The coffee farmers living income – an issue towards sustainable production

MORE OFTEN than not, a crisis highlights the weaknesses in a system, a friendship, a home and an industry. The global Covid-19 crisis demonstrated the cracks in health sectors, production systems, and very importantly, international trading/commerce systems.

For us in Jamaica the crisis demonstrated our vulnerability to elements beyond our control which stifled even those factors that we felt we had control of. This global crisis was as good as any to set the stage for remedial and preventative actions especially for the most vulnerable.

The Jamaican coffee industry has demonstrated strong resilience over the years fighting back from hurricanes (Gilbert, Ivan, among others), droughts, fires, torrential rains and pricing issues. The COVID-19 crisis, however, has highlighted the structural weaknesses in the industry which cannot be ignored.

There are two structures of great importance that are worthy of being highlighted. These are the large proportion of small farmers with relatively high levels of dependency and the ageing population of our coffee farmers.

With 72 per cent of our coffee farmers being male and averaging close to 60 years of age with an average of three dependents the sustainability structure is vulnerable. The restrictions imposed during the pandemic meant that coffee activities were impacted by the age restriction. With that situation the economic livelihood also came under pressure given the dependency situation stated above.

As one of our mandate to facilitate the development of the coffee sector the Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority (JACRA) has embarked on a coffee value chain assessment. The aim is to identify the bottlenecks and opportunities which will lay the foundation for a strategic approach to building out a coffee industry business model.

The challenges surround the farmer demography, which consists of a large small farmer population, dominated by male farmers who are ageing. The replacement farmers are, therefore, not very evident.

We also see ageing coffee plantations resulting in low productivity because of the financial inability posed by the return of investment levels, the dependency demand and agerelated illnesses.

The assessment has helped to see that there are similar challenges in other coffeegrowing countries and hence the industry needs a catalyst. As we are observing from our value chain analysis and has been stated by the Harvard Growth Laboratory Country Rankings in terms of the Economic Complexity Index, moving up the coffee value chain will increase export diversification by taking advantage of product diversification through a wider range of complex products.

This will strengthen the sustainable development platform as we increase economic viability by way of a gender equitable social welfare in an environment that is conducive to supporting good coffee production.