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"The people of Dipilto say this is the best coffee in the whole of Nicaragua," said Jorge Arturo Díaz, as he handed over a cup in the municipal offices of the tiny village, high up in the northern mountains of Nicaragua, near Honduras. "Of course, most people say that about their own coffee," he added. Dipilto is in Nueva Segovia province, one of Nicaragua’s best coffee growing regions, at high altitude with rich soil.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere in the village of Dipilto is grave. Bush fires have raged since February for three months, driving campesino farmers away from their homes and livelihoods. Although the government reports that the fires have destroyed 6,375 hectares of forest in the area, local authorities put the figure at 15,000 hectares. According to Julio Herrera, of the National Forestry Institute, 4,000 hectares of valuable pine tree and coffee plantations have been affected.

"The fires are a disaster," said Diaz, a Colombian agronomist, recruited by the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR) to assist the Association of Nueva Segovia Municipalities (AMUNSE) and the Agriculture and Livestock Union (UNAG) in promoting sustainable coffee growth.

Bush fires have become a regular occurrence over the last 20 years in Nueva Segovia: partly the product of higher temperatures in the north, brought about by massive logging of pines and a plague of pine "gorgojo" grubs which have together cleared vast tracts of forest, disrupting the ecosystem.

Twenty years ago, the region was covered with pines and temperatures were cool, according to locals. Today the days are scorching, and the mountains are dotted with only the occasional pine. "When Hurricane Mitch hit in 1998," said a community member in Dipilto, "it was much worse than it might have been because there were no trees to act as a wind break or to absorb the water. The soil simply washed down the mountain sides, destroying houses, bridges, families: anything in its path" (LP, Jan. 18, 1999).

The AMUNSE/UNAG project aims to support small farmers and coffee producers hit hardest by climate change, soil erosion and a glut in the global coffee industry (LP, March 12, 2003).

The wholesale price for Nicaraguan coffee, made mostly from high-grade, Arabica beans, has dropped from US$1.44 a pound in 1999 to around 70 cents a pound now. This nose-dive has left approximately 300,000 Nicaraguans unemployed as well as threatening many small-scale producers, who account for 64 percent of coffee production, with foreclosure.

In April 2002, the National Assembly unanimously passed a bill which would have suspended all foreclosures due to debts and unpaid loans for coffee growers for 300 days. The bill was vetoed by then President Arnoldo Alemán (1996-2002) and subsequently dropped after intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), including the suspension of $50 million in loans by the IDB due to what it called an "unstable market."

The government’s latest approach to the coffee crisis is to tell farmers to find something else to do. In a country with 67 percent unemployment, and a northern territory populated by farmers who have grown up growing coffee, UNAG does not favor such a solution. UNAG’s Roger Eddy Montalbán points to a more sustainable approach to ensuring the farmers’ survival. "The conditions here are now more favorable for growing specialty coffees, like organic and gourmet," he said. "We say: do keep growing coffee, but make it specialty coffee, and at the same time grow other subsistence crops."

Many such coffees are "shade grown," beneath trees, offering a slower growing cycle and time for the sugars in the beans to mature. The trees also provide a natural habitat for wildlife, thereby supporting the environment. Most specialty coffee is also organic, grown without pesticides or herbicides. Such growing conditions are ideal for entering the fair trade market, where the coffee is bought straight from the farmer, cutting out the middlemen.

From Dipilto we drive higher into the mountains, along a dusty track, until we arrive at a tiny tin building, surrounded by coffee plants. Marcio Filiman Sevilla Mardena stands nearby, washing his recently-harvested coffee beans. He leads me through the seemingly haphazardly arranged plants — coffee is rarely planted in rows, to avoid soil erosion when the rains come — to show me the many different crops he’s growing among them.

There are banana, apple and citrus trees and tomato plants, as well as trees that are harvested to produce natural medicines. When asked how many people he employs to do all this work, Mardena laughed and pointed to his chest. "Only one," he said.