Article
Hard Times for Coffee Farmers
Latin America is littered with monuments to the boom-bust history of tropical cash crops: the moldering palaces of rope-fiber growers in the Yucatan, Central America's abandoned banana plantations, the crumbling mansions of sugar barons in Cuba. But no bust has been crueler than the current collapse of coffee prices. Few have sparked such massive displacement of small-scale farmers and crops, or posed such a threat to the environment.