Final answer:
The coffee industry in Latin America faced challenges due to price volatility, sensitivity to environmental issues, and political instability, leading to interventions that often failed due to global market dynamics and the complexities of trade policies.
Step-by-step explanation:
Efforts to save the coffee industry in Latin American countries often met with challenges due to factors like price volatility, environmental factors such as frosts in Brazil, and political turmoil such as the civil war in El Salvador which disrupted traditional farming and export operations. The Brazilian economy faced significant challenges as it was highly sensitive to changes in world coffee prices and consumption rates. Environmental issues, like frosts, could lead to bankruptcy for coffee planters, illustrating the vulnerability of economies heavily reliant on a single export crop. In Colombia, the coffee industry was bolstered by the formation of the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia in 1927, supporting small farms and the seasonal workforce. However, commodity price drops contributed to the Latin American Debt Crisis of the 1980s, illustrating the interconnectedness of global markets and the vulnerabilities of export-dependent economies.
In El Salvador, the coffee industry was a key economic factor, causing US coffee companies to back the wealthy elite through the government during the civil war. These complex scenarios coupled with over-saturation of markets, and protective trade policies such as tariffs, show the multifaceted reasons behind the challenges and failures in saving the coffee industry in certain Latin American countries.