Coffee

We had a chance to tour a coffee mill nearby in La Perla. It's a long process of receiving the coffee berries, washing them, removing the berries, removing the shell of the seed that is the bean, and drying the bean. Some people also had a chance to go out to pick coffee berries as well. One group of four people picked a collective 50 pounds over the course of 4 hours. We learned that that would only come out to a few US dollars wage. There is also the factor of weather that affects how good the harvest would be. Higher quality coffee comes from ripe red berries but you're not always going to get trees full of them. They'll come in a spectrum of ripeness between red and green. But they can't afford to only pick the most ripe red berries; they wouldn't be able to get enough income. So they have to pick some that aren't as ripe to be added into the production. Another factor is how the international coffee market's prices are. Those affect how much demand and the price of wholesale coffee is. Then if farmers are dealing with a middleman sales person then it's likely they'll get paid a smaller amount compared to what it would be resold. Through hearing and seeing parts of all this we had a glimpse into just how difficult coffee production is.  Gordon Mark