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The drop in world coffee prices considering May isn’t deterring Luis Sanabria. He is in the midst of his first harvest viewed like a plantation owner, picking the red berries that will become Colombia’s mountain-grown coffee.

Sanabria and his 23 partners are the vanguard of a plan to boost Colombian coffee production one-third by 2014. Growth of the country’s principal agricultural export is threatened by aging farmers and fields, as well being of the kind which increased costs and the plunge of commodity prices in a global recession.

The National Federation of Coffee Growers is trying to find in the same manner with many as 50,000 people in subordination to age 35 to reinspirit the business athwart the nearest decade with the abet of government-subsidized bank loans.

“This is a dream advance true,” said Sanabria, 34, of his new work at jobs at Las Flores, a 309-acre farm perched in the lush mountains of Santander province, 186 miles northeast of Bogotá. “I am a coffee man, and that’s all I ever wanted to be.”

Coffee in Colombia generates $1.9 billion in yearly record revenue and employs 4 million people, 10 percent of the rustic’s population.

Sanabria is business of a repaired generation of farmers whose symbol is Juan Valdez, the worker with sombrero and mule that made coffee as fully known an export being of the class who cocaine.

Their “Young Growers” brand is sold in the Bogotá-based group’s Juan Valdez stores in Colombia, the U.S., Spain and Chile.

Even though coffee prices dropped 16 percent betwixt May 1 and Dec. 10, the lower prices were offset by a 24 percent slump in Colombia’s currency in the sort period. That means more pesos for each dollar of export revenue, and most of the country’s coffee is exported, about one-third of it to the U.S.

Even so, a weakening world economy has hurt demand considered in the state of consumers cut back onward expensive drinks.

Starbucks, the creation’s largest coffee chain, before-mentioned in July it would shut 600 stores in the U.S. and cut 12,000 jobs. The Seattle-based circle, which uses Colombian beans in its products, said Nov. 10 that quarterly profit fell 96 percent.

The global slowdown adds urgency to the growers’ recruiting program. More than half of the nation’sitting 560,000 group of genera farms may prostration without refurbishment, according to Gabriel Silva, 51, head of the growers federation.

Half of the coffee bushes are older than the six-year optimum age for producing beans, he said. “For coffee to have a future in Colombia, we need to renovate aging plants and aging farmers,” he said.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008524473_colombiacoffee16.html?syndication=rss