Word: coffeemen
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...hasten the end of the old coffee system that piled up surpluses and lowered quality by guaranteeing government purchase of every bean grown in Brazil, Quadros promised coffeemen more exchange dollars for higher quality coffee, less for poorer grades. He also ended government purchase and storage of the bottom 10% of the crop (classified "refuse"), began burning the 7,000,000 bags of refuse currently on hand...
Fortunes & Murder. From his headquarters hamlet of Brasil, pudgy Victor Merchán, 52, wields power in a 5-sq.-mi. area, on the fringes of which anti-Communist coffeemen patrol their land with rifles. Born of coffee-bean pluckers but now enjoying a fortune from his tax rake-off, Merchán studied two years in Moscow, returned to indoctrinate Colombians and, around 1930, incited peasants to overrun most of the area's coffee plantations...
...Coffeemen already knew that a menacing surplus was piling up (TIME, June 20). What surprised them was the fact that the U.S. State Department's representative on the committee joined the Latin experts in signing a report calling for export quotas and stockpiling to keep coffee prices from sinking through the floor. Main reason for the softening of the State Department's longtime opposition to international coffee-price props is that coffee is, after all, Latin America's No. 1 export. It accounts for 97% of El Salvador's exports to the U.S., 90% of Colombia...
...face of the FTC report, the coffee industry flatly denies that it was responsible for coffee's dizzy spin. Brazilian growers argue that all early crop reports are bound to be inaccurate. To judge yesterday's estimate by today's knowledge, say the coffeemen, is both unsound and unfair. Furthermore, when viewed in terms of the expected 1954 harvest v. the actual harvest, the crop loss from frost was an estimated 2,932,700 bags, or 17%; FTC's 8% figure is based on a false comparison with 1953 production...
...with coffee's rise. Speculation, say the traders, was no greater than normal. They also dispute FTC's contention that exchange rules that restrict trading to Santos coffee only-about 10% of U.S. annual consumption-result in a narrow, rapidly fluctuating market. The fact is, according to coffeemen, that about 40% of all U.S. coffee is traded on the exchange. The price rise, they insist, was simply due to heavy demand coupled with the fear of a low, frost-bitten supply. Says Gustavo Lobo Jr., president of the New York exchange: "If speculation occurred, it was within permissible...