Puerto Rico's little secret: coffee / Some of the world's best beans never get off the island

2005-07-31 04:00:00 PDT Adjuntas, Puerto Rico -- Long before Starbucks and even Sanka, the coffee produced in this cool mountain region was internationally beloved -- so much that Puerto Rico, barely the size of Connecticut, was among the world's largest, proudest coffee exporters. The cafes of Vienna, Paris and Madrid served Puerto Rican coffee in the 19th century, as did European monarchs and even the Vatican.

But while short and sturdy coffee trees still flourish on parts of the island, it is hard to find Puerto Rican coffee anywhere now.

Puerto Rico does not even produce enough to meet its own demand, forcing the island to buy beans from other countries. Up to a quarter of the annual harvest goes to waste, mostly because of one problem: nobody likes picking coffee beans, and there are far more appealing options for work these days.

Rural Puerto Ricans who might once have picked beans for a living have sought better opportunities in the mainland United States, where the Puerto Rican population now roughly equals the 3.9 million people living on the island. And as Puerto Rico has evolved to an industrial economy from an agricultural one, low-wage workers have come to prefer factory or construction jobs -- available even in remote mountain towns -- that pay more and demand less.

"I picked coffee one time," said Julio Torres, executive vice president of Grupo Jimenez, the island's leading coffee company. "I lasted six hours, and I never picked coffee again."

So bleak are the industry's prospects that last month, Puerto Rico's new agriculture secretary, Jose Orlando Fabre, held a coffee summit with other cabinet members and the mayors of 21 coffee-growing towns, mostly in the island's rugged interior. Fabre decided to try putting prisoners and the unemployed to work as pickers, and perhaps even importing pickers from other countries.

With the harvesting season beginning next month, Fabre said the island's 10,000 coffee farms needed at least 5,000 new pickers, and more to increase exports, as he would prefer. Compared with giants like Brazil and Colombia, the Puerto Rican coffee industry is but a blip; the island produces about 20 million pounds of coffee a year, compared with more than 3 billion pounds in Brazil, the world's largest producer.

Exports plummeted after Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, partly because the United States was already buying coffee from Brazil and saw sugar, not coffee, as the island's most potentially lucrative crop. The coffee industry in Puerto Rico is subsidized and supported by the government, which sets prices and imposes a high tariff on imported beans to protect local farmers.

A series of brutal hurricanes further curbed production, and from 1965 to 1990, exports stopped altogether. But as the specialty coffee market boomed in the past decade, a few farmers and businessmen here, including Torres, have tried to restore the renown of Puerto Rican coffee. They saw their opening after a hurricane battered the Blue Mountain region of Jamaica in 1990 and when Japan, where Jamaican coffee is coveted, came looking for Puerto Rican beans instead.

"We realized there were people willing to pay a premium for a good coffee, " Torres said at his coffee-processing plant in Ponce. "Until then, we were keeping the best coffee in the world for ourselves, not for others."

For the most part, they still are. Puerto Rico exported only about 2 million pounds of coffee last year, according to its Department of Agriculture, a fraction of the nearly 60 million pounds shipped in the late 1800s.

Torres and others in the industry want to reverse this trend, but not all are supporting the prisoners-as-pickers plan. Torres said prisoners would be too lazy and unqualified for the job, which requires standing on steep inclines six to eight hours a day, plucking thousands of coffee berries as insects swarm and bite, and carrying them in heavy containers around the waist.

"It's easier for them to stay in their prison than collect the coffee," Torres said. "It's a skill you need to learn in your hands and your feet."

His idea is to recruit migrant farm workers from the southeastern United States, where most harvesting is finished by October, just in time for the peak of the Puerto Rican coffee harvest. Migrant workers also come from coffee- producing countries like Mexico and Guatemala, and could be experienced pickers. The question is whether the Puerto Rican government would pay to fly in workers and house them for the season.

Fabre said his plan would be more feasible than importing pickers from Central and South American countries, who would need visas and working papers. He said that he would seek meetings with agriculture secretaries of Southern states to discuss the idea, but that meanwhile he would experiment with sending minimum-security prisoners to a few coffee farms this fall.

"It needs to be proven that they will work well alongside others," he said.

Although Grupo Jimenez's premium brand, Yauco Selecto, is exported to Israel, New Zealand, China and most of Europe, the dwindling production and high cost make Puerto Rican coffee as rare as saffron.

The price of coffee grown and sold on the island is heavily regulated to protect the industry, and at $3.46 a pound, it has not changed in more than a decade. Off the island, though, Puerto Rican coffee is far more expensive than the world market average because of the high production costs. As an American commonwealth, Puerto Rico is subject to a minimum wage and strict environmental standards. At the Porto Rico Importing Co. in New York, Yauco Selecto sells for $11.99 a pound, the costliest after Jamaican Blue Mountain at $29 and Hawaiian Kona at $24.95.

Kenneth Davids, founder of the online magazine Coffee Review, said in an e-mail message that the best Puerto Rican coffee was "full bodied, roundly sweet, with low but vibrant acidity," not unlike the finest Blue Mountain varieties. But it can have a disappointing mustiness, Davids said, probably because of delays in drying the beans. It is a low-key coffee with subtle virtues, he added, making careful preparation all the more important.

Carmen Alamo, an agriculture professor at the University of Puerto Rico, said census data suggested that coffee farms between 20 and 100 acres were downsizing, probably because of the labor shortage. "We think that they are now instead trying to plant small areas that their labor force could tend to," Alamo said.

But Fabre said most farms still produced more than they might be able to harvest in hopes of finding enough pickers to at least fill the island's own cups. Beyond that, Torres said he saw potential for new markets in Asia and Australia. Fabre said he had even talked to the Department of Defense about buying Puerto Rican coffee, possibly starting this year for its submarine fleet.

None of this will come to pass, though, unless the island finds thousands more pickers, a prospect that Torres, unsentimental as he is about the job, doubts.

"Maybe they can train monkeys to do it," he said.