Recap #8 | April 30, 2020

Welcome to Recap, a brief overview of recent coffee developments every two weeks from the Specialty Coffee Association. 

Root Capital, a company that supplies agricultural businesses with financial capital and training, recently conducted a survey to gauge how COVID-19 is affecting rural agricultural communities. The results confirm the reports emerging from coffee-growing communities that we shared on our last episode. Delays in shipping contracts, unpredictable changes in demand,  decreased processing capacity, and unavailability of in-person agronomic assistance have led to the inability to plan for the future, given the uncertainty of the near-term. 

While we wait to fully understand the impact the virus will have on coffee harvests in Central and South America, reports of significant losses emerging from Yunnan, China foreshadow a bleak result. The Yunnan harvest, occurring in January and February, offers a glimpse of how lockdowns and social distancing are likely to impact farmer livelihoods in other coffee-producing countries, where COVID-19’s effects are only beginning to be reported. Despite freezing temperatures in December 2019 destroying yields, Yunnan growers were hopeful that years of increasing capacity while battling climatic inconsistency would finally result in cost-covering prices for the 2019-2020 harvest. But in January, China implemented curfews in the Hubei province to mitigate the spread of the virus. This mid-harvest lockdown limited transport to processing facilities and resulted in labor shortages as entire villages were isolated. In some cases, the “last harvest,” usually reserved for picking “premium-grade” coffee, had to be abandoned, leaving coffee farmers with both a significantly reduced yield and the ability to sell high-quality coffee at a premium. Reports like this—and the results of the Root Capital survey—confirm fragility of the current system and its incapacity to ensure coffee production is a thriving, equitable, and sustainable activity. 

The Specialty Coffee Association has released a summary of the Price Crisis Response Initiative’s work between December 2018 and December 2019. Led by a core team of SCA staff with the support and guidance of Forum for the Future and industry volunteers, the Price Crisis Response, or “PCR,” set out to confront the economic systems that threaten the livelihoods of coffee farmers and the quantity and quality of the global coffee supply. Structured to reflect the working group’s journey through the year, the report synthesizes the desk research, stakeholder interviews, four industry convenings, and learnings from a peer review process into a series of recommendations. While implementing these recommendations will require overcoming numerous challenges, the SCA believes they are some of the best options to achieve a specialty coffee sector that distributes value equitably, fosters resilient farming communities, and values diverse producers of differentiated coffees. The SCA’s Chief Sustainability and Knowledge Development Officer, Kim Elena Ionescu, will lead a lecture on the findings of the report during #ExpoWeekend on both April 30 and May 1. A forthcoming article in Issue 12 of the SCA’s quarterly publication, 25, also outlines the key findings. 

Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism announced a joint campaign with Tokopedia, a local E-Commerce company, to promote domestic coffee. Both coffee growers and coffee shops have been negatively impacted by the virus, with the value of Aceh-grown coffee plummeting 50% and shops reporting significantly decreased footfall. Using the hashtag #SatuDalamKopi, or “United in Coffee,” the campaign involved nearly 1,200 coffee businesses nationwide offering their products in Tokopedia’s marketplace to drive the demand for locally-grown coffee. 

If you want to dive deeper into anything you heard today, check out the links in the description of this episode. Recap will be back in two weeks’ time. Thanks for listening. 

Further Reading: 

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