El Salvador will get an $80 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) to renovate thousands of coffee plantations destroyed by the roya fungus, the country's government said on Thursday. Agriculture Minister Orestes Ortez said that the money would be used to give loans to some 4,160 producers to help them renew their fields with plants resistant to the fungus.
El Salvador is the only country in Central America that has not yet shown any signs of recovering from the region's worst-ever outbreak of a leaf rust fungus that in 2012 reached higher altitudes than before. The country's annual coffee harvest is now less than half of what it was prior to the outbreak after some producers could not afford to replant with roya-resistant seedlings and left their farms or turned to other crops.
The funds from the CABEI should be ratified by Congress, Ortez said. El Salvador is forecast to produce just 740,000 60-kg bags of coffee in the 2017/18 crop year (October/September), compared with the 1.87 million bags harvested in 2010/11 prior to the outbreak, International Coffee Organization (ICO) data show.
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