Planning my visit to Guatemala, I imagined colonial charm, good food, and beautiful landscapes dominated by impressive volcanoes. I never imagined that it would spark a curiosity in family-based production, craftsmanship, and artisanship. The weaving of textiles, the production of chocolate, the crafting of jade, and the cultivation/production of coffee are all things I witnessed and learned about during my trip.
I saw people making things, producing things, with a level of hustle, skill, and care that made me think about the American dream – the idea that upward mobility can be achieved through hard work and initiative. And it made me wonder about the economics of this type of work in Guatemala.
In particular, a coffee farmer’s story made me curious about smallholder farming, its implications for workers, and the implications on the international stage. In short, I wanted to know if the families that produced the high-quality, delicious coffee that I and so many others enjoy so much, made a decent living from their efforts?
Growing Coffee – From Bean to Cup
I didn’t know what to expect as we waited patiently for someone from the tour company to meet us in the main plaza of Ciudad Vieja, a town about twenty minutes from Antigua. After we were collected, our guide explained that we would walk to the farmer’s home in town, and from there visit his coffee farm. As we walked through the hilly streets I wondered how we would get to the farm – would there be a car waiting for us?
It surprised me to see that we would walk to his farm, slowly inclining up the cobbled and broken streets within the town limits and then reaching a place where the town ended and the street became just a dirt road. I guess I just associated farm with “way out in the country”. We walked up the road, which also was on an incline heading up a volcano, and then we started to see plots of crops off to the left and right of the road. It was beautiful, the climate was perfect, and the sunlight danced around giving the day a magical quality. I thought to myself, I’m sure he’s proud to own his plot and grow something so delicious on this beautiful land.
Eduardo told us about his becoming a farmer, hoping for better economic opportunities (he started off as a baker), and how he bought more and more land as he became able. He explained that the land was a lot more affordable during the dictatorship and terror of the 1980s, when guerrilla warfare made it very dangerous to own. With the terror done, now it was nearly impossible for someone like him to afford to buy land unless he bought far up the volcano. He told us about how he made a go of farming on his own in the beginning but after some years he joined a cooperative. How in the cooperative he works with they share tools and resources to get their coffee ready for export. Getting good, stable prices for his crops could be challenging, even in a co-op, he told us.
After learning about how coffee is grown, we went back to his home and he explained the process and showed us the equipment for washing and drying the coffee beans. Then his lovely wife showed us how to roast them, literally toasting them on a flat clay griddle on top of her wood-burning stove. Afterwards, she ground them in the way of the Mayan tradition by placing them on a volcanic stone and rolling another cylindrical stone over them. Finally we got to enjoy a cup of the finished product with a champurrada (a flat, crunchy cookie, popular in the country).
Family Farming in Context
One thing that struck me as I was learning on the tour was that most of the farmers in Guatemala are smallholder, family farms, just like Eduardo. And they try to come together to share knowledge, resources, and gain bargaining power. I learned that someone like Eduardo can earn a little extra by working with an organization (in this case De La Gente) to give these tours of his farm and teaching the production process. I thought this all sounded great.
Later, when I went to the data, I learned that although smallholder farmers make up ~97% of the farms in the country, they only produce about 44% of the coffee yield. The remaining 3%, large and medium-size farmers, make up the rest (Daily Coffee News). It’s estimated that about 70% of smallholder farmers belong to a co-op. The majority of their crop is bought as berries by intermediaries who process it and then sell for export. Unfortunately, selling unprocessed berries brings in much lower prices for farmers. Eduardo seemed to be one of the smallholders ahead of the curve in that respect.
Although Guatemalan coffee is of great quality and can garner better export prices, smallholder farmers often don’t reap the benefits. Below is a graph showing export prices for coffee grown in Guatemala vs. Colombia. Colombia is the third-largest coffee producer in the world, Guatemala is ~10th, and the United States is the largest buyer of coffee exports from both these countries, 40% and 40-50% respectively. We see that Guatemala has often dictated higher export prices per bag of coffee than Colombia, which has larger scale. (If interested, I dig into the quirks of the coffee industry in Colombia in this article). This clearly shows the value of the product in Guatemala.
Economic Reality in Guatemala
So, here we see a major disconnect. I had assumed that if you work hard, own land, and produce something of value, you can live a financially secure life. But many smallholder farmers, despite belonging to co-ops, do not get the full potential of the commodity that they cultivate. Rising costs of production also seem to be an issue. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) says that the majority of farmers cannot live/support a family on their income from farming alone. They have to seek other means of income, usually through informal work. Although Eduardo seemed in a better position than many, this tracks with him as well. He was securing alternative income by giving these tours.
Guatemala is in a bad way economically. A high proportion of the nation works in the informal labor sector (~68%). These people piece together work to earn money. They do not get benefits, insurance, or any guarantees covered by national labor laws. 47% of the country’s population lives in poverty.
I wondered if owning a coffee farm put families in a better economic situation than most in the country. The short answer is that it’s complicated. Below we see the average earnings of a person in a year in rural vs. urban areas. The average income across the population is $5575. The FAO states that the average smallholder farm family generates a gross annual income of $6772 USD. This leads to the conclusion that farm families do a little better than average.
But we know that this is family, not individual income. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison. We also know that farmers supplement their income with other kinds of work outside of what is earned from their crops. It’s estimated that 40% of those earnings comes from non-farm/agricultural work. This means that about $4063 USD of the FAO number actually comes from farming. It is estimated that the rural annual living wage in Guatemala, the income needed for a worker and their family to afford basic necessities, is $5904. This leads one to conclude that farming is not a viable way to earn a living in and of itself.
I also wondered about the advantages of farming cooperatives. Does membership actually improve the income of farmers? Unfortunately I was not able to obtain data with a breakdown of income along these lines. But, we know that ~70% of smallholder farms belong to co-ops. And reporting says that the majority of these farming families cannot subsist on their farming incomes alone.
So this may indicate that there is much more needed support to make farming a living-wage endeavor for owners. Infrastructure and the ability to sell processed beans, not raw coffee berries, are a few. An alternative consideration is that these numbers indicate that smallholder farms are just too small. It could be possible that families need to own above a certain threshold of land to make it sustainable.
Making Sense of Making a Living
When I sat down to write this essay, I thought I would find data supporting the ideas that I grew up with about gaining economic stability in society. Owning land is gold, working hard is king, producing something of value secures a future. My time with Eduardo gave me a sense that, yes this could be a tough industry. But farming, particularly with the support of a co-op, had opened up financial opportunity for him.
Unfortunately, the data that I observed tells a very different story. A story where farmers fail to make enough to live through farming alone. A story where they sell unprocessed berries, despite being part of co-ops, excluding them from untapped value in their commodity.
It can be difficult to sit with both views. Both Eduardo’s experience as a smallholder farmer and the data can be correct. But Eduardo’s story is only that of one man. And the data has gaps. Incomes in the industry are not well reported — we don’t have data on co-op vs. non-co-op farming family incomes. And we don’t even have an apples-to-apples comparison of farming income to the national average, because we have family vs. employee incomes.
The reporting and data referenced in this essay indicate that 70% of smallholder farmers belong to a co-op. If co-ops help share resources and information, why is it reported that most farmers sell raw berries, not processed beans? Is this not something that co-ops assist with? We would need more data to verify this. This would give us a better understanding of the incomes of farming families. And perhaps shed light on missed potential for farmers to at least reach the average employee income in the country.
It’s a reminder that data does not always tell the whole story. Sometimes it just points us to where we need to look closer. Or makes us aware of the gaps in our information that we need to close in order to move closer to truth. Another important nugget: one person’s reality may not extrapolate to that of the majority.
This story also prompts us to remember that the world is complicated. The playbook that we are fed about self-determination and production is not a plug-and-play solution for making a living. Sometimes it’s not enough to cultivate a raw product, or even create a finished one, if you don’t have proper/direct access to the markets that value it.
In Guatemala, people were hustling, creating, producing. Yet, nearly half of the population lives in poverty. People should be able to make a living wage for solid work cultivating a commodity that people actually value. This leads one to wonder, what is the glitch in the system? Can opulence only come with scale?
Sources
Coffee Daily News. https://dailycoffeenews.com/2024/05/15/guatemala-coffee-report-new-map-for-worlds-fourth-largest-arabica-producer/
Anacafe. https://www.anacafe.org/uploads/file/a051658b56974d28a7dab61f23faaaa0/CafedeGuatemala-Cifras-2023.pdf
ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342764180_The_Coffee_Market_System_in_Guatemala_Opportunities_for_Supporting_Renovation_and_Rehabilitation
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1141910/
World Bank. https://www.worldbank.org/ext/en/country/guatemala
Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia. (January 27, 2025). Export value of coffee from Colombia from 2012 to 2024 (in million U.S. dollars) [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved December 21, 2025, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/883670/colombia-green-coffee-exports-value/
UN Comtrade. (March 19, 2024). Exports value of coffee from Guatemala from 2012 to 2023 (in million U.S. dollars) [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved December 21, 2025, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1416897/coffee-export-value-guatemala/
INE (Guatemala). (August 10, 2024). Average monthly income in Guatemala from 2017 to 2023 (in Guatemalan Quetzals) [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved December 21, 2025, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1400889/average-monthly-income-guatemala/
Living Wage Update Report Rural Guatemala, Central Departments 2024. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/63e128dff6c16159094155ea/t/66eb157645e040369b69b00e/1726682486731/2024+Update+Report_Guatemala_Central+Departments.pdf
