Perspective: Cofee & migrationHow a Struggling Coffee Market Pushes Guatemalans North

Published 26 August 2019

Last year, Stephanie Leutert traveled to the Guatemalan highlands to visit the towns that were sending the most people per capita to the United States. She was curious about why Guatemalans were leaving their communities and what factors contributed to these decisions. In each town, she never found a single answer but, rather, various overlapping reasons that included a changing climate, low wages, few opportunities for employment, a desire for family reunification, distrust in political leaders and a lack of safety, among others. Yet there was one unexpected theme that she kept hearing about in the highlands: a changing coffee sector and low international coffee prices.

Last year, Stephanie Leutert traveled to the Guatemalan highlands to visit the towns that were sending the most people per capita to the United States. She was curious about why Guatemalans were leaving their communities and what factors contributed to these decisions. In each town, she never found a single answer but, rather, various overlapping reasons that included a changing climate, low wages, few opportunities for employment, a desire for family reunification, distrust in political leaders and a lack of safety, among others. Yet there was one unexpected theme that she kept hearing about in the highlands: a changing coffee sector and low international coffee prices.

Guatemala’s coffee industry is one of the country’s main economic motors and also the largest rural employer. Leutert writes in Lawfare that in recent years, the industry has struggled to stay afloat amid recurring coffee plagues, unpredictable rain patterns, a stronger Quetzal (the Guatemalan currency) and low global coffee prices. When prices are high, coffee growers can flourish and absorb higher production costs, but when prices drop, hundreds of thousands of families watch as their incomes dry up. These families and their communities often have few alternative economic opportunities, meaning that a struggling coffee sector can send local economies into a tailspin.

Over the past three years, the combination of Guatemala’s various push factors have sparked an exodus, with emigration numbers more than tripling (doubling over the past year alone). Since October 2018, the country has surged past Mexico as the number-one sending country for people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. During this time frame, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 250,000 Guatemalans—compared to just 136,000 Mexicans—making up a third of all U.S. border arrivals and 40 percent of all apprehended families. It’s also likely that tens of thousands more Guatemalans have left the country, with Sarah Spalding and I estimating, in a model we made for Lawfarethat more than 282,600 Guatemalans have headed north since last October.