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Angola Coffee
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A laborer holds a basket of freshly picked coffee beans.
Courtesy United Nations (.J.P. Laffont)
Nowhere has the decline in agricultural production been
more
dramatic than in the coffee sector. Formerly Angola's
leading
export, by 1985 coffee exports had dropped to 8 percent of
their
1973 level (see
table 10, Appendix A). Under colonial
rule, about
2,500 large commercial farms and 250,000 peasants were
involved in
growing coffee. During the 1975-76 fighting, the owners,
managers,
and skilled technicians, as well as most of the migrant
work force,
abandoned the coffee estates, which were then
nationalized.
Suffering from a lack of skilled management and shortages
of
available labor in the rural areas, these coffee farms
have
continually posted losses. By 1985 the thirty-four state
coffee
companies produced only 8,890 tons of coffee and depended
on
government subsidies to stay in business. The government
marketed
only 4,700 tons from peasant producers in that year.
In 1983 the government adopted an emergency program to
revive
the coffee industry. Local coffee companies, rather than
the
National Coffee Company (Emprêsa Nacional de
Café--Encafe), were
given the responsibility to run the state coffee farms,
and, to
encourage greater efficiency, the area under cultivation
was
reduced to less than one-fifth of the area abandoned by
the large
commercial coffee growers at independence. Aid for these
efforts
has been obtained from the French Central Board for
Economic
Cooperation (Caisse Centrale de Coopération
Economique--CCCE) and
two UN organizations, the WFP and the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO). The WFP was furnished with US$14.3
million on
a five-year (1983-87) plan to pay coffee workers in food
rather
than in local currency to discourage worker absenteeism,
one of the
industry's most serious problems. In addition, the
government, as
part of its program of economic liberalization, was in the
process
of turning over the marketing of coffee to local, rather
than
national, organizations.
Despite these efforts, however, by 1985 the state
coffee farms
had only about 50 percent of the required work force
because of the
general drain of people from the rural areas and the
unattractive
wages that were paid in nearly worthless kwanzas.
Moreover, the
industry was still plagued by the UNITA insurgency, whose
attacks
had inflicted over US$4 million worth of damage on coffee
plantations by 1985. Other problems encountered on the
coffee
plantations mirrored the general deterioration of the
economic
infrastructure. High charges for transportation of coffee
and
machinery and lack of facilities for hulling the coffee
slowed and
made more expensive the entire production process.
Furthermore,
some plantation managers complained that their workers
were not
productive, not only because of absenteeism but also
because of
their advanced age.
The decline in coffee exports in the mid-1980s resulted
largely
from the depletion of stocks that had earlier cushioned
exports as
production declined. Exports to members of the
International Coffee
Organization (ICO) have remained fairly stable since 1983,
but
exports to non-ICO members, of which East Germany has been
by far
the most important market in the late 1980s, have
declined. The
fall in sales to the non-ICO market has eroded coffee
earnings
because these sales have traditionally been at
substantially higher
prices than those to ICO members. Exacerbating the decline
in
production and exports has been the depressed world market
for
coffee. From February 1986 to August 1987, ICO indicator
prices
dropped by more than 20 percent.
Data as of February 1989
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