‘It used to be a farm – now it’s a mall’: how El Salvador’s crisis-hit coffee producers are trying to adapt

A mural in Concepción de Ataco. Coffee accounted for the biggest part of El Salvador’s exports in the 20th century but production has fallen to record lows in recent years. The industry cannot sustain many permanent jobs, so a fifth of coffee farmers also need other work. Photograph: Vespasian/Alamy

The new highway has taken chunks out of Ines Ortiz’s coffee farm but the land lost to the Los Chorros Megaproject, El Salvador’s largest-ever infrastructure scheme, is only the latest crisis faced by growers in Central America’s smallest country, who have survived deforestation, civil war, climate change, falling prices for their beans, and infestations of rust disease in recent decades.

A former head of natural resources at the agriculture ministry, Ortiz, 72, still cannot believe what she sees on her farm of shade-grown coffee plants in the hills spreading from the San Salvador volcano. The farmed forest lost to the $410m ($300m) highway graphically illustrate how the government’s construction boom and deforestation have hit the coffee industry.