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Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: The Coffee Culture of Columbia's Riviera
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16929 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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4 / 1990 |
1,666 Words |
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Gary Predmore
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Over the last hundred years, coffee has become Colombia's preeminent export crop. "Mountain-grown Colombian coffee," television commercials claim, is the "richest" coffee in the world. Consequently, throughout the Colombian Riviera, the climatic belt between the Caribbean coast and the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, there has developed a coffee-growing culture that permeates the region's numerous small villages, towns, and outlying plantations and haciendas. This coffee culture reflects a unique blend of Indian and Spanish life-styles adapted to the demands of modern technology and agricultural production.
Indeed, such cultural flexibility and evolution seem the hallmark of the ever-changing mix of culture and commercial endeavor that has historically been found along the coast. Time may have stilled the flow of jewels, gold, and emeralds that once departed the South America continent through the portals of the Colombian Caribbean, but today the rich bounty of coffee is following the same path.
La Federacion de Cafeteros de Colombia (The Coffee Federation of Colombia) has the primary responsibility of coordinating and developing the coffee-producing areas of Colombia. However, the federation functions in a largely advisory capacity. It cannot, and does not attempt to, force the coffee farmers to produce quotas of coffee per acre, nor does it autocratically guide every phase of coffee production in Colombia. Almost all of Colombia's coffee farms are individually owned, and this has produced a free enterprise system that has evolved naturally over many decades. There are over three hundred thousand individually owned coffee farms in Colombia, which employ two million of the country's thirty million people. To coordinate such an intricate, massive, and complex system of free enterprise, the men and women of the coffee federation must possess not only the technical skills of the agronomist but the persuasive power and negotiating skills of the diplomat.
Coffee is the mainstay of Colombia's future. The development of a successful, legally ordered, and democratic Colombian society is rooted in the complexities of the coffee-producing culture. Somewhat perversely, the greatest threat to the Colombian free enterprise system stems from the vagaries of its export markets, particularly the United States. Consumer and U.S. government resistance to higher Colombian coffee prices (and therefore profits for the small farmer), coupled with the vast illicit market for drugs (which can generate a much higher profit for the small farmer) that exists in the United States, threaten to persuade more and more Colombian smallholders to become embroiled in the lucrative trap of criminal drug production and thereby to surrender their fragile democracy to the subjugation of the drug cartels.
A Trip to Palmor
On several occasions I have journeyed with representatives of the federation as they conducted their business among the mountain coffee growers. Let us travel together with a typical federation group of officials and technicians from the coastal city of Santa Marta into the rugged Sierra Nevadas to meet for a day with a small group of coffee growers. The farmers have descended form their high mountain plantations by mule to the little town of Palmor, nestled between rugged hills, to meet with us.
As our
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