One cent a cup for coffee farmers
In the verdant southern highlands of Ethiopia, coffee farmer Gafeto Gardo thinks about quitting an industry that has sustained families for generations.
Over the past year, the amount Gardo gets for a kilogram of coffee beans has fallen a third to eight birr, reducing his income from a cappuccino sold in the West for $3 to $4 (between R41 and R55) to under a cent. “We’re losing hope. We’re not reaping as much as we should. Coffee is our life.”
Unlike producers of commodities like oil and gas, coffee farmers have long been at the wrong end of the value chain, receiving only a small fraction of the retail price of their crop.
Now, a slump in global coffee prices to their lowest in 13 years raises questions about whether it’s worth growing beans at all in some of the traditional coffee heartlands of America, Colombia and Ethiopia. “It’s labour intensive and costly. We fear they could abandon the crop en masse,” said Desalegn Demissie, head of the Shebedino cooperative development office.
At the other end of the chain, coffee has never been hotter.
Millennials in the West who grew up with Starbucks drink lots of it.
But growers worldwide have warned coffee company heads of a “social catastrophe” should they not raise farmers’ incomes. In a letter last year to Starbucks, Jacobs Douwe Egberts and Nestle, a group representing 30 countries said there was a risk farms would be abandoned. –