考研读译参考《经济学家》：中美洲咖啡贸易与“啡农”

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Fair enough
Mar 30th 2006 | MEXICO CITY AND SAN JOSÉ
From The Economist print edition
     MAKING good coffee is not a simple business. Coffee bushes must be grown in shade—neither too much, nor too little. A hillside is best—but it mustn't be too s______①. After three years, the bushes will start to produce bright-red coffee “cherries”, which are picked, processed to remove the pulp, and spread out to dry for days, ideally on concrete. They are m_______② again to separate the bean, which needs to rest, preferably for a few months. （1）Only then can it be roasted, ground and brewed into the stuff that dreams are ★quelled with[1].
     In Mexico and parts of Central America, as in Colombia and Peru further south but not in Brazil, most coffee farmers are smallholders. （2）They found it especially hard to deal with the recent ★slump[2] in the coffee price. The price has since recovered: the benchmark price applied to m________③ coffee now ranges from $1.11 to $1.14 per pound. That is roughly double its ★rock-bottom[3] level of August 2002.
     But the v_________④ of their income makes it hard for farmers to invest to sustain their crop, says Fernando Celis of the Mexican National Organisation of Coffee Growers. The slump forced many small farmers to switch to other crops, or migrate to cities. Mexico's exports of coffee are less than half of what they were six years ago.
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附件：19《经济学家》读译参考：还算公道—中美洲咖啡贸易与“啡农”