Panama Coffee Harvest Runs on Indigenous Hands and Vanishing Labor

In Panama’s western highlands, prized coffee begins as a handpicked routine. Ngäbe Buglé families arrive for the harvest, chasing wages and tradition. But growers and officials warn the labor pool is thinning, threatening the September picking that keeps farms alive.

A Judge’s Palate, a Picker’s Past

The mountains of western Panama produce one of the most coveted coffees in the world, but the first fact you meet up there is not glamour. It is work. It is the repetition of hands moving through branches, selecting and collecting grain by grain, day after day, season after season.

One face that holds the whole story, if you let it, is Moisés Montezuma. He is described as one of Panama’s best roasters and the only national coffee judge of Ngäbe Buglé origin. He now sits in the world of selection and scoring, involved in choosing the best lots that enter Best of Panama, the international annual competition organized by the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama. But his beginning was not behind a tasting table. It was in the fields.

“I started picking coffee in 1975. I had a passion for the things I did, and one of them was learning to process coffee, later to taste it. Little by little, I became a taster without realizing it,” Montezuma told EFE.

That line does something important. It makes coffee feel like a shared journey, fostering pride and a sense of cultural connection for the audience. The cup becomes a story of human effort, not just a product. The farms are more than scenery; they are the heart of a tradition that sustains communities.

Coffee harvesting in Panama employs thousands, mainly indigenous Ngäbe Buglé families. Their stories of arriving motivated by tradition and income help the audience feel empathy and recognize the human effort behind each harvest.

You can hear it in how Montezuma narrates his progression. First, a picker; then, someone learning processing; then, cupping; then, judging. He remembers becoming a pre-judge before becoming a national judge in 2006. That matters because it shows what knowledge looks like when it grows from labor rather than from branding—a skill earned slowly, and almost quietly.

Budgets Made in the Fields

For Yamileth Pinto, the harvest is not only a tradition. It is a plan.

She is a 21-year-old university student studying Physical Education, and each coffee season becomes a chance to keep going, to keep paying for what school requires. She learned to pick coffee from her father because every year he would arrive with the family at Hacienda La Esmeralda, described in the notes as the cradle of the world’s most valued coffee. That detail is not just a boast. It is a reminder that the most celebrated coffee still depends on the same basic tool: human time.

“When classes end, I migrate right away for the harvest. With that harvest, I help myself with the money I take out at the end, which helps me study. I make a budget for each thing. When I finished sixth year, my dad gave me that idea, and from there I got the support to help me in my studies,” Pinto told EFE.

It is hard to miss the everyday observation implied here: school has an end date each term, and the harvest has a season, and the two have learned to fit together. Migration becomes a calendar. Study becomes something you fund with your own hands. Budgeting becomes as essential as picking.

The sensory world is physical and straightforward. The notes mention the grain’s honey, the sweetness you can taste that helps experienced workers distinguish varieties. They mention fragrance and flavor in the context of Geisha. Coffee is not abstract in these mountains. It has a smell, a texture, and a pace.

That is where Leopoldo Pinto Rodríguez enters. Thirty-five years in, he is another example of what coffee can do when it becomes steady work over time. He began as a picker and learned a trade in the farms that gave him stability. He was among the workers tied to a first lot that changed world coffee when Geisha was brought to an international cupping table for the first time.

The notes point to his present skill in a way that feels intimate: today, he recognizes the difference between varieties by tasting the honey of the grain, including Geisha, the coffee that put Panama in the global elite for its innovative flavor and fragrance.

But Leopoldo does not point to global recognition as his most outstanding achievement.

Leopoldo’s pride in his children’s university success highlights how steady work benefits families. This can inspire respect and admiration for the labor that makes such progress possible.

In Latin America, this is one of the oldest arguments that labor makes on its own behalf. Not romance. Not heritage as a slogan. A child in college. A family that becomes a little less vulnerable.

When the Labor Leaves, the Harvest Is at Risk

The story is also about movement. Lucas Hernández began picking coffee at 18 with his mother. They moved across Panamanian farms and then crossed into Costa Rica after harvests.

“It is not an easy task, but it is gratifying,” Hernández told EFE.

For him, the work is part of the culture of his people, rooted in the heart of Panama. That sentence matters because it refuses the idea that harvest labor is merely a temporary inconvenience. It places it inside identity and continuity.

The growing labor shortage threatens Panama’s coffee industry, risking economic stability and cultural traditions tied to the harvest season.

Pitti describes an annual influx of about 10,000 people migrating to Renacimiento to harvest coffee, and he adds a detail that sharpens the concern: many cross the border into Costa Rica. What this does is put the picking at risk, especially the harvest that begins in September in lower-altitude zones.

Here is the uncomfortable hinge of the whole dispute. The coffee world celebrates Panama’s best lots, its competitions, and its elite status. Yet the harvest depends on people whose lives are defined by mobility, by following seasons, by stretching wages across months. If those workers leave, or if fewer come, the system strains in the most direct way possible. The coffee does not get picked.

Producers are searching for solutions, the notes say. But in the fields, the work continues anyway, because the harvest does not pause for policy debates. It moves forward with the people who show up.

Yamileth migrates when classes end. Lucas follows the crop. Leopoldo measures success by the degrees his children earn. Montezuma brings 50 years of field experience to the judging table. Grano a grano, as the notes put it, a tradition stays alive.

The wager here is whether Panama can keep that tradition alive without losing the labor it relies on. And whether the world that prizes the cup will notice what is happening at the branch level, where the story always begins.

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