Juayua, Apr. 24 - El Salvador's coffee trees are advancing beyond retirement age and industry officials say the former backbone of the economy is slowly fading into history.
While most modern coffee farming practices call for trees to be replanted on a 15-20 year cycle, the average tree age in El Salvador is much older, with trees planted before the first manned space flight in 1961 easily found on many farms.
Coffee farming began on a large scale in El Salvador in the 19th century and coffee families with huge land holdings soon dominated the nation's economy and politics.
But yields are now well below global standards and industry leaders worry the sector may never climb out of the hole it is in with farmers still swamped with debts after record low prices earlier this decade.
"The average age of the El Salvadoran coffee tree is above 35 years, which is worrying if the farm is poorly maintained," said Ricardo Espitia, who heads the El Salvadoran Coffee Council.
According to the El Salvadoran Coffee Research Foundation, average yields are now about nine 60-kg bags of green coffee per hectare, less than half what they were in 1991/92 at the end of El Salvador's civil war, fought in large part by leftist rebels against the country's coffee-farming elite.
In a November speech in Costa Rica, Eduardo Esteve of agricultural trading giant ECOM said yields under 10 bags per hectare are unsustainable in the modern marketplace. Other industry analysts agree low-yield farms are doomed.
"The situation is very critical. Obviously this has aspects that have to do with the indebtedness, profitability and productive efficiency," warned Carlos Borgonovo, president of Salvador's Association of Coffee Processors and Exporters.
"The solution is to increase productivity. If it does not increase, coffee growing here is going to continue dying or disappear," Borgonovo said.
Replanting, pruning, pest controls and fertilizing all but stopped in El Salvador when farmers found themselves ineligible for bank loans in the mid-1990s amid a downward price slide that bottomed out in 2002.
As a result, El Salvadoran production has plunged to its lowest levels in 50 years, with the 2006/07 crop seen at 1.3 million bags, or just 44 percent of output a decade ago.
Experts say that to get things back on track farms need to start by resuming normal maintenance of older trees, because replanting takes farms out of production for at least three years as new trees grow to maturity.
The signs of strain are clearly visible on the shady farms that cover hillsides around the town of Juayua about 50 miles (75 kms) west of the capital San Salvador. Thick trunks are testimony to the decades that the trees have stood over the hills' panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean.
Many farms have become so unprofitable that farmers are clearing them through slash-and-burn practices to plant corn, which also rids the landscape of its main source of forest cover.
Trees that remain have not been given proper care. Some plots replanted after prices shot upward last year are now covered in undergrowth as credits and farmer optimism has waned.
Strong flowering displayed by trees earlier this month had raised hopes production will recover in 2007/08.
But with the industry as a whole estimated to be $350 million in debt and sales not expected to surpass $250 million, few in the industry think farmers will begin the massive replanting the industry needs any time soon.