CARACAS: With Venezuelans unable to find their country’s coffee in supermarkets, the nation’s embattled farmers are turning to an unlikely source of relief: Colombia, one of the world’s most competitive markets.
Battered by fertilizer shortages and forced to sell below the cost of production, growers in Venezuela’s western coffee region are illegally selling their produce to middlemen who then transport it over the Colombian border, producers say.
“Recently people have been opting to sell to intermediaries because they pay more than the set price,” said Fermin Azuaje, a small-scale coffee producer in the Venezuelan state of Portuguesa. “Why are they paying this price? Because they are selling it somewhere else.”
Price controls and collapsing oil revenue are making it harder for Venezuelans to buy basic products this year, creating a new crisis for President Nicolas Maduro’s government. Caracas residents line up for hours outside supermarkets to buy subsidized ground coffee, most of which is imported.
Venezuela’s national coffee output has slumped by more than 70 percent since 1998 when the late Hugo Chavez was elected president, according to the National Federation of Venezuelan Coffee Producers, known as Fedecave.
Middlemen pay growers 130 bolivars ($0.7 at the black market exchange rate) for a kilogram of coffee, roughly a third more than the government’s set price, Azuaje said in a Jan. 11 interview at his home in Biscucuy, the capital of Venezuela’s largest coffee-producing municipality. The coffee is then transported by truck to border towns such as San Antonio del Tachira where it is sold to Colombians for 220 to 280 bolivars a kilogram, he said.
Essential Role
Farmers who receive state subsidies aren’t allowed to sell coffee outside Venezuela. In an attempt to end the smuggling, a government decree published Dec. 8 bans the transportation of coffee to three Venezuelan states that border Colombia. Coffee can only be sold to state-controlled organizations,
Colombia’s coffee growers federation declined to comment on the reports of contraband coffee entering the country. The country’s customs agency didn’t reply to an e-mail seeking comment.
