The price of coffee on the coffee exchange was in free fall on the coffee exchanges for a long time. Since corona, this has risen a bit, but unfortunately the price was still far too low. The past few months it's been on the rise, and broke through the previous highest price ever threshold. Cheap coffee seems good for us, consumers, but the opposite is in fact true. Cheap coffee causes a number of perverse effects that affect, among other things, the quality of our coffee and our living environment.
Many coffee farmers get less money for their beans than it costs them to grow, pick and process them. A coffee farmer cannot keep that up for long. If this continues, they will explore other options. For example, they can choose to replace their Arabica plants with the Robusta variety. The yield is better, but it has different properties than Arabica. A choice that must be made carefully, if you still want to achieve the same quality. Or perhaps farmers will even stop growing coffee altogether in favor of other crops. Or, and this is also a bad option, they opt for efficiency gains through automatic picking, where both ripe and unripe berries are taken from the bush together, which greatly affects the quality of the coffee.
Even worse, you often see that the preferred cultivation methods may yield more beans (of lower quality) in total, but this usually also causes damage to the place where they are grown. In the latter case, for example, large areas in the sun are cleared of other vegetation. However, a coffee plant produces better beans under the natural shade of higher growing plants. Coffea Arabica originated a long time ago in the few wooded areas of Ethiopia.
Farmers are therefore cultivating more land and not always doing so in a way that is good for the soil or the plants and vegetation around it. This leads to poor land management, soil erosion and forest loss and a reduction in biodiversity, which in turn leads to flooding and contributes to climate change. The same climate change that will soon make it impossible to grow coffee in certain places because the conditions have changed so much. And which therefore threatens the survival of coffee as we know it.
Also very disturbing is the fact that farmers who do not make a profit are equally unable to invest in better machines or improve their production processes. They usually do not have enough money to pay their workers a fair wage. All this is absurd when you know that coffee is one of the most traded products in the world (not the 2nd most, that's a myth). Specialty coffee, the only way in which the farmer receives a fair price for his/her product regardless of the coffee exchange, only makes up a small percentage of the world market.
Our producers are therefore vulnerable, and that is why we support them with various initiatives that ensure that these farmers receive a correct price. We also help them set up cooperatives that provide better working conditions, security and representation. Farmers learn about good soil and water management. Women farmers are united in the Women Coffee Producers' programs, which are very important because they are even more vulnerable. As a result, they receive further training, their representation in the coffee world is improved and they have better access to healthcare and other important authorities. A comprehensive approach, because that is the only way to protect coffee and the grower.
We therefore ask the major coffee companies to follow us and increase the price they pay for their beans, even if the price on the coffee exchange drops again. Only then will we be able to improve the working and living conditions of coffee farmers around the world, help combat climate change and continue to guarantee the quality of coffee. I'll go one step further: it's our damn duty as coffee makers. Take up the challenge!
