Colombian Coffee's Biggest Problem: No One Wants to Pick It.

Coffee occupies a position somewhere between medicine and fetishistic object for much of North America and Europe, but, of course, coffee isn’t grown there. It’s grown in Latin America, Africa, and, increasingly, Southeast Asia. Coffee harvesting has a reputation as a reliably horrible job. Picking coffee is brutal; in Central America, coffee farmers are paid only once a year and have to suffer through several months in which they have no money, but still put in long, backbreaking hours. In one country, Colombia, the farm workers are fighting back by choosing to abandon the coffee fields and find other jobs, reports Reuters.

Colombia has long had a reputation for producing some of the best coffees in the world; its climate and high elevation allow coffee plants to produce lovely, mild arabica beans. (It’s the biggest producer of arabica in the world.) The country even has its own fictional mascot: Juan Valdez, a mustachioed man who appears with his mule, Conchita, on Colombian coffee to denote its place of origin. But output has been plummeting in the last decade or so, and a labor shortage is a major reason.

Colombia has had a transformative decade. Its major crop, coffee, was decimated by the coffee borer beetle, a problem that took eight years to get under control. At the same time, the country’s economy exploded: poverty levels since 1990 have been sliced in half, and industries as varied as construction and tech have become major employers.

This past year, with the blight under control, the coffee crop is back to its pre-borer levels. The country has the capacity to produce as much as 18 million bags of coffee, at 60 kilograms per bag, each year. But with other opportunities that come with a newly booming economy, Colombia does not have enough farmhands to do the backbreaking labor of actually picking the coffee.

That’s largely because the job of picking coffee is undesirable. Coffee pickers are paid poorly, with one picker interviewed by Reuters earning about $80 a week for the dangerous work of climbing steep elevations to pick the fruits. Coffee farmers do not typically give pickers any sort of benefits, so they can forget pensions or medical care.

Colombia’s coffee picking can’t be easily mechanized due to the steep slopes that the coffee plants prefers. It’s estimated that the country needs somewhere between 20 percent to 40 percent more pickers to ensure that the fruits are picked at the right time – or the crop will suffer serious waste.