‘Everyone feels like they are being scammed’: can Central America’s small coffee growers survive as global prices fall?

A worker harvests coffee at the El Espino co-operative in Santa Tecla, El Salvador. In the mid-1970s, El Salvador ranked among the world’s leading coffee producers, with harvests exceeding 5 million quintales. Now, national production struggles to hit 1 million Photograph: Camilo Freedman/The Guardian

On a steep hillside in western El Salvador, Oscar Leiva watches rainfall in December, a month that once marked the start of the dry season. During this harvest cycle, flowering came early and then stalled. A heatwave followed. What remains of the crop is uneven, lower in quality and more expensive to produce than the last.

For Leiva and his family, coffee has never been just a crop. His mother, Esperanza Marinero, remembers when the rains arrived on schedule and the harvest could be planned months in advance. Today, the calendar no longer holds. Decisions about pruning, fertilising and hiring labour feel like educated guesses. Each mistake carries a cost the family cannot afford.