Jamaica's famed coffee industry facing hard times

BRANDON HILL, Jamaica — A few years ago in this mist-shrouded mountain town, steep slopes were quilted with some of the world's most valuable coffee trees. Farmers scrambled to increase acreage and pickers painstakingly filled wooden boxes with ripened berries at harvest time.

Today, much of the terrain is overgrown with underbrush and bamboo as a declining luxury market in Japan and a voracious beetle drive thousands of frustrated small farmers away from tiny plots of leased highlands.

Times are hard for the growers of Jamaica's legendary coffee, especially those on isolated, low-tech farms such as the ones in Brandon Hill, a one-road enclave with no traffic lights.

"We used to make a living, but now we're working hungry," said Colin McLaren, standing in his sloping farm of flowering coffee trees in Jamaica's wild eastern mountains, where his father grew the gourmet arabica beans before him. "It's tough and getting tougher."

Jamaica produces what connoisseurs rank as one of the world's finest coffees, mostly grown on patches of a few acres between 2,000 to 5,000 feet (610 to 1,525 meters) above sea level. The moist, cool climate of the Blue Mountains lengthens the growing period from five to about 10 months, allowing sugars to develop in the beans that grow inside the berries. Many coffee lovers say the rich brew has a smooth, nutty flavor and a deep, intriguing aftertaste.

The roasted beans often sell for about $40 a pound in the United States, up to four times the price of other gourmet coffees. In Japan, the main market for Blue Mountain coffee, the beans fetch as much as $34 for a 100-gram (3.5-ounce) package.

But consumers are buying less because of the global economic slump. And that has brought declines in purchases by coffee dealers, as well as big drops in the prices paid to Jamaica's growers. Like farmers everywhere, they get only a small fraction of the retail price after middlemen, processors, shippers, retailers and others take their slices of the pie.

Meanwhile, the cost of producing coffee has soared for Jamaicans as inflation has driven prices for fertilizer, insecticide and wages higher over the last decade and powerful storms damaged their trees. Between 2005 and 2009, the cost of tending an acre of coffee almost doubled, jumping from $3,400 to $7,070.

An increasing number of exasperated Jamaican farmers say they can't even eke out a bare living growing the specialty crop.