Land‑registration delays stall smallholder access to fair‑price scheme

The Federal Office for Cooperative Affairs reported on Tuesday that 1,274 land‑registration applications from Tierra Verde smallholders remain pending, a rise of 38 percent over the previous quarter. The backlog has become a bottleneck for farms seeking entry into the federal fair‑price scheme that guarantees minimum prices for coffee and yerba mate during the upcoming harvest.

Cooperative Council chairwoman María Torres explained that without official registration, farms cannot qualify for the scheme’s price guarantees. "We have families who have cultivated these plots for generations, yet they sit on the waiting list while the market price swings wildly," she said, gesturing toward a stack of unfinished paperwork at the council office in San Vicente.

Governor Lucía Báez met with the Federal Treasury Minister Marcus Eklund last week, urging a rapid review of the pending files. The minister promised additional staffing for the registration unit, but no concrete timeline was offered. Meanwhile, the Assembly’s agriculture committee warned that delayed certifications could force farmers to sell at market rates, eroding already thin profit margins.

The cooperative’s own audit shows that each day of delay reduces a farm’s expected revenue by roughly 0.7 percent, a figure that could total a loss of 5 percent for a typical coffee‑producing household by the end of October. The council hopes that the upcoming federal budget will allocate funds to clear the backlog before the November price settlement.