Paper presented at the 52nd CFCS Annual Meeting, Guadeloupe, July 10-16, 2016
COFFEE, QUALITY AND ORIGIN WITHIN A DEVELOPING ECONOMY: RECENT FINDINGS FROM THE COFFEE PRODUCTION OF HONDURAS. Joel Ulises Sevilla-Palma1, Carmen Peligros-Espada2, Octavio Uña-Juarez3 and Sonia Quiroga Gómez4 1
PhD, Planning Coordinator, SAG EMPRENDESUR, Honduras; 2 PhD., Lecturer, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain;
3
PhD., Lecturer, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos;4 PhD., Lecturer, Universidad de Alcalá
Keywords: Agriculture, Coffee, Honduras, Altitude and Quality Abstract Following the privatization in 2000 of the technical and economic services of the Honduran government and the following channeling of taxes from coffee production, the development of coffee policy of Honduras was at hand of the private sector influence, leaving the public sector as a secondary participant. From the launch of the policy in 2003, one special interest was given to improve the national production and to promote specialty coffees identified locally with a good potential at final markets. The Honduran Institute of the Coffee (IHCAFE), now private has turned into a key actor by having taxes managed from the public (producers, intermediaries and exporters), and due to this fact to assume the leadership in the execution of the policy, particularly in the local assistance and the international promotion of the coffee. From gathering a national coffee quality project, IHCAFE collected hundreds of samples out of the producing regions of the country (200408), the followed quality analysis found diverse profiles of flavors and aromas of the coffee, though the process also found important defects in the coffee, which were associated with problems of processing and quality control. Introduction At the beginning of 21th century, coffee was a booming business, yet after years of commodity exports based on commercial preparations with limited quality control, many problems started to have a greater negative impact on the price paid for Honduran mainstream coffee. Internally, while the primary production kept increasing, the quality control was problematic after the harvest and particularly during the wet milling processing of fruits to parchment, leaving coffee parchment without a proper drying and with high humidity content, besides promoting the presence of fungus, provoking a rapid deterioration of coffee quality during transport, storage and trade. With a complicated scenario, different studies had found related quality problems within the Honduran coffee industry, among them: insufficient technology transference, poor processing facilities and above all complicated marketing relationships between growers and intermediaries. For instance, coffee defects affect quality, and are known to be associated to insufficient processing facilities, lack of quality control, and restricted technical assistance to the crop. In contrast, the exemplary (high quality) or specialty coffee segment was growing at final markets, and in 2003 Honduras started to discover new opportunities with the differentiated coffee niche within the local boundaries, coffees with particular characteristics, for example related to certain agronomic varieties, harvesting, crop´s high altitude growth and better processing. Materials y methods From the universe, the sample size of the growers was calculated by following a well-known statistical protocol for sample size estimation of 397 surveys with expected error of 0.015 and confidence of 90% (Robert, Morgan & Daryle, 1970; Hernandez et al, 2006). The statistical program INFOSTAT® was used for multivariate analysis of the data information (Di Rienzo et al, 2008; Balzarini et al, 2008, Sevilla, 2013). Following the multivariable statistical methods, commonly used to analyze quality rather than quantity type of information, the Correspondence Analysis was primarily selected to perform interdependency analysis, in which the initial contingency tables were later used to present a graphical plot visualizing the relationships between selected variables (Rencher, 2004; Di Rienzo et al, 2008). Other multivariable analysis techniques were complementary to the study: Principal Components technique to perform simultaneous analysis of quality and quantity variables, and the Canonical Correlation technique by using only quantity type of variables. In total 904 coffee bean samples were collected by IHCAFE and later analyzed in this study, during four consecutive annual coffee harvests from 2004-2008. Within the Honduran producing regions: 173 coffee samples originated from Agalta Tropical, 203 from Azul Meambar, 208 from Copan, 184 from Montecillos and 136 from Opalaca. All samples were from Arabica coffee varieties: Bourbon, Catuai, Caturra, Colombia, Geisha, IHCAFE-90, Lempira, Pacas, Typica and Villa Sarchi. Samples came from three altitude ranges: low (less than 900 meters above sea level), medium (901-1,200 masl) and high (1,201 masl and above). Samples were collected in dry parchment during the harvest season, centralized and stored in sealed plastic bags. Samples in parchment were prepared for green coffee and stored in plastic boxes within a month, before obtaining medium roast products by the Quality Control Lab (IHCAFE), after resting for a few hours the samples were ground and used in the sensory test room for cupping evaluation. Coffee bean samples were ground medium a few minutes before obtaining the infusion. The amount of ground coffee used for the infusion was set up to obtain an optimum ratio of 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 ml of water. Ground coffees were put in white ceramic cups, and hot purified water was poured over the ground coffee (93ºC, reverse osmosis and carbon filtered water), some 3 to 5 minutes before cupping by panelists from IHCAFE´s Quality Control Lab. 2.5. Cupping Method. The sensory test
264