Cocaine sent Juan Rivera Cabrera to prison. Coffee got him out -- at least for a few hours each day.
Rivera, serving five to seven years for selling cocaine, is among 100 inmates who travel each morning to Puerto Rico's lush highlands to pick coffee beans.
The "coffee convict" brigade was begun last month because of worries that a shortage of pickers might result in up to 30 percent of this year's crop going unharvested before the beans started shriveling and blackening toward the end of the season around New Year's.
"We have the technology, the land and the coffee, but what we don't have are workers to pick the crop," said Jose Fabre Laboy, Puerto Rico's agriculture secretary.
Working with the Department of Corrections, Fabre hopes to enlist an additional 750 coffee pickers from adult and juvenile prisons for next year's harvest.
The voluntary program has drawn praise from farmers who see it as a novel solution to the labor shortage -- and criticism from others who feel the prisoners work too slow.
Each morning, the inmates rise before dawn, pile into buses and drive into the fog-cloaked mountains of western Puerto Rico, the heart of coffee country. On a recent morning, one group went to a large coffee estate in Yauco, 140km southwest of the capital, San Juan.
Clad in brown uniforms, they waded through rows of coffee plants, plucking ripe, red beans and dropping them into buckets dangling from their necks -- all under the fixed gaze of burly prison guards with pistols.
"It was hard the first time, because I had never picked coffee before," Rivera said. "But I'm getting better at it."
Inmates are paid the same as regular coffee pickers -- US$5 per 13km bucket of ripe beans -- and get 10 days taken off their sentences for each month of work.
Puerto Rico was among the world's leading coffee exporters in the 19th century, then hurricanes and increased competition hurt the business. Today, nearly all Puerto Rican coffee stays on the island, where many people start their day with a "cafe con leche" -- coffee with milk.
William Cintron, a former mayor of Yauco and one of 40 coffee farmers who volunteered to use the prisoners, said the labor shortage hurts the coffee industry's growth by limiting how much farmers can plant. He wants even more prisoners used.
"We can't plant more coffee without manual labor, and the manual labor is in the prisons," he said.
But Jorge Gonzalez, mayor of the coffee-growing town of Jayuya, said inmates are too slow at picking the beans, which over-ripen if they are not harvested quickly.
He wants to bring in pickers from the Dominican Republic instead of using inmates.
"Foreign workers are the salvation and the solution for the coffee industry," he said.
This US territory in the Caribbean has just 10,000 coffee pickers -- 5,000 less than needed. The number drops each year as workers quit to take less strenuous jobs in manufacturing and other sectors that pay more than triple the average wages for coffee pickers.
Few prisoners can pick more than 68kg of beans in a five-hour day, a fraction of what a skilled bean picker can pluck. Skilled pickers earn on average US$50 a day -- twice what most prisoners make -- although really speedy ones make up to US$100.
Fabre said there have been few complaints about the prisoners. None has tried to escape, and the ones picking the beans in Yauco said they enjoyed it.
"It takes away the boredom of being locked up. It's a form of therapy for us," said Andre Rivera, a 24-year-old convicted armed robber with a wide grin and tattoos snaking up his arms.
"It's been a tremendous experience," chimed in Juan Coyazo, 31, who is serving a seven-year sentence for assault.
"We're in the mountains of our Puerto Rico and we're proud to be picking the fruit of our soil," he said.
Tropical Storm Usagi strengthened to a typhoon yesterday morning and remains on track to brush past southeastern Taiwan from tomorrow to Sunday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was approximately 950km east-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost point, the CWA said. It is expected to enter the Bashi Channel and then turn north, moving into waters southeast of Taiwan, it said. The agency said it could issue a sea warning in the early hours of today and a land warning in the afternoon. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was moving at
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
UPDATED FORECAST: The warning covered areas of Pingtung County and Hengchun Peninsula, while a sea warning covering the southern Taiwan Strait was amended The Central Weather Administration (CWA) at 5:30pm yesterday issued a land warning for Typhoon Usagi as the storm approached Taiwan from the south after passing over the Philippines. As of 5pm, Usagi was 420km south-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost tip, with an average radius of 150km, the CWA said. The land warning covered areas of Pingtung County and the Hengchun Peninsula (恆春), and came with an amended sea warning, updating a warning issued yesterday morning to cover the southern part of the Taiwan Strait. No local governments had announced any class or office closures as of press time last night. The typhoon
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
RSS