Does Good Coffee Have a Future?
Does Coffee Have a Future?
I should really ask, “Does good coffee have a future?”
Bad coffee is easy and plentiful. Always has been. If you are willing to exploit people or the planet or go full Napoleon and replace coffee with chicory then there is always a way to get bad coffee. Heck, people are drinking mud and mushroom dust and other things and calling it coffee – so, yeah, there’s all kinds of postapocalyptic future for weird potions that might remind you of something similar to coffee.
And hey, drink what you want. If you are happy with those things, more power to you. This article isn’t really for you. Here’s a quote I like from Karl Weinhold’s book Cheap Coffee:[1] “If you like cheap coffee and don’t care if it’s bad, or if it is half-burnt rice and chickpeas, then have at it.”
Agreed. As long as people and the planet are not being exploited, cheers!
But we’re here to talk about coffee and if you aren’t then let me just say that this is a really weird website for you to be visiting.
Regarding the future of good coffee, Weinhold further points out, “If coffee is both good and cheap, it’s probably because a producer was swindled.”
And, I might add, it’s also probably because the planet is being destroyed.
Wait. Is there a problem with the future of good coffee?
Yeah! There really is.
First, climate change on a macro and micro scale is making it harder and harder to grow coffee – especially good coffee. One oft-cited study has gone so far as to predict that half of all lands suitable for coffee growing will be gone by 2050.[2] For a long time, strategies for growing cheap coffee have prioritized production volumes over sustainability and have desolated lands. In Brazil, for example,[3] there are seemingly endless examples of former forest which was mowed down for monocultural coffee planting. After some years of growing only coffee the soil is no longer suitable for anything other than grazing and the land is sold off to be used for cattle.
You don’t have to be politically green to understand that shifting land from lung to dung is bad.
The best quality coffee requires the best growing conditions. You need shade trees and good soil and the right temperatures and balanced biodiversity and good rainfall and moisture retention. Heat waves and droughts and mudslides and pestilence all make it really, really hard to develop excellent arabica coffee (which is the kind you like – and if it isn’t the kind you like, again, really weird website for you).
The second big problem is the people of coffee – especially the farmers. Farmers – actual farmers and not just executives who own huge farming conglomerates (in Oklahoma, where I - Cody Lorance - am from we’d refer to those dudes as all hat and no horse) – have long been the least powerful and most impoverished people in the coffee industry.
Here are a couple facts to ponder:[4]
Annually, coffee revenues exceed $200 billion dollars. That’s a lot.
Less than 10% of this value reaches the countries which grow coffee and only a fraction of this reaches the farmers. That sucks a lot.
12.5 million farms produce all the coffee you drink and 84% of these farms are smaller than 2 hectares. Tiny.
5 companies buy half of all the world’s coffee exports. Wait… what?
Five. Companies.
How much bargaining leverage do you have as a farmer with a hundred coffee trees against a company that has billions in purchasing power and who has designed their products so that your crop in Uganda is 100% interchangeable with that of a similarly powerless coffee farmer in Brazil or Papua New Guinea or India?
Don’t like the big companies price? Fine. They will just move on to the next farmer. You have no power.
The overall trend of the past few decades has seen the total global value of the coffee industry increasing while the compensation of coffee growers has steadily decreased. In Cameroon as much as 44% of coffee farmers live in extreme poverty and in Nicaragua it is as much as 50%.
One study conducted in Uganda’s Bududa district, where most of our company’s coffee is grown, found that the average household (typically 6-10 persons in total) earned only around $100 per year.[5]
A hundo a year. Look down at your shoes. How many pairs is that? How many years would it take to buy your cellphone?
It's no wonder that so many farmers are running away from coffee. We see it all the time in our work where younger people who have watched parents and grandparents struggle for decades with coffee and poverty are trying desperately to leave the industry.
Who can blame them? I’m grateful that farming families working with us have had the extra money for tuition for their kids the past several years. They deserve a chance to get an education and build a new future. It should be on coffee companies like ours to prove to young people that there is a good future in coffee. To prove it. Not leverage poverty to coerce them into farming. To prove a good future, not to deceive and manipulate and exploit.
Of course, not everyone can leave the industry. Extreme poverty has a tendency to reduce your career opportunities and cheap coffee only has the power to sustain one thing – poverty.
So where does that leave us?
In Uganda, where Endiro was born and where most of our work continues there has been a lot of talk about the notion of “value addition” in coffee. This year a controversial “coffee agreement” was proposed that was supposed to help “add value” to Ugandan coffee. The agreement was later defeated for a number of reasons but one of the big criticisms was that the agreement did not add value where it was needed most – at the farm level. Is post-harvest value addition what we need?
If we care about good coffee and a good coffee future which does good things for the planet and its people, we need to begin by changing what we mean by “value addition.” Any plan or strategy that does not add value to the farmer and to the land is not true value addition. True value addition enriches farmers and builds a sustainable future for them and their next generation.
Anything less than that is just about as meaningful to the future of coffee as adding non-dairy whipped cream to a frappe.
Not meaningful.
Action Steps:
1) Watch out for coffee blends. Blends make coffee interchangeable which strips farmers of negotiating power. Aim for coffees that are lotted in as small a region or group of farmers as possible.
2) Sing the praises of your favorite coffee origins - countries, regions, villages. The more you can put a small growing group on the map, the more power you are giving to those farmers.
3) Look for coffees that are independently certified in terms of how they pay farmers and how they tread the environment. Self-certification is problematic because there is no outside accountability. We obviously are fans of B-Corp Certification because customers can look beyond the label to get details for the company’s score. For example, here is our B-Corp Profile. Here is the profile for another coffee company. There are other good certification programs out there. Being a well-informed consumer is important.
4) Brew all the good you can. Seriously, you need to be a person who does good and gives off those good vibes. It’s important. You cannot solve all the world’s problems. But together we can do quite a bit. Next time you drink some coffee, let it fuel something good in you. Dream big. Believe in better things. Do good.
[1] For more, check out Karl Weinhold’s excellent book Cheap Coffee: Behind the Curtain of the Global Coffee Trade.
[2] I’m referring to “A bitter cup: climate change profile of global production of Arabica and Robusta coffee” which was originally published in Climate Change.
[3] Examples of this were cited during the lecture “A New Approach to Detecting Deforestation” by David Browning at the 2022 Specialty Coffee Expo in Boston, MA. If you want to dig into this further check out David’s company, Enveritas.
[4] This research is from the 2020 Coffee Barometer.
[5] This is from a 2017 study by Kelly Austin called “Brewing Unequal Exchanges in Coffee: A Qualitative Investigation into the Consequences of the Java Trade in Rural Uganda”.