‘Everyone feels like they are being scammed’: can Central America’s small coffee growers survive as global prices fall?

Family-run farms in El Salvador and Honduras face mounting losses, rising costs – and the need to adapt or be left behindRead more of our Coffee crisis series hereOn a steep hillside in western El Salvador, Oscar Leiva watches rainfall in December, a month that once marked the start of the dry season. During this harvest cycle, flowering came early and then stalled. A heatwave followed. What remains of the crop is uneven, lower in quality and more expensive to produce than the last.For Leiva and his family, coffee has never been just a crop. His mother, Marina Marinero, remembers when the rains arrived on schedule and the harvest could be planned months in advance. Today, the calendar no longer holds. Decisions about pruning, fertilising and hiring labour feel like educated guesses. Each m