Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick

Author:Augustine Sedgewick [Sedgewick, Augustine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

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THE WORLD DEPRESSION did what Herbert Hoover had not—cut the legs out from under the Brazilian defense of coffee. From 1929 to early 1933, the four years of Hoover’s presidency, world coffee prices fell by more than 60 percent, from over twenty cents a pound to under ten, wiping out the gains of the previous decade. The decline in prices squeezed all levels of Salvadoran society, but not evenly. Foreign importers offered Salvadoran exporters and millers lower prices for their crops. Millers cut the advances they paid to coffee planters. Planters, who depended on these advances to pay workers, hired fewer people and paid them less. Working people, already accustomed to making do with less than they needed, went without.

In rural districts generally, unemployment may have been as high as 40 percent.9 On the coffee plantations, it was probably even higher than that. Antonio Flores Torres owned a large plantation just outside Santa Ana. In the spring of 1927, Flores Torres employed an average of forty-five people a week digging holes for new trees, cleaning the weeds around existing trees, and preparing for the next crop. In the spring of 1931, he employed an average of nineteen people a week.10 Those who kept working coffee did so on the barest of terms. Planters pushed down wages to match the fall in prices—often between 50 and 60 percent, and in some cases as much as 75 percent.11

For people who worked coffee, the solution to hard times was not so simple as the planters’ backup plan James Hill had described—just closing up their town homes and going to the country, where they could wear old clothes and eat things grown on the land until the crisis passed. Eating things grown on the land was exactly what working people could no longer do.

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