Spotlight on Mexico: Historical Context

As we near the end of 2022, our most recent set of Reserve Lot releases finds our buying team at Passenger excited to make long overdue producer visits in the year ahead. While the second half of this year has already seen travel to various producing countries return in earnest, one place we are particularly hopeful to return to next year is Mexico. Despite our first and only sourcing trip to Mexico being cut short in 2019 due to the arrival of the Coronavirus, we’ve continued to be impressed by the quality of the Mexican coffees we’ve had the opportunity to taste in the years since. It seemed only appropriate then to take a moment to highlight four beautiful new additions to the Reserve Lot menu from producers in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, in southern Mexico. Not only are the quality of these coffees notable for the range of experiences they offer - from approachably balanced to uniquely complex - we also find their quality to be representative of one of the many ways that smallholder farmers in Mexico have looked to address their future, as they continue to grapple with the fallout of coffee’s complex past in the region.

Mexico’s coffee story is truly one of ‘boom and bust’ - a story from which it still hasn’t fully recovered today. After coffee was introduced to Mexico by European colonists in the 1800’s, foreign investment in large swaths of land in Mexico continued to increase throughout the century, forcing many indigenous land holding coffee producers further into more remote and mountainous regions. It wasn’t until after the Mexican Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century that agrarian land reforms began to return plots of farmland to indigenous laborers, often in the form of large communal-use land plots called ejidos¹. Perhaps the most notable reform for the coffee sector specifically came with the foundation of INMECAFE in 1959. INMECAFE was a governmental organization that brought the production and export of coffee under state control, which limited the powerful influence of private exporters and ‘coyotes’ (predatory traders that travel throughout producing regions offering low prices, in cash, for coffee that is ultimately sold to other traders at a profit). Additionally, INMECAFE provided technical assistance and critical financing to a growing number of collective coffee farmer groups, eager to join the trade under this new arrangement. By the early 1980’s, INMECAFE had attracted more than 80% of Mexico’s smallholder producers². The windfall of all of these post-revolution changes was a resurgence in coffee production that would lead Mexico to become the fourth largest producer of coffee in the world by the early 1990’s.

Despite these successes, a confluence of forces, largely in step with the rise of globalization in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, would lead to a dramatic swing in the opposite direction for Mexico’s coffee sector. A loosening of coffee price controls by the ICO (International Coffee Organization), pressure from various international financial organizations such as the World Bank, and a new presidential administration in Mexico that supported broader free market economic goals, ultimately led to the privatization and sale of the ejidos and the dissolution of INMECAFE by 1993. Now lacking direct government support, and struggling to find buyers, coffee farmers were forced to adapt to the new market conditions where private exporters and multinationals with outsized access to cash and credit largely determined the financial terms. This was a new era, where “coffee traders and roasters in the United States and Western Europe [had begun to] consolidate into a handful of enormous corporations that stockpiled large coffee reserves to strengthen their hand in the market”, further exacerbating the precipitous drop in coffee prices³. It was during this period, known as the ‘coffee crisis’, that coffee quality and production volumes in Mexico began to ‘go bust’ (there was a dramatic decline on both fronts).

To appreciate the impact of the crisis for producers in this period, it's valuable to point out the scale of importance that coffee production held in Mexico at that time:

In the southern states, the nation’s main coffee growers, 52 percent of all economically active individuals depend on coffee production. Sixty-six percent of coffee is grown by small-scale producers who own less than 10 hectares, while 45 percent comes from plots less than 5 hectares… If we consider that in 2002, the worst year yet, the price per pound was US$0.41, we can clearly see the scale of this catastrophe… [By 2005] the independent organization Coordinadora Nacional de Organizaciones Cafetaleras (National Coordination of Coffee Grower Organizations - CNOC) estimated that producers have lost 65 percent of their income since 1989⁴.

While there were myriad responses to these challenges from producers in Mexico, it’s estimated that between 1995 and 2000 alone, some 800,000 people left the state of Veracruz, with a similar flight happening from the neighboring state of Chiapas⁵. As many of those who left sought refuge in the U.S., there was a further doubling down on the pain felt by producers that remained, as “[the] lure of the U.S. labor market forced up the cost of labor for small-scale Mexican growers at the same time that coffee prices remained low and credit expensive”.

The independent producers and cooperatives that remain today, continue to seek ways to keep coffee production a financially viable business, in part through production of higher quality specialty grade coffees. While never making a full recovery to the boom days of old, Mexico is still among the top ten coffee producing countries in the world.

Considering the shifting challenges that coffee producers in Mexico have been confronted with throughout the country's tumultuous history with the coffee industry, the quality that these coffees display is all the more impressive. We’re hopeful that these coffees are indicators of a promising future for coffee in Mexico - one that we look to continue to explore.

1. Topik, Steven, John M. Talbot, and Mario Samper. “Introduction: Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Latin American Coffee Societies.” Latin American Perspectives 37, no. 2 (2010): 5–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684712
2. Renard, Marie-Christine, and Mariana Ortega Breña. “The Mexican Coffee Crisis.” Latin American Perspectives 37, no. 2 (2010): 21–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684713
3. Topik, Steven, John M. Talbot, and Mario Samper. “Introduction: Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Latin American Coffee Societies.” Latin American Perspectives 37, no. 2 (2010): 5–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684712
4. Renard, Marie-Christine, and Mariana Ortega Breña. “The Mexican Coffee Crisis.” Latin American Perspectives 37, no. 2 (2010): 21–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684713
5. Topik, Steven, John M. Talbot, and Mario Samper. “Introduction: Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Latin American Coffee Societies.” Latin American Perspectives 37, no. 2 (2010): 5–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684712