Top banana in beans

By Tony Smith

Associated Press

MONTE BELO, Brazil — The smile on coffee farmer Marcelo Vieira’s face says it all as he puts down the phone. Across the Atlantic, a client — one of Italy’s most discerning roasters — is delighted with the latest delivery.

"Gianni says it’s the best Brazilian coffee he’s ever tasted!" says Vieira. "He says it’s going to be our Blue Mountain!"

That would be good news for Vieira and other pioneering Brazilian coffee farmers who, faced with a second year of slumping prices caused by their own bumper crops and a glut of cheap Vietnamese robusta beans, are determined to take Brazilian coffee upmarket.

If they could get as much value-added on their new single-estate specialty arabica coffees as Jamaica’s Blue Mountain beans or, say, a prime Bordeaux from a famous French chateau or even an extra-virgin Italian olive oil squeezed on a Tuscan estate, they would have a beanfeast.

Blue Mountain, a bean grown in Jamaica’s mountains of the same name, is the Rolls-Royce, the Stradivarius of coffee. While regular Brazilian coffee fetches 50 cents a pound, a pound of Blue Mountain commands $6. It’s a rare commodity: Jamaica only produces 40,000 sacks a year, each weighing 60 kilograms, or about 132 pounds.

"I could produce nearly as much as that," says Vieira, on his own 3,000-acre farm. "The answer is to make this farm as famous as Blue Mountain, but the question is how to do it."

To start with, Vieira set aside 35 acres of his farm’s rolling hills to grow neat, terraced rows of bushes sprouting Icatu beans, a Brazilian hybrid of the classic Bourbon bean from Reunion island in the Indian Ocean.

The beans are harvested by hand and mostly sun-dried — "the traditional method, just like we used to do half a century ago," he says.

After adding in the extra labor, production costs are double those of regular coffee.

But he sells the specialty beans at more than double the price and has firm delivery contracts with roasters such as Gianni Versi of Giamaica Caffe in Padua, Italy.

"That protects me from market fluctuations," Vieira said. "It’s a guarantee I won’t make a loss."

That’s saying something these days.

Since 1994-1995, world coffee production has jumped by 9 million sacks in Vietnam and by nearly 12 million in Brazil, according to World Bank Senior Economist Panos Varangis. Armed with World Bank loans, Vietnam has surged from nowhere to become the world’s second biggest coffee producer.

The chronic oversupply has sent prices plummeting to 30-year lows and all across Latin America, which accounts for 60 percent of world production, hundreds of thousands of farm workers have been laid off. African producers are also suffering.

The resulting devastation across rural Central America is so bad that Varangis has named it "the silent Mitch" for 1997’s disastrous hurricane.

Trying to prop up prices, the Association of Coffee Producing Countries Organization introduced a retention scheme two years ago to hold back 20 percent of exports. But Vietnam, a nonmember, continued to boost production and the scheme collapsed last fall.

Like Vieira, Luis Norberto Paschoal who sells his Da Terra coffee to Italian global brand Illy, blames the slump not on a glut of coffee, but on a glut of robusta produced by Vietnam and bought by multinationals such as Nestle, Kraft and Sara Lee that sell most of the world’s coffee.

Robusta is a hardier coffee species that is cheaper to grow. It contains more caffeine and has a more bitter taste.

Paschoal says that is turning health-conscious youngsters off the beverage and claims robusta-heavy blends actually discourage coffee consumption.

"To get the same caffeine kick, you only need to drink two cups of robusta, rather than four cups of arabica," he said.

"The industry must understand it must eliminate the defects in coffee and reduce caffeine levels by reducing the robusta in the blend," Paschoal said. "If not, the industry will self-destruct."