Colombia Agriculture

This nation's $100-million-a-year rose industry has been imperiled by a recent American anti-dumping ruling in favor of U.S. growers, Colombian industry representatives say. Colombian growers, who send an estimated 90% of their production to the American market, say a tentative decision last month by the U.S. Commerce Department could force them to hold back 50% of their rose exports over the next three months and could cost Colombians about 50,000 jobs.

Two bitter freezes in Brazil have pulled this country out of a four-year crisis and pushed it toward what could be one of the greatest coffee booms in its history. Coffee growers in this Andean nation, which produces more coffee than any other except Brazil, have suffered through four years of low prices. But they have watched their prospects soar since frost hit Brazil on June 27.

Every two weeks, the 13 members of the Indian Council of the town of Mosoco gather at their small brick meeting house to discuss community affairs and gaze out the window at mountain slopes cleared for planting of opium poppies, the raw material of heroin. The dark stains on the cliffs where trees have been cut and bushes burned bring back bitter memories of a previous drug boom.

Coffee has always taken Arceseo Dominguez to higher places. Now it is dragging him down. Born poor in the heart of Colombia's rich coffee zone, Dominguez inherited a scrap of land, hauled coffee sacks by donkey down from the mountains for other growers and then used whatever he made to establish himself as a middleman. Buying and selling coffee, he poured his profits into huge expanses of land throughout the central cordillera of the Colombian Andes.

Here in the cloud-swept mountains of southern Colombia, a group of Paez Indians recently abandoned their traditional crops to begin growing the poppies that earn them slightly more money. The buyers are Colombian cocaine traffickers trying to diversify their business by using the poppies to produce what law enforcement officials call some of the purest heroin in the world.

Juan Valdez, Colombia's symbolic Mr. Coffee, is symbolically counting his pesos with a warm glow of self-satisfaction, if not outright glee, these days. The reason: In 1990 Colombia earned more from coffee exports than Brazil, the longtime titan of the international coffee market. That's big news here. "Colombia Defeated Brazil in Coffee," boasted a Colombian newspaper headline when the news came out the other day. "Colombia, No. 1 World Coffee Exporter," declared another.

Consider the plight of the Colombian flower grower. Peddling his blossoms in the world export market, he has to compete for publicity with that more famous Colombian-produced commodity, cocaine. He has to guide each shipment of roses and carnations through a gantlet of suspicious U.S. Customs inspectors and probing X-ray machines. He has to avoid undue delays lest his wares wilt into worthlessness.

President-elect Cesar Gaviria is asking the United States for a more cooperative policy toward Colombian exports as a way of supporting this country's costly fight against cocaine traffic. Gaviria, a member of the governing Liberal Party, was elected Sunday and will take office Aug. 7. In a victory speech, he said his government will need more than "rhetorical support" from cocaine-consuming countries against violent traffickers.

A federal money-laundering investigation has uncovered evidence that Gen. Manuel A. Noriega received millions of dollars in kickbacks from a coffee-smuggling scheme, according to sources close to the inquiry. The allegations involve contraband Colombian coffee that was shipped to Panama, rebagged as Panamanian coffee and exported to the United States and elsewhere. The scheme enabled the Colombian producers to evade export quotas and sell the coffee for a higher price.