A chara, – The article by Deirdre McQuillan on Colombian coffee production ("The journey from bean to cup", Magazine, November 16th) would appear to have been written from only one point of view. Nestlé, the company that invited Ms McQuillan to Colombia, is a large multinational whose human rights record in that country has been questioned on many occasions.
Ms McQuillan mentions in passing a “violent, uneasy past”, however, in reality violence is experienced on a daily basis by farmers and workers in Colombia today. It is extremely upsetting that she paints such rosy picture, when the harsh reality of the Colombian countryside, particularly 600,000 families of coffee producers who cannot cover the costs of production due to prices being set so low by global markets, is such a different and more compelling story.
While she does mention agrarian “unrest” in coffee producing areas, she fails to give a picture of what happened in March: one person was killed and over 100 injured by the riot police, many of them severely and seriously injured. This violence was replicated in August during the national agrarian strike with 15 people murdered and hundreds injured.
The Colombian government, while it is good with big producers and multinationals, has in fact failed to honour any of the promised increases in subsidies mentioned in the article and much of the current level of subsidy has failed to reach the majority of small farmers.
What is worse: the Colombian government’s relentless push for a free trade agreement with the EU threatens to make matters worse; even after the agrarian crisis and terrible disruption to the rural economy, following the US-Colombia FTA, have already been clearly demonstrated in a number of independent reports. This is the reason a new strike is being planned for early next year. We, the undersigned, hope that then, the Irish media will listen to the voice of farmers in Colombia. – Is mise,
JOSÉ ANTONIO
GUTIÉRREZ D, Latin
American Solidarity Centre;
JOHN O’BRIEN, Justice for
Colombia Ireland; ALIRIO
GARCÍA, National
Federation of Rural Workers
of Colombia & JOSÉ
ORLANDO GÓMEZ ARIAS, Association of Rural
Workers of Cauca Valley,
C/o Merrion Row,
Dublin 2.