NYERI, Kenya - Robert Kanyi, a 90 year-old Kenyan coffee farmer, grabbed his head in disbelief when a visitor told him that coffee drinkers in the United States pay as much as $3 for an espresso, made with Kenyan beans. "I don't see that kind of money here ", he said. "If we did, we wouldn't be poor". Only a few weeks ago, Kanyi uprooted half of the coffee plants on the three - acre plot his family has farmed for the past half-century, replacing them with beans, maize and tea."It was very painful," he recalled outside his two-room mud hut facing snowcapped Mount Kenya. "Cutting down the [coffee bushes) was like sacrificing something or someone close to you. But we have no alternative. At least we'll have something to eat."
Low wholesale prices have devastated thousands of farmers like Kanyi in the coffee-growing countries of East and Central Africa -Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Burundi and Rwanda.
In Nyeri, where Kanyi lives, farmers don't need labourers to tend abandoned fields, so unemployment has topped 50 per cent, according to some government officials.
"Wife-beating is up, alcoholism is rampant and families are falling apart every day -all because of the problems in the coffee business," said J.K. Mwangi, a Kenyan official who monitors coffee trading in the central highlands. In the nearby town of Meru, dozens of coffee farmers have uprooted their coffee plants to grow khat, a stimulant popular in Somalia, Yemen and Ethiopia.
Stanley Mungathia, 55, said the khat grown on his l.2-hectare plot brings in about $6,000 a year -more than five times the amount he earned from coffee.
"This is a cash business," said Mungathia, who now exports khat to Somalian communities in London and Amsterdam. "I don't have to wait for some cooperative to pay me money that will never come."
The crisis also has affected education. Thousands of students have dropped out or been kicked out of school because their coffee-farming parents cannot afford to pay their school fees or buy their books and uniforms.