San Jose, Costa Rica, Nov. 21 - Costa Rica's most profitable coffee crop in years is quickly ripening, but instead of excitement for the harvest, farmers find themselves nervously hoping they can find enough people to pick the crop.
A boom in construction and competition with sugar, melon and pineapple crops has this Central American country facing the unsavory prospect of leaving beans unpicked on trees.
Rodrigo Vargas, president of the country's National Chamber of Coffee Farmers, the country's largest growers' group, says the upcoming harvest is threatened on two fronts.
Not only is the country well short of the 150,000 harvesters it normally needs, but indications are that coffee beans throughout the country will hit peak maturity simultaneously instead of the normal staggered periods.
That would raise the need for pickers to 180,000 for the peak, Vargas says.
Officials at the Costa Rican Coffee Institute say they expect to have 110,000 pickers for this harvest, and they hope the government allows 10,000 temporary workers from neighboring Nicaragua.
But with full harvesting just two weeks away, there has been no government response yet. Growers say privately they hope the government is lax in enforcing immigration laws.
"The issue of labor is becoming one of deep analysis," Xinia Chavez, a coffee farmer and president a processing and exporting cooperative Coopepalmares told Reuters. "Labor continues to be scarce."
Farmers and ICAFE attribute the labor shortage to a combination of factors, including competition for other industries, a poor image of the work and a lengthening of the school year in to the harvest.
Roughly half of the pickers are believed to be Costa Rican, the rest mainly Nicaraguan migrants, many of them without work permits who sneak into the country clandestinely.
The scarcity of labor has helped raise the prices pickers receive. While legally pickers can be paid no less than $1.00 per box (enough cherries to produce five pounds of green coffee), Chavez said on her farm when harvesting begins next month she will start paying $2.00 per box.
But she may need to raise that amount if coffee is going unpicked. Farmers in more rural areas say they will start harvesting offering $2.25 per box. An average picker collects 10 to 12 boxes per day, more during peak ripening periods.
Anticipating problems, this year for the first time ICAFE has set up a toll-free number for farmers to call if they need workers, although it is unclear if calling the number will help farmers find laborers who may not exist.
While immediate concerns are focused on this year's crop, Vargas said the long-term prospects for solving the industry's labor woes are slim, as depending on migrant laborers is not a solution.
That has led to calls for experimentation with mechanizing parts of the harvesting process. In Brazil, the world's largest producer, many farms are fully mechanized. But unlike Brazil few Costa Rican coffee farms are on flat terrain accessible to tractors.