Trade Policies and Their Effects on Farming: The Case of Columbian Coffee

Each country lives its own reality, has individual pressures and particular interests; furthermore, the aghcultural sector of the poor and developing countries, due to their special topographical, climatic and latitude conditions has to be divided in two parts; on one side, where there is a high grade of automatization and mechanization and, on the other, as it is the specific case of the Colombian coffee industry, basically of high slopes, where the productive processes become practically handicraft schemes. Taking into consideration the above fact, I do not think there are magic formulas to design commercial policies, but I would like to explain the successful pattern of the Colombian coffee industry, where the growers, in association with the government, have designed their own external and domestic marketing policies.