Coffee farmers in Yunnan brewing up profits
Coffee farmers in southwest China's Yunnan Province are enjoying profitable incomes as prices hit a decade high this year.
At Dakaihe Village in Yunnan Province's Pu'er City, coffee growers say prices had been falling in previous years, which resulted in huge losses for farmers.
In 2021, however, coffee growers planted the beans on more than 44,500 hectares of land. The 46,000 tons of output have yielded prices not seen in 10 years.
"I have been growing coffee cherries for more than 10 years. This year's price is the highest. It reached 4.5 to 4.6 yuan (about 70 U.S. cents) per kilogram at its peak, but last year, it was only 3.5 yuan (about 55 U.S. cents) at the highest level," said Zeng Yong, a coffee grower.
According to Zhou You, purchasing manager of a local coffee company, about six kilograms of fresh coffee cherries can be made into one kilogram of raw coffee beans.
Zhou said their coffee beans will be sold overseas after first being processed at their company.
"Currently, all the goods in the warehouse have been sold out and ordered by clients. These are sold to Europe, while theses are for the Middle East countries," said Zhou.
Industry watchers say China's raw coffee bean exports accounted for about 70 percent of the country's total output during the pre-pandemic era, but only accounted for about one percent of shares in the global market.
But now, due to the uncertainty in the global coffee market, Chinese coffee farmers and manufacturers are now expecting to grab a bigger share of the domestic market, as China's coffee consumption has been booming in recent years with a 15-percent annual growth rate.
"At present, in terms of the domestic coffee consumption across China, the annual growth rate is 15 percent, while the growth rate is about one percent in the global market," said Liu Haifeng, acting deputy manager of