Excellent news - coffee farms cannot find the workers

A long report on how Central American coffee farmers are finding things getting worse. Which includes this:

Labour has become one of the most acute pressures. Coffee farming is physically demanding, poorly paid and increasingly unstable, driving younger people to leave rural areas.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, during the coffee boom, prices were good and all the conditions existed that don’t exist any more,” Guerra says. “Back then, people were eager to work. Now, if you are lucky, you find 20 or 30 workers.”

Isn’t that excellent? The rest of the economy is improving, wages are going up in non-rural areas, sucking people off backbreaking physical work into indoor work, no heavy lifting. At those higher wages too.

We might have to pay more for our coffee, that’s true, as this reserve army of unemployed in the idiocy of rural life disappear but the overall balance for us all is undoubtedly beneficial.

As it was for us those centuries back of course. The wages in the factories were significantly higher than those on the land. Which is why the cities grew the way they did…..

Tim Worstall