Clear Lake Coffee Roasters Industry insider series;Burnt by Both Ends: How Climate Breakdown and Market Greed Are Destroying Central America's Coffee Farmers

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Burnt by Both Ends: How Climate Breakdown and Market Greed Are Destroying Central America's Coffee Farmers

From the hillsides of El Salvador to the mountain estates of Honduras, the people who grow the world's most traded commodity are being crushed between a changing climate they did not cause and a market system designed to extract every last cent from those least able to fight back. A new report from the Guardian lays bare a crisis hiding in plain sight.

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The Calendar Has Broken

Oscar Leiva stands on a steep hillside in western El Salvador in December — a month that, within living memory, meant the reliable start of the dry season. He is watching rainfall. His flowering crop came early, then stalled mid-cycle. A heatwave followed. What remains is uneven, lower in quality, and more expensive to produce than the harvest before it.

His mother, Marina Marinero, remembers when the rains arrived on schedule and the harvest could be planned months in advance. That world is gone. The calendar no longer holds. Every decision — when to prune, when to fertilise, when to bring in labour — has become an educated guess made under financial duress. Each wrong guess carries a cost the family cannot absorb.

This is not an isolated story. It is the defining story of coffee agriculture across Central America right now, playing out on tens of thousands of smallholdings across El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and beyond. The Guardian's recent investigation gives this crisis names, faces and figures. Our job here is to place it in its proper political context: this is not a natural disaster. It is the predictable outcome of a system built to serve capital, not the people who produce the wealth.

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"When prices keep producers at subsistence level, adaptation becomes impossible." — Cecibel Romero, coffee researcher, El Salvador

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From 5 Million Quintales to One: A Collapse in Numbers

To understand how bad things have become in El Salvador, consider this single statistic. By the mid-1970s, El Salvador ranked among the world's leading coffee producers, with harvests exceeding 5 million quintales — each quintal roughly 46 kilograms of coffee. Today, national production struggles to reach 1 million quintales. That is an 80 per cent collapse in output over half a century.

The causes are multiple and interconnected, which is precisely how the ruling class prefers them: complex enough that no single villain can be named, diffuse enough that no single remedy is demanded. Land restructuring stripped smallholders of productive land. Rural migration has hollowed out the labour force. Climate shocks have made yields unpredictable. Institutional support has been systematically withdrawn. And market prices have been allowed to fluctuate wildly, destroying any possibility of stable planning.

Researcher Cecibel Romero puts it plainly: "There is a real climate crisis, but there is also a social crisis." She is right to insist on both. The climate crisis is real — rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and the aggressive spread of coffee rust disease are measurable and documented. But the social crisis is the frame inside which the climate crisis becomes fatal. Farmers who had financial reserves, institutional support, and stable markets could absorb a bad season. Farmers kept perpetually at subsistence level cannot adapt. That is not a coincidence. That is a feature.

El Salvador Coffee: The Numbers

• Peak production (mid-1970s): over 5 million quintales per year
• Current production: struggling to reach 1 million quintales
• One quintal = approximately 46 kilograms of coffee
• Production decline: approximately 80% over 50 years
• Key causes: land restructuring, climate shocks, withdrawn institutional support, market volatility

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The Production Model Was Always Designed to Fail Them

Romero's analysis of how the coffee sector arrived at this point is worth examining carefully, because it reveals the role that short-term profit maximisation has played in destroying long-term viability. The dominant production model, she argues, prioritised yields and short-term fixes over soil health, shade management and resilience. When the devastating rust outbreaks struck in the early 2010s, many producers replanted with new disease-resistant varieties. Those varieties promised resistance but delivered lower quality and limited durability. Within a few years, the system was hit again.

This is the pattern of capitalist agriculture the world over: extract maximum value now, externalise the costs onto the land and the workers, and leave the long-term consequences for someone else to manage. When the consequences arrive — as depleted soils, collapsed biodiversity, failing crops — the farmers bear them alone. The companies that bought the coffee cheaply, the exporters who handled it, the roasters who branded it, the retailers who sold it at a markup of several thousand per cent: none of them are on that hillside with Oscar Leiva, counting the losses.

As the sector's economic importance declined, institutional support was cut. Public support services weakened. Renovation programmes fragmented. Credit became inaccessible. Producers were left to navigate a triple crisis — climate, disease, market volatility — entirely alone. This is austerity applied to agriculture. It is the same logic that hollows out the NHS, that defunds social care, that eliminates legal aid. When the state retreats, those with capital can pay for private alternatives. Those without capital are simply left exposed.

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"Producers are being asked to adapt. But adaptation has a cost." — Juan Luis Hernández, forest engineer, Honduras

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Honduras: The Arithmetic of Ruin

Cross the border into Honduras — Central America's largest coffee producer — and the same story repeats itself at larger scale. Juan Luis Hernández, a forest engineer who has worked with the Honduran Coffee Institute on environmental projects, says the climate crisis has eliminated the margin for error. "Producers are being asked to adapt. But adaptation has a cost."

That cost is not abstract. Gerardo Vásquez, a small producer in Copán who manages an 8-hectare family farm, has trained with the Honduran Coffee Institute and advises other farmers on soil analysis, variety selection and agroforestry systems. He has done everything right by the standards of the technical literature. And yet survival remains far from guaranteed.

He runs the numbers. Establishing a single manzana — roughly 0.7 hectares — of coffee now costs about 200,000 Honduran lempiras, equivalent to approximately £5,600, spread over three years. Fertiliser prices have surged since the pandemic. Labour shortages have pushed harvest wages higher. When all costs are tallied — harvest, processing, transport — a producer spends more than 3,000 lempiras, roughly £83, to produce a single quintal of parchment coffee.

And then the rain comes at the wrong time. Constant unseasonable rain makes drying the coffee cherries impossible, forcing producers to sell the raw fruit directly from the field at sharply lower prices. Those who cannot afford to wait sell to intermediaries who provide cash advances in exchange for the right to buy the harvest at a price they set. The farmer gets money that day. The intermediary gets the profit later. "That producer feels relieved," Vásquez says, "but he is not earning anything, just recovering part of what he spent."

Read that again. A farmer does months of physically demanding work in a changed and hostile climate, incurs substantial costs, takes on risk, and ends the season having merely recovered part of his expenditure. This is not a market functioning poorly. This is a market functioning exactly as it is designed to: extracting value from those with no alternative.

The Cost of One Quintal: Honduras 2025–26

• Cost to establish 1 manzana (0.7ha) of coffee: ~200,000 lempiras (£5,600) over 3 years
• Cost to produce 1 quintal of parchment coffee: 3,000+ lempiras (£83+)
• Includes: harvest, processing and transport costs
• Outcome if rain prevents drying: forced sale of raw cherries at depressed prices
• Outcome if sold via cash-advance intermediary: farmer recovers partial costs only

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Labour: The Third Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About

Carlos Guerra, co-owner of Café San Rafael in Copan Ruinas, Honduras, describes a labour market in free fall. Fifteen or twenty years ago, he says, prices were good, conditions existed that no longer exist, and people were eager to work. Now, if you are lucky, you find 20 or 30 workers.

Coffee farming is physically demanding, poorly paid and increasingly unstable. The combination is driving younger people out of rural areas and into cities, or across borders entirely. This is not a failure of ambition or loyalty to the land. It is a rational response to the conditions on offer. When a crop cannot reliably cover its own production costs, when wages cannot reliably feed a family, when the next season's outcome cannot be predicted, leaving is the sensible choice. The failure belongs to the system, not to the workers who exit it.

The labour shortage then becomes its own constraint on adaptation. Jesús Guerra explains the bind directly: "With cattle, you can introduce technology. But coffee is different. You cannot mechanise selecting ripe cherries or pruning. That requires human judgment." The tasks that might allow a farm to adapt — careful variety selection, selective harvesting, soil management, precise pruning — are exactly the tasks that cannot be automated. They require skilled, present, committed workers. Driving those workers away through poverty wages and precarious conditions destroys the very capacity that adaptation requires.

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"Everyone feels as if they are the one being scammed." — Emeric Seguin, Director of Sourcing, Fantôme Roasters, Quebec

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The Market Squeezes from Both Sides

If the human costs are severe, the market dynamics are almost deliberately cruel in their timing. After a record rally in Arabica bean prices earlier in 2025 — which did not translate into record incomes for producers like Leiva or Vásquez, since they had already sold forward or lacked storage capacity to benefit — analysts at Rabobank are now forecasting a sharp price plunge.

Production is rebounding in Colombia and Brazil. Global surpluses are projected to grow over the next two seasons. Prices are expected to fall, potentially sharply. For farmers in climate-vulnerable regions who are already spending more to produce coffee of lower quality, a global price crash would be devastating. The cruel irony is this: the regions most damaged by climate disruption — which they did not cause — will bear the brunt of price falls driven by productivity recovery in regions less severely affected.

The "speciality coffee" sector is frequently offered as the solution to this problem. Higher prices, closer relationships between producers and buyers, quality premiums that reward the best growers — this is how the speciality market presents itself. Emeric Seguin, director of sourcing and sustainability at Fantôme, a Quebec-based speciality roaster working with Central American smallholders, is more honest about the limits of this model than many in his industry. "Everyone feels as if they are the one being scammed," he says. Farmers feel undervalued. Buyers worry about inconsistency. Co-operatives are trapped between both.

Seguin also makes a point that deserves to be amplified: the industry's definition of quality is not objective. "Quality is treated as something objective," he says. "But it is really a cultural agreement decided in tasting rooms, not on farms." The palates of buyers in London, New York and Tokyo determine what constitutes quality coffee. Those judgements shape what prices producers can command. The producers have no seat at that table. Their labour creates the value; others decide what it is worth.

Certification costs, processing infrastructure and export logistics remain significant barriers for most smallholders who might otherwise access the speciality market. The market offers a lifeline with one hand and charges an entry fee with the other.

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Climate Is Moving the Map

The physical geography of viable coffee production is changing. Vásquez estimates that farms below 1,000 metres altitude are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, pests and disease. Forty years ago, coffee struggled to grow above 1,000 metres. Now producers are planting higher each decade as warming makes lower elevations inhospitable. This is not a gradual drift. It is a forced march uphill, abandoning land, infrastructure and community roots that took generations to establish.

At Café San Rafael, Carlos Guerra describes the changed rhythm of flowering: what was once a simultaneous white bloom across the entire mountain, carrying the smell of jasmine, is now staggered and unpredictable. Harvests stretch later into the year. The extension increases costs and reduces returns. Rust disease, which thrives in warmer and wetter conditions, has spread more aggressively into altitudes that were once too cool to support it.

Some farms are experimenting with adaptation: more shade cover to moderate temperatures, soil restoration to improve water retention, adjusted harvest timing and tighter post-harvest control. But Guerra is clear about who can afford this path. "We have a window to sell coffee to a differentiated market," he says. "Many producers do not have that option."

The adaptation trade-offs are real even for those who can try. Moving to shade-grown production can reduce yields from 40 quintales per manzana to five or ten. A producer then faces a stark choice: accept dramatically lower income, or intensify with chemical inputs and accept the ecological damage. Neither option is good. Both exist because the market refuses to fully value what ecologically sound production actually costs.

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The Renacer Alternative: Proof That Another Way Is Possible

Not everything in this picture is despair. In El Salvador, an initiative called Renacer — the word means rebirth or renewal — is working to demonstrate that a different model of coffee production is viable. Led by agronomists and producers, it is a coffee production school that promotes ecological practices centred on soil health, shade restoration and long-term stability rather than maximum yields.

Lead agronomist Sigfredo Corado frames the goal with refreshing honesty: "You may not harvest 50 quintales one year, but you also will not fall to 10 the next." This is resilience over extraction. It is the opposite of the model that brought the sector to its current crisis. And it works — not as a miracle solution, but as a demonstration that the race to maximum yield is not the only available path.

The existence of Renacer matters for two reasons. First, it shows that the technical knowledge for a better model exists. Second, it shows that the barrier is not knowledge or will — it is resources. Smallholder farmers operating at subsistence level, crushed by debt, cannot simply adopt Renacer's methods. They need time, money, and institutional support to make that transition. These are precisely the things the current market system denies them.

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Who Is Left Behind? A Question That Answers Itself

The Guardian's investigation ends with a question: as coffee adapts across Central America, who can afford to adapt to it — and who will be left behind? It is a good question, asked with appropriate gravity. But the answer is not a mystery. It is written into the structure of the system.

Those who will be left behind are those who were always supposed to be left behind: smallholder farmers without capital reserves, without institutional support, without access to differentiated markets, without political voice. Those who will survive — and perhaps thrive — are those with capital: the Café San Rafaels with their roasteries and speciality relationships, the large estates that can fund the transition to shade and soil restoration, the multinationals that will continue to source from whoever is cheapest when smaller operators have given up.

Meanwhile, land once covered in shaded coffee is increasingly being sold for real estate development or converted to sugarcane. The hillsides that sustained communities for generations are being absorbed into other circuits of capital accumulation. This is enclosure. It has a long history. It happened in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is happening in El Salvador and Honduras today, dressed in the language of market adjustment and climate necessity.

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What Solidarity Actually Looks Like

The Guardian's report is quality journalism that names real people, gives real figures and places the reader on those hillsides. But quality journalism is not the same as systemic analysis. This crisis is not primarily a climate story, though climate is real. It is not primarily a market story, though markets are the mechanism. It is a story about power: who has it, who does not, and what the consequences of that imbalance are for those at the bottom of the chain.

The solutions are not mysteries. Fair minimum prices that actually cover the cost of production — including the ecological cost. Public investment in agricultural support services deliberately stripped away. Land rights that protect smallholders from displacement. Democratic control over supply chains that extract value from their labour. Debt cancellation for farmers trapped in advance-purchase arrangements. Genuine technology transfer, not just advice to adapt without resources to do so.

None of these things are technically impossible. They are politically blocked, because the interests that benefit from the current arrangement — the traders, the roasters, the retailers, the financial institutions underwriting commodity speculation — have more power than the farmers who produce the coffee. That is the political economy of your morning cup. It is worth knowing.

Oscar Leiva will plan his next cycle without reliable forecasts, on land that no longer follows the calendar his mother knew. The question is not whether he can adapt fast enough. The question is whether we — collectively, politically — will change the conditions under which adaptation is demanded of him. So far, the answer has been no. That is a choice, not a necessity. It can be made differently.

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Source: Based on reporting published in The Guardian, 'Coffee Crisis' series, 2025–26.