Land Registry Backlog Locks Smallholders Out of Fair-Price Schemes

The Federal Office for Cooperative Affairs has a queue, and for many Tierra Verde smallholders it has become a wall. Ten months after submitting their paperwork, more than 300 farming families in the interior valleys are still waiting for their land titles to be verified, a step required before they can join the federal fair-price scheme for coffee and yerba mate.

Without that verification, the cooperative federations that buy at the federal floor price cannot legally accept their harvest. Farmers are left to sell on the spot market, where prices have run nearly a fifth below the floor for most of this season.

In the cooperative town of Santa Clara, the harvest captain Rosa Quiñónez described the bind plainly. 'We have the beans, we have the buyers, we have the price on paper. What we do not have is a stamp from Meridian,' she said. Her cooperative has filed 47 applications since October; none has been processed.

The backlog has become the sharpest point of friction between Tierra Verde's cooperative economy and the federal bureaucracy in Meridian, and the Federal Office for Cooperative Affairs has yet to explain when it will clear.