Brazil: A Wind Without Pity

Up from the Antarctic last week blew a chill and unexpected wind, clutching with its frosty fingers the hillsides and greening fields of coffee-rich Brazil. Brazil's coffeegrowers have learned to live with the danger of frost in June or July —it is now winter in the Southern Hemisphere—but the cold August wind caught them by surprise. Striking in the predawn light across the entire state of Parana (where most Brazilian coffee grows) and as far north as São Paulo, it wilted leaves and left September blossoms stillborn on the branch. Within hours, a lifeless swath of brown marked its path. Before retreating, the wind devastated about 60% of Brazil's coffee trees in the nation's worst freeze in a decade.

"My world turned brown," cried Coffee Farmer Soguro Saito, who lost 5,000 of his 9,000 trees to the wind. Worried Coffeegrower Raimundo Pereira complained bitterly: "The cold wind that ruined my trees has no pity." Thousands of ruined farmers will have to wait two years to harvest another coffee crop, but, in Brazil's one-crop economy, the wind also meant hardship for countless others. Dozens of coffee-roasting plants and wholesale buyers will have nothing to work with; truckers will have nothing to haul; laborers on the large plantations will be laid off.

Nonetheless, there is still an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. Though many people will be hurt by the wind, in the topsyturvy economic world of production gluts nature has done what man has trouble doing. In the past few years, 200 million trees have been deliberately rooted up in Brazil and their beans burned, but 50 million surplus sacks of coffee still overflow the country's bulging warehouses. In the normal supply-and-demand world, a bad crop should make prices go up. But under the new quotas drawn up by the 48-nation International Coffee Council, Brazil can export no more than 18 million sacks a year, and has so much coffee in its big backlog that there is no reason why a cup of coffee should cost more.