Colombia will produce in 2015 some 14 million bags of coffee, the country’s biggest harvest in the last 22 years, President Juan Manuel Santos said Friday in his speech at the closing ceremony of the National Coffee Growers Congress in Bogota. Santos also said the value of Colombia’s coffee harvest will be “the highest in history,” a whopping 6 trillion pesos ($1.87 billion).
He said the result “is of vital importance not only for the more than half-million coffee-growing families who are seeing their incomes increase, but also for the entire economy because that money goes into commerce and creates jobs.”
Santos recalled the crisis the sector suffered through several years ago, but said “today we meet in a very different scenario.”
He pointed to the hike in productivity, with production rising from 10 bags per hectare (4 bags per acre) in 2009 to more than 16 bags per hectare (6.4 bags per acre) in 2015.
“We’ve made good progress, but we must admit we have a long way to go to catch up with competitors like Brazil and Vietnam, which produce between 40 to 60 bags per hectare (16 to 24 bags per acre),” he said.
For his part, the general manager of the National Coffee Growers Federation, Roberto Velez Vallejo, considered the rich harvest to be “the result of government support for coffee growing over the past six years.”
