“Unfortunately, Specialty Coffee is still a very young and small fraction of the coffee market to represent a real immediate solution for the global coffee price crisis. However, Specialty Coffee has offered coffee producers for the first time in history the opportunity for them, their communities and work to be acknowledge and prized.”
We tend to believe, poverty among coffee farmers can only be alleviated by finding ways to improve farmer’s income. Yet, we are missing the point, since low income is surely not the main problem but rather a consequence.
We like it or not, we all live in a capitalist world and as such, we tend to put our money and attention in whatever we see value. The money we spend acquiring certain items is proportional to the value we see on them. This sense of value is unique to each person; but the capacity to assess value is common to every human being.
As a result, we tend to focus our attention on people and things that based on our personal evaluation provide value, and ignore the ones that do not.
That is why we do not remember or care about the name of the homeless person sitting on the sidewalk but we can remember all women Brad Pitt has dated.
“Poverty turns people invisible and invisibility turns people poor”
For decades, commodity coffee has been an anonymous product only worth based on its price. Although it has economically benefited farmers for a while, it has always dehumanized producers by turning their work and lives invisible and irrelevant to the consumer. This situation has exacerbated poverty among coffee farmers and it has built a massive gap between farmers and consumers at a global scale.
SEE ALSO: What is the real price of coffee?
On the other hand, Specialty Coffee introduced new concepts of traceability, origin and quality that not only value the coffee for its price, but for its taste and production process, emphasizing the work and farmers skillset, bringing visibility, respect and dignity to the farmers and communities where these coffees are produced.
Specialty Coffee limitations
Although Specialty Coffee does not represent an immediate solution for the coffee price crisis, it is a segment of the market that is rapidly growing, gaining broad visibility and appreciation among consumers.
Unfortunately, Specialty Coffee is only popular in nations where consumers enjoy enough disposable income to indulge themselves with a premium product. However, for the rest of the world, who do not have this luxury, we should expect instant coffee and commodity coffee to remain the rule and first choice.
Besides the limited market, Specialty Coffee is difficult to produce, it takes a higher investment of resources; while commodity coffee only requires for producers to be fast and efficient, Specialty Coffee involves a strict quality control, precise processing and drying and a sophisticated packaging and shipping.
Also, commodity coffee production does not require any particular knowledge or training, whereas Specialty Coffee production is highly technical and demands a completely new skillset most coffee producers do not have.
To make things worse, impoverished farmers in the developing world who live in rural areas (most of them) are unlikely to reach or ever meet an already limited market that only exist in industrialized nations.
Commodity market benefits
It is unquestionable; the commodity coffee market has been negative for farmers in the long run, essentially by making them anonymous and stealing control over their crops value. However, when the market price was high before 1989, the commodity market offered the unique possibility for farmers to commercialize their product regardless quality with no volume restrictions and requiring no particular technical or marketing skillset, some did not even need to move from their properties because coffee was periodically collected from their doorsteps. Additionally, until 1989 the International Coffee Agreement controlled the price through a system of quotas that helped buffering the international coffee price volatility.
SEE ALSO: Why is the coffee market price so low?
This defective system allowed Vietnam to emerge from the ashes of the Vietnam War to become the regional economic power it is today and for the global coffee industry to double their production in less than 30 years. Even the coffee surplus negatively affecting the market coffee price today is a direct consequence of the success and popularity of the commodity coffee market.
However, nothing last forever and the commodity market is today proven to be a complete failure (for coffee at least); every coffee producing country is different and unique, cost of production varies as much as quality and taste attributes, some coffees are from estates, cooperatives or shade, forest, semi-forest grown, handpicked, intensively or extensively planted, you name it. There are hundreds of differences variations the coffee market price fails to consider.
Despite, all differences, the commodity system shorten it to a single value, that is kept relevant by companies and speculators who still use it today, regardless it is fair or not, to trade, hedge and as an “accurate” representation of the global coffee price,.
The cost of freedom
After the International Coffee Agreement ended in 1989, all coffee farmers officially entered the international free market, and since then, they have been victims of it. In a free market, producing countries must compete for a share of the same market even when there are clear advantages of some countries over others. Efficiency, technology, yield and low cost of production are key to competiveness most countries do not have and so far from all producing countries only Brazil, Vietnam and Indonesia are considered to have a profitable coffee industry.
The gentrification of coffee
As long as Brazil and Vietnam keep hammering international commodity prices at record low levels with their hyper-productive farming methods, for the rest of coffee farmers worldwide, who do not enjoy the luxury of technology and scaling up production, there are very few options available. The first one and most likely, would be to abandon coffee completely and grow other crops instead, and the second to transition into Specialty Coffee.
Inexorably, many coffee producers would disappear and the ones who remain would certainly get more technical and skilled, based on World Coffee Research prediction, by the year 2030 the demand of coffee would finally reach the offer but not so much by increasing consumption but by losing half of today’s coffee farmers.
We should not be surprised in the following years to see the poor farmer with callused and dirty hands stereotype of coffee farmer, now in extinction, to be replaced by the image of a skilled coffee professional. I want to see whether reward changes as well.