Nicaraguan Coffee Farmers Are Thriving, Contrary To Claims
By Paul Homewood
You would think that a publication calling itself Christian would actually place a premium on telling the truth. Sadly it is only propaganda that matters to the Christian Science Monitor:
Jinotega, Nicaragua
Maria Gonzalez knows that growing coffee in Nicaragua’s northern mountains – as she has done since she was a little girl – gets harder and harder each year.
Rising temperatures are spoiling harvests when berries ripen too fast and a coffee leaf disease wiped out about half of the region’s crop between 2012 and 2014, killing most of Ms. Gonzalez’s plants.
Just as her new plants were starting to flourish, whipping winds and torrential rains from hurricanes Eta and Iota last November uprooted the bushes and shook the unripe berries to the ground.
With an initial hard few years now stretching into a decade, coffee farmers like Ms. Gonzalez face a tough decision: stay loyal to their coffee crop or find a new way to survive.
“I’m experimenting with a lot of things because if I see that one is doing better, I’ll stick with that,” she said. “And if not, we’ll be there fighting for our coffee.”
A coffee picker carries sacks of coffee cherries at a plantation in the Nogales farm in Jinotega, Nicaragua January 7, 2016.
Soaring temperatures in Central America due to climate change are forcing farmers to pull up coffee trees and replace them with cocoa, spurring a revival in the cultivation of a crop once so essential to the region’s economy.
This article could hardly be further from the truth.
Coffee production in Nicaragua has been rocketing in recent years, and is double what it was a couple of decades ago:
Nicaragua Coffee Production 1961-2019
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
Of course, there are inevitably years when harvests are poor, but the decline in output between 2012 and 2014 was no greater than many other years since 1961.
It is estimated that harvest losses from the two hurricanes, which frequently hit Nicaragua, will be between 10% and 15%., taking output back to 2017 levels. Again, drops of this magnitude are commonplace in Nicaragua.
And far from the Jinotega region being particularly vulnerable as claimed, it is recognised as the best in a country noted for the quality of its coffee:
The simple fact is that coffee plantations are thriving in Nicaragua.
Shame on the Christian Science Monitor for peddling lies.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Christian Science is a separate religion from Christianity as you and I understand it. It is packed full of lies so this is unsurprising.
Yeah yeah…apparently cancer can be cured through the power of prayer…
Write to the CSM, send them your stuff and ask them to comment after they’ve read it.
Lets see what they have to say. My guess is that they were simply provided with the article for their next publication, so no-one, absolutely no-one will know what to say or how to reply.
But this is how it’s done, “spread the gospel”…
The source of the article is actually Reuters. CSM only carried it.
Reuters? Well, there you go! Part of the MSM pack dedicated to promote The Climate Gospel.
The BBC play that game so I warn them against it every time I challenge something they are peddaling. They have a duty to check sources.
If a statement regarding their responsibility is not included in a complaint they play weasel and dismiss you by saying “we are not responsible for external content” or ” we are only publishing work publised elsewhere. Of course none of that makes the content right! It is totally disingenuous because of course as “impartial” as they are they only push anything which promotes the religion.
These are far from stupid people, so far from their journalism being reactionary it is actually premeditated and in a US court of law certain crimes if pre meditated carry the death sentence!
What a disjointed mess of assertions and illogical implications and unrelated factoids by CSM. Just plain dumb, dumber and dumbest and i’ll bet my house they have no idea how disjointed their words are.
I looked up the Reuters article
There is little Twitter discussion
#1 says “Crops grown in a monoculture are always more vulnerable. They should have stayed with shade-grown”
#2 Gives a quote summary
\\ More than 494,211 acres of food & other crops throughout #CentAm were devastated by the 2020 hurricanes that slammed the Nicaraguan & Honduran coasts
… and destroyed an estimated 10-15% of this year’s coffee harvest for producers in Gonzalez’s co-operative, Soppexcca” //
– That sounds a high number of farm acres .. is it credible ?
– I volunteered with coffee farmers cooperative in Guatemala
and visited a coffee farm in Nicaragua both were not coastal but up in inland highlands.
Same journo did another article 3 years ago
On Twitter 20 people promoted it,
but no discussion
She deleted her own tweet about it.