Central American ambassadors assess Mitch coffee damage.

WASHINGTON - In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, Nicaragua's coffee exports will be cut in half, while it'll take years for coffee growers in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to rebound from the disaster, according to ambassadors of the four countries interviewed in Washington.

William Stixrud Herrera took over as Guatemala's envoy in Washington on September 10 - less than two months before the powerful storm slammed into Central America. He says Mitch caused at least $50 million in damages to the Guatemalan coffee industry.

"Rain was falling at the rate of three inches an hour for more than three consecutive days, so a lot of cherries fell to the ground," he said. "The equivalent of 500,000 bags was lost because while the coffee in the lowlands was in harvest, nobody would go out to harvest it under the circumstances."

Stixrud, who was president of Anacafe - Guatemala's national coffee association - before taking up his current post, said Mitch is "one of the worst things ever to affect Guatemala's coffee industry." About 25,000 acres were affected, not to mention the high humidity, which encourages the growth of fungus - meaning trees will have to be pruned.

When the hurricane hit, Stixrud was in Guatemala getting ready for his daughter's wedding. In the storm's aftermath, the diplomat helped coordinate assistance arriving from Guatemalans living in the U.S. He says total damage to the country's agriculture sector is around $263 million.

"Recuperating the trees will take three to four years. It's not like melons or bananas, which grow back much sooner," says Stixrud, who owns coffee farms in southeastern Guatemala. Fortunately, the famous Antigua strictly hard bean variety, cultivated at 4,500 to 6,000 ft. above sea level, was hardly affected by Mitch.

"My biggest challenge is to get Guatemalans living here in the U.S. to invest in their communities back home," says the ambassador. "What I want is to help our government eradicate poverty through investment in power, small businesses, and schools."

In El Salvador, 250 died and around 84,000 people were left homeless by Mitch, which also caused an estimated $100 million in damages to the coffee sector.

"We have lost 30 - 40% of our total coffee production," said El Salvador's envoy to the U.S., Rene Leon, estimating losses at 100 million quintales. "This will create a very demanding economic and social situation in our country. The trees are there, but all the fruit was washed away by the water and flooding."

The situation is far more serious in Honduras and Nicaragua, which even before the hurricane were two of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, Nicaragua's ambassador to the U.S., says Mitch left 4,000 dead and 900,000 homeless in his country, and caused damages of $1.5 billion - which would be equivalent to $5 trillion in damages for the U.S.

"It was our worst disaster ever, much worse than the 1972 earthquake that leveled Managua because that didn't even touch our productive apparatus," he said. "This hurricane will affect our exports for years to come."

Nicaragua's coffee exports, currently estimated at $300 million a year, have been effectively cut in half, said the ambassador.

"The coffee sector has been hard-hit," Sacasa told Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, "but the greatest problem we have isn't destruction of the trees, but getting workers to harvest the crop, because there are no roads to

The storm, which destroyed over 100 bridges in Nicaragua, also caused extensive damage to the country's shrimp and tobacco industries.

In terms of loss of life, Honduras - where over 7,000 people died - bore the brunt of Mitch more than any other country in Central America. Edgardo Dumas Rodriguez, the Honduran ambassador to the U.S., says that "before the hurricane, the economy was moving ahead. We didn't have much unemployment and things were OK. But now we have 1.5 million people doing nothing. At least 40% of the coffee crop was destroyed. The problem is, when the cherries fall to the ground, you can't do anything with them."

Dumas predicts his country's Gross Domestic Product will tumble 25% from this year to next, given an estimated $400 million in damages to the Honduran banana sector, the destruction of hundreds of bridges and the destruction of Tegucigalpa, the capital city. Nevertheless, Honduras is already rebuilding, with massive help from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and foreign governments including the U.S.

"Nature was bad to us, and this gives us an opportunity to do something," said the ambassador. "We have to take advantage of the situation instead of sitting down and crying."

Larry Luxner is editor of South America Report, a monthly business newsletter published in Bethesda, Maryland. He can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail].