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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday September 20 2018, @11:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the caffeine-addicts-hope-so dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 20 2018, @05:06PM (1 child)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday September 20 2018, @05:06PM (#737595) Journal

    We should invest on getting those plantations back up and running. People who have been successfully growing coffee for generations are a pretty safe bet.

    I do have a question, though. How much more motivated can a "dedicated group of millennials" be than the people whose livelihood it has been for generations? How much more can the "know-how of young exiles" be than the people who have been doing nothing else but growing coffee in those locations for more than a hundred years?

    The NGOs are great for offering to help, but the build-up is a little over the top.

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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @11:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @11:06PM (#737825)

    The locals may know how to grow coffee, but they are ignorant about important things like the proper number and gender-types of bathrooms to install in each plantation, how to properly address transsexual coffee bean pickers (it's "tzhu" informally and "Uszhted" formally), whether the plantation's website should be developed in Ruby on Rails or in Rust, and which Code of Conduct is most encompassing of differing viewpoints.