Out-Of-Work Nicaraguan Coffee Workers Beg  for Help By Ivan Castro Reuters  Wednesday, June 12, 2002; 9:35 AM MATAGALPA, Nicaragua-  Thousands of unemployed Nicaraguan coffee workers, struggling to find a way to survive the third year of a global coffee crisis, are again lining the nation's highways to beg for help. A crisis of low international coffee prices has left hundreds of thousands of workers without work. Now, like last year, they are abandoning the fields to mount protests along stretches of highway. Some have spent the last month on the roadsides. "We beg for money in the street from buses passing by, and with what we collect, we buy rice for everyone to eat," said 38-year-old Felipa Jarquin as she stirred her cup of coffee, hoping its grounds might predict a brighter future. Coffee prices have plummeted since 1999, and with production costs in Central America now nearly double what the beans fetch on international markets, farmers can no longer afford to pay workers like Jarquin, a veteran employee at a now bankrupt plantation. Nearly 3,000 workers have staged daily sit-ins during the past month at roadside spots on a highway running from Matagalpa to the town of La Dalia, 110 miles (180 km) north of the capital of Managua. The peasants survive on a diet of fruits, like the bananas they gather from Matagalpa's green mountains, and the little rice they can buy with money collected at the protests. "There is work, but why do the work if the bosses say they cannot pay us?" said Henry Diaz, a 17-year-old protester. A BLOW TO HEART OF COFFEE LAND Nicaragua's northern provinces of Jinotega and Matagalpa are at the center of the nation's coffee industry, with 56,000 hectares of land producing about 60 percent of the harvest. President Enrique Bolanos, who took office in January, has announced plans to aid 20,000 small coffee producers and to restructure debt held by 2,000 large-scale growers. But unions complain aid measures for small-scale growers, heavily in debt to exporters and other financiers, are progressing too slowly. Grower Eduardo Rizo, the leader of Jinotega's producers' union, said further layoffs are likely if the government doesn't come through with adequate aid soon. Conservative estimates put the number of unemployed coffee workers at about 30,000. "That means that we're talking about 120,000 and 150,000 people who depend on those jobs and are having problems," he said. REGIONAL COFFEE CRISIS While the impact of the coffee crisis on growers is worldwide, it is particularly pronounced in Central America and Mexico. Nestor Osorio, executive director of the International Coffee Organization (ICO), said at a Managua growers meeting this weekend that the coffee crisis will not be solved unless growers push their governments to put coffee on the global political agenda. "In Central America this has turned into a bottleneck in which possible solutions won't be easy and where assistance from government and from international organizations and agencies is urgently needed," he said. Central America contributes about 12 percent of world coffee production, and the industry is a principal source of revenue and employment in the region. In 1997 the region had coffee-export revenues of $1.99 billion. That figure dropped to $985.9 million in 2001, according to estimates from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Cepal). Peasant Jarquin said growers will do what it takes to earn a livelihood, like hopping over the border to Costa Rica, where there is a shortage of farm labor. "But we're going to be denouncing the fact that in our own country, they don't listen to us and they don't pay attention to us," she added. © 2002 Reuters