The drop in coffee prices will affect up to 70% of Honduras’ small-scale producers, representatives of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in this Central American country warned this month. This will affect an average of 100,000 small-scale producers in Honduras—18-20% of whom are women—that will now find it more difficult to invest in fertilization and maintaining their farms, among other things.
This inevitably reduces both the coffee sector’s competitiveness in relation to other countries and its development, as coffee is the country’s main agricultural export item (25.8%). To resolve this and other challenges facing the coffee sector, at the beginning of the year Rikolto, the National Coffee Board (CONACAFE) and the organization Solidaridad Network signed an agreement to update the national coffee policy with a gender focus.