollars to the poor mountain regions, she says.
Related: Second-Largest Blackout in World History Hits Puerto Rico
Puerto Rican Death Toll From Hurricane Maria May be Many Times Higher Than Official Estimate
Puerto Rican Officials Raise Hurricane Maria Death Toll to 2,975 Following GWU Report
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @02:47PM (3 children)
Granted, lots of people there are really poor. The place is kind of socialist, and they'd be like Venezuela if they didn't have the US federal government controlling the currency.
For the sort of people who can build normal American suburban homes though, it isn't much of a price difference to build tornado-proof housing. It's actually cheaper when labor is costly, but I'm guessing labor is cheap in Puerto Rico. Several of the houses built in the www.monolithic.org style have withstood tornados.
Plants are more trouble, especially keeping costs down...
The plants are normally pruned to not exceed 2 feet tall. That isn't too big. If you put them in pots, you can bring them inside. You can use a forklift. There are nursery robots to move pots now.
You can of course also grow them indoors. Fortunately, they don't like much light.
There is always insurance of course. The trouble here is that farmers who don't buy insurance will have lower costs than those who buy insurance. The insurance buyers will go out of business before the disaster even happens.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 20 2018, @03:08PM (2 children)
I thought about bringing them indoors. If you're going to grow them indoors all the time, you might as well not grow them in Puerto Rico. Unless you can build some sort of open structure that reduces (wind?) damage but lets in most of the sunlight.
Bringing the plants indoors temporarily seems like a difficult task. Although there are a lot of unemployed people in Puerto Rico who might be temporarily hired to help that happen. One big problem is that you only have days of advance notice before a major hurricane hits. It could veer off and leave the crops unscathed. It would suck to bring the plants indoors only for it to be a false alarm.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @08:00PM
Seriously, the plants don't need much light. They die in full sunlight. It's the same with cocoa bean plants. They naturally grow at the bottom of a forest.
Any "sort of open structure that reduces (wind?) damage but lets in most of the sunlight" will kill the plants. A normal house with windows is almost perfect for coffee beans, lacking only the high humidity... and soil too I guess, unless your floor is beyond dirty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @04:47PM
Robusta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffea_canephora) beans are what they should be growing. Cheap, hardy, & enough caffeine content to wake the dead.