019《经济学家》读译参考之十九：还算公道—中美洲咖啡贸易与“啡农”

TEXT 19

Fair enough

Mar 30th 2006 | MEXICO CITY AND SAN JOSÉ

From The Economist print edition

MAKING good coffee is not a simple business. Coffee

bushes must be grown in shade—neither too much, nor

too little. A hillside is best—but it mustn't be too s______

①. After three years, the bushes will start to produce

bright-red coffee “cherries”, which are picked, processed

to remove the pulp, and spread out to dry for days, ideally

on concrete. They are m_______②again to separate the

bean, which needs to rest, preferably for a few months.

（1）Only then can it be roasted, ground and brewed into

the stuff that dreams are ★quelled with[1].

In Mexico and parts of Central America, as in Colombia and Peru further south but not in Brazil, most coffee farmers are smallholders. （2）They found it especially hard to deal with the recent ★slump[2] in the coffee price. The price has since recovered: the benchmark price applied to m________③coffee now ranges from $1.11 to $1.14 per pound. That is roughly double its ★rock-bottom[3] level of August 2002.

But the v_________④of their income makes it hard for farmers to invest to sustain their crop, says Fernando Celis of the Mexican National Organisation of Coffee Growers. The slump forced many small farmers to switch to other crops, or migrate to cities. Mexico's exports of coffee are less than half of what they were six years ago.

（3）For farmers, one way out of this dilemma is to decouple the price they are paid from the international commodities markets. This is the a_______⑤of Fairtrade, a London-based organisation which certifies products as “responsibly” sourced. Fairtrade determines at what price farmers make what it considers a reasonable profit. Its current calculation is that the appropriate figure is 10% above the market price.

W________⑥, sales of Fairtrade-certified coffee have increased from $22.5m per year to $87m per year since 1998. This is still only a tiny fraction of the overall world coffee trade, worth $10 billion annually. But there are plenty of other ★niche markets[4] for high-quality coffee. Some small producers can c_________⑦more by marketing their coffee as organic—a switch which takes five years or so—or “bird-friendly” （4）because, unlike large, mechanised plantations, they have retained shade trees.

Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee-bar c________⑧, says it uses a similar formula to that of Fairtrade in buying its coffee. All is bought at a “fair price”, says Peter Torrebiarte, who manages Starbucks' buying operation in Costa Rica.

（5）Some niches can be large. Only 6% of world o________⑨is of top quality, but in Costa Rica and Guatemala the figure rises to 60%, says Mr Torrebiarte. Starbucks bought 37% of Costa Rica's entire coffee crop in the 2004-05 season, according to Adolfo Lizano of the country's coffee institute.

Mexico lags behind its neighbours in extracting higher prices. But 95% of the coffee in Mexico is arabica—the