Coffee Workers Turning to Construction

“For every three workers we need, we have two,” states Juan David Rendon.

Rendon, the head of the Andes Coffee Cooperative, oversees the work of a number of coffee farms and plantations; combined, the cooperative own about 86,000 acres of arable land that is used for coffee farming.

But despite tackle adverse weather patterns and fluctuating market prices, the biggest battle he, his coffee farmers and his colleagues elsewhere in the country face is an absence of staff.

Instead of taking up seasonal harvesting jobs, many people are now leaving traditional farming communities to take up better-paid jobs in the construction industry.

With increased competition in the sector, and the likes of Starbucks able to pay more and more, many of those ‘lower down the chain’ (so to speak) are feeling the pressure.

“The highways have taken a lot of people,” said Pedro Echavarria, a coffee farmer based in the region of Antioquia in the northwest of Colombia.

“It’s a very serious problem.”

One of the major issues with the lack of available labour – aside from the inflated cost of employment and increased competition not just in the coffee sector, but across the board – is that crops are running the risk of being infected, because nobody is out in the fields monitoring the situation.

In years gone by oil and mining led the way in driving economic growth in Colombia, but recently President Juan Manuel Santos gave the green light to an ambition $17 billion construction project known as 4G. Some 1,300 kilometres of new roads are expected to be built with the aim of shortening travel time between industrialised hubs, emerging cities and coastal ports.

With the need for labourers, many of those who used to work on farms are now heading to find employment building these new highways.

“The pay is higher, and it’s less work,” says Juan Arboleda, another coffee farmer from Antioquia.

And with unemployment rates falling, it’s likely that coffee farmers and cooperatives will continue to find seasonal staff hard to come by.

“This is a problem we’re going to have,” Arboleda added.