A waiter serves coffee in a glass to a customer outside a coffee shop in Havana's Vedado neighborhood. Drinking coffee on the street and in homes is a custom in Cuba that has become increasingly difficult to maintain, due to scarcity and cost. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

While the Cuban government’s plans to increase production begin to bear fruit, Mireya Barrios confesses that she seeks every possible way to enjoy a cup of coffee every day, in the face of high prices and scarcity.

“If I don’t drink it I don’t feel good, I have a headache all day. For me drinking coffee is almost as important as eating,” said Barrios, who receives from family members quantities of coffee beans “brought from the east, where the best coffee in the country is produced,” which she mixes with chickpeas before roasting, to make it stretch farther.

After drinking her own cup, Barrios sells coffee as a street vendor in the early morning in the old town district of Centro Habana, one of the 15 municipalities that make up Havana.

“That sip of hot coffee is sometimes the entire breakfast of people who go to work and don’t have it at home because they leave in a hurry, or because they don’t have any coffee, which in addition to being scarce has become very expensive,” Barrios said in an interview with IPS.

Coffee is part of the basic food basket on the island. The government sells each month, per person and on a subsidized basis, a 115-gram package mixed with 50 percent chickpeas.

In recent months there have been delays in distribution due to the late arrival of raw materials, including packaging paper, given the financial problems faced by this Caribbean island country in the midst of the deepening structural crisis of its economy, which dates back three decades.

When consulted by IPS, residents in some of Cuba’s 168 municipalities admit that the coffee quota “is barely enough for seven to 10 days, if you’re thrifty.”

People often resort to the black market to acquire additional quantities. There, the same 115-gram package, often taken from stores or government establishments, is sold for the equivalent of half a dollar.

Better quality Cuban and foreign coffee brands are sold almost exclusively in stores in convertible currencies, unaffordable for many families who are paid wages in the devalued Cuban peso.

For example, a kilo of the national brand Cubita costs about 15 dollars in a country with an average monthly salary equivalent to 32 dollars, according to the official rate of 120 pesos to the dollar.

Roberto Martínez shows the nursery where he grows new coffee plants in the town of Palenque, Yateras municipality, in the eastern Cuban province of Guantánamo. A cooperation project with Vietnam created seed banks to renew and improve cuttings and thus boost the quality and yields of local coffee. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Boosting coffee production on the plains

Coffee arrived in Cuba in 1748 and production received a major boost after the Haitian revolution (1791-1804), with the immigration of French-Haitian farmers who settled in mountainous areas of the eastern part of the island where they set up coffee plantations, some of whose ruins were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in the year 2000.

During part of the 19th century, this country was the main exporter of coffee to Europe, exporting 29,500 tons in 1833, for example.

Statistics show that the historical record was reached in the 1961-1962 harvest: 60,300 tons. But after that production declined and currently volumes do not exceed 10,000 tons per year.

With a demand of 24,000 tons per year, this once important exporter actually has to import coffee from other countries, but in quantities that do not meet its needs.

According to Elexis Legrá, director of coffee and cocoa of the Agroforestry Group (GAF), attached to the Ministry of Agriculture, Cuba exports the Arabica variety, the highest quality, produced by coffee growers in mountainous areas.

The prospect is to start exporting small quantities of the Robusta variety, in greatest demand on the international market.

This year, the goal is to export some 2,700 tons, a figure similar to that of 2020, according to industry executives.

Experts say the main factors behind the drop in production are pests, tropical cyclones that frequently hit the island, the effects of climate change, the depopulation of rural and mountainous areas and obsolescent technology.

About 90 percent of national coffee production comes from the mountains in the four easternmost provinces: Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo, where the highest quality varieties are grown, due to tradition and favorable microclimates.

However, since 2014 the Cuban government began identifying soils with adequate conditions for planting coffee in lowland regions, and training courses and technical advice have been provided to new coffee growers.

Sun-dried coffee beans in Palenque, in the municipality of Yateras in the province of Guantanamo. The easternmost of Cuba’s provinces is one of the largest local producers of coffee, where the highest quality varieties are grown, due to tradition and the favorable mountainous microclimates. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“They used to say you couldn’t grow coffee here, and today we have some 2,000 bushes on just half a hectare,” Juan Miguel Fleitas told IPS. In addition to growing root vegetables, fresh produce and fruit and raising livestock, he also grows coffee on his family farm, Victoria 1, in the capital’s Guanabacoa municipality.

The 29-hectare farm, with six workers, belongs to the 26 de Julio Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs).

The UBPCs manage both private properties and state lands granted in usufruct in this socialist nation with a largely centralized economy.

“In the cooperative we have about eight hectares of coffee, dispersed. We are working on the introduction of Vietnamese coffee. It has a good yield, with a larger bean,” the farm’s head of agricultural production, Jorge Luis Gutiérrez, told IPS.

The beans came from seed banks from the east of the island, as part of the Cuba-Vietnam collaboration project, developed from 2015 to 2020.

In the 1970s, Cuban experts taught Vietnamese farmers and extension workers to plant this variety, in a nation then devastated by the war with the United States (1955-1975).

Vietnam is today the second largest exporter of the bean and shares its know-how with Cuba to achieve Robusta coffee cuttings that guarantee renewed plants with superior characteristics, in order to increase quality and yields.

Cuba’s “program to grow coffee in the lowlands” has set a goal of planting 7,163 hectares of coffee in production areas in several of the country’s 15 provinces.

So far, 1,200 hectares have been planted, another 700 hectares are in preparation, and the aim is to harvest more than 4,000 tons by 2030, according to official estimates.

By that date, Cuba’s “coffee production development program” aims to harvest 30,000 tons of coffee nationwide.

Bags of coffee are stacked on a handcart, to be sold at a state-run establishment in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood. The government provides 115 grams of coffee per month to Cuban families at subsidized prices, but in recent months it has been delivered with delays due to difficulties in obtaining supplies. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Organic coffee

Esperanza González is committed to growing coffee “without chemicals or herbicides, only using agroecological management techniques, earthworm humus, lots of organic matter and free-roaming chickens that help fertilize the soil with their excrement.”

González, who returned to Cuba after living for years in the Canadian province of Manitoba, was granted in 2017 in usufruct the eight-hectare Farm 878 that she renamed Doña Esperanza, located in the town of Santa Amelia, in the municipality of Cotorro, near the capital.

Since 2008, the Cuban government has granted unproductive and/or degraded land in usufruct to recuperate it and bolster food production.

This policy forms part of plans to strengthen food security in a country that is up to 70 percent dependent on food imports, whose rising prices lead to a domestic market with unsatisfied needs and shortages.

González, who through her own efforts imported “the equipment and the technology to be able to completely process our coffee,” told IPS that she hopes that with this year’s harvest they will “have a local quality product packaged under our own brand.”

However, she also highlighted “the exchange with coffee growers in the municipality of Segundo Frente (in the province of Santiago de Cuba), from whom we have received baskets to harvest coffee and give the final preparations to our crop.”

In 2021 “we harvested half a ton of good quality beans. We hope that little by little Doña Esperanza will become a lowlands coffee farm with higher volumes of export-quality and national-consumption production, which is so much needed,” she said.

Several initiatives with international support seek to strengthen the value chains associated with coffee production, restore the soils and ecosystems where coffee is grown, and identify markets for selling coffee grown with sustainable practices.

Prodecafé, an agroforestry cooperative development initiative that will run until 2027, was launched in February. With a budget of over 63 million dollars, it is expected to benefit 300 cooperatives in 27 municipalities in the four eastern provinces where coffee production is concentrated.

This joint project of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Ministry of Agriculture is aimed at strengthening the cocoa and coffee value chains and includes a gender approach by encouraging the inclusion of women in agroforestry activities.

Nursery operators raise improved Robusta coffee seedlings in Uganda. Credit: IITA

By Sally Nyakanyanga
KAMPALA, Dec 22 2016 (IPS)

Coffee production provides a quarter of Uganda’s foreign exchange earnings and supports some 1.7 million smallholder farmers, but crop yields are being undermined by disease, pests and inadequate services from agricultural extension officers, as well as climatic changes in the East African country.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), one of the world’s leading research partners in finding solutions for hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, is playing a key role in overcoming these challenges with simple, efficient practices like planting shade trees to protect coffee plants that require a cooler tropical climate.“The knowledge I’ve received towards adapting to farming that suits the changes in the climate, such as intercropping and planting shade trees, has transformed my life." --Coffee farmer Cathrine Ojara

Mujabi Yusuf, 41, a coffee farmer in the Nakaseke District of Central Uganda, told IPS prolonged droughts and unpredictable rainfall had been major setbacks.

“I have fed my family and sent them to school through coffee farming, but the weather has failed us,” says Yusuf. “Buying farming inputs such as fertilizer is a challenge because it’s expensive, yet for some time my farming production has been decreasing.”

Uganda has the largest population of coffee farmers in the world, yet 2 percent of its exports are not certified. It is Africa’s largest Robusta producer, accounting for 7 percent of global Robusta exports. The cost of production is low as a result of smallholder farmers using family labour and few inputs.

“Seasons have changed and become unpredictable. The rains sometimes come but for a short period. This has resulted in leaves wilting and eventually dying,” says Kironde Mayanja, a coffee farmer from Central Uganda.

“Drought stress, pests and diseases, poor quality of inputs, inadequate extension services and financial constraints inhibits farmers from adapting efficiently in Uganda,” says Elizabeth Kemigisha, IITA Communications Officer.

“There is a global awareness that if agricultural research for development is to have a positive impact on the beneficiaries of development efforts, all stakeholders in the process need to be on the same page. All stakeholders can all contribute to address the challenges of agricultural development and food security for all,” Kemigisha told IPS.

IITA generates evidence-based solutions such as a shade tree tool, farmer profiles and segmentation, new crop varieties, intercropping coffee and banana, as well as appropriate investment pathways for various stakeholders.

“Our research is used by non-governmental organisations and the private sector, and we work closely with governments, particularly National Agricultural Research Organisations (NARO). IITA has worked with HRNS as an implementing partner to conduct studies to enhance local knowledge on climate change adaptation in coffee growing,” Kemigisha said.

David Senyonjo, the Field Operations Manager in charge of climate change at HRNS, says his organization promotes and provides technical support for coffee production by working with smallholder coffee farmers.

“Research has helped to enhance farmers’ resilience to the adverse effects of climate change by providing them with the know-how to adapt to the changing climatic conditions,” says Senyonjo.

Cathrine Ojara, a female coffee farmer, is one such success story.

“The knowledge I’ve received towards adapting to farming that suits the changes in the climate, such as intercropping and planting shade trees, has transformed my life,” she says.

Ojara said she has been able to send her children to school and improve her household, as well as establish extra income through projects such as poultry.

Mayanja, who has an eight-acre farm, with the help of HRNS Africa has adopted new farming methods and his yields have increased from 20 to 50 percent.

“We have received training that has made me an expert in climate change and I have put to good use what I learnt to improve our crops. I have been practicing mulching, planting and managing shade trees, using fertilizers, digging water trenches and irrigation,” Mayanja told IPS.

Senyonjo noted that women face additional difficulties. “[They have a] lack of control over production resources like land, which in most cases is a prerequisite to having access to credit, hence women are less likely to use yield enhancing inputs like fertilisers,” he said.

“We don’t have our own land and due to time constraints and domestic responsibilities, we are unable to attend trainings on climate change,” Ojara told IPS.

While women do most of the farm labor, they only own 16 percent of the arable land in Uganda.

Hannington Bukomeko, a scientist with the IITA, said effective adaptation to climate change among coffee farmers requires low-cost and multipurpose solutions such as agroforestry, a practice of intercropping coffee with trees.

IITA has developed a shade tree advice tool, offering the best selection criteria for suitable tree species that provide various ecosystems services in different local conditions.

“Shade trees are one of the climate change adaptation practice we recommend for farmers. Shades modify the micro-environment so that it reduces the intensity of sunshine hitting the coffee plant as well as evaporation of water from the soil,” says Senyonjo.

Bukomeko explained that the tool helps coffee farmers to identify appropriate tree-selection.  “Farmers lack the knowledge on selecting the appropriate tree species, lack the tools and technical support to summarize such information to guide on-farm tree selection,” Bukomeko told IPS.

According to Bukomeko, the shade tree tool relies on local agro-forestry knowledge and scientific assessments of local on-farm tree diversity. “Users of the tool can identify their location in terms of country, province and ecological zone, select their desired ecosystem services and rank them according to preference. In return, the tool advises the user on the best tree options for a given location and ecosystem services,” says Bukomeko.

The shade tree tool was tested and validated for the studied regions, and found to serve the purpose of guiding on-farm tree selection for coffee farmers, according to IITA.

“Through government and other partners, the tool can be used by extension workers who will have mobile devices that can access the application tool,” says Kemigisha.

IITA has also conducted research on banana/plantain, cocoa, cowpea, maize, yam, and soy bean.

Ilsy Membreño separates green and red coffee beans, part of the tasks involved in the harvest on the Montebelo farm in El Salvador. The drop in production caused by coffee leaf rust has driven wages down to just three dollars a day. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
EL CONGO, El Salvador , Dec 18 2015 (IPS)

Sitting in front of a pile of coffee beans that she has just picked, Ilsy Membreño separates the green cherries from the ripe red ones with a worried look on her face, lamenting the bad harvest on the farm where she works in western El Salvador and the low daily wages she is earning.

As it spread through this country and the rest of Central America, the fungus (Hemileia vastatrix) that causes coffee leaf rust infected the farm where she works.

“There is less coffee to pick, and in the end there is less money for us,” lamented Membreño, one of 30 people working in the harvest on the Montebelo farm in the municipality of El Congo in the western Salvadoran department (province) of Santa Ana.

The parasitic fungus feeds off the leaves of the plants, infecting them with yellow and brown spots. The leaves fall off and the beans are unable to mature.

Coffee production generates some 150,000 direct jobs and 500,000 indirect jobs, according to the report “Coffee Cultivation in El Salvador 2013”, drawn up by the governmental Salvadoran Coffee Council (CSC). Between 1995 and 2012, coffee represented 7.5 percent of the country’s total exports.

The fungus threatens to further impoverish El Salvador’s rural areas, where 36 percent of households already live in poverty, according to the government’s Multiple-Purpose Households Survey 2013.

Membreño told IPS that before the coffee leaf rust outbreak ravaged the farm, she picked two quintals (92 kilos) a day, earning around eight dollars a day during the three-month harvest.“The disease caught us with our pants down.” -- Julio Grande

“But now I don’t even manage to pick one quintal, and I earn just three dollars a day,” she said with resignation.

The other day labourers who talked to IPS described a similar situation when we visited the privately-owned farm, which is 116 manzanas (a manzana is equivalent to 0.7 hectare) in size.

Climate change has also hurt the coffee crop, with lengthy droughts in the rainy season and heavy rains in the dry season.

“The rain has knocked the coffee beans off, and we lose time picking them up,” said Sonia Hernández, a mother of three who is also working on the Montebelo farm, told IPS.

Official figures published on the CSC web site show that output plunged from 1.7 million quintals in the 2012-2013 harvest to just 700,000 in the 2013-2014 harvest, due to the coffee leaf rust outbreak.

In the period in question, the total payments to temporary harvest workers dropped from 21.6 million dollars to 8.7 million dollars.

Production rallied somewhat during the 2014-2015 harvest, to 925,000 quintals. The CSC’s forecast for the 2015-2016 harvest is 998,000 quintals – still below the output obtained prior to the outbreak.

“Without a harvest, these poor people don’t have work,” Manuel Morán, the foreman, told IPS.

Montebelo is in the Apaneca-Lamatepec mountains, where conditions are perfect for coffee cultivation. But neither corn nor beans, the staples of the Salvadoran diet, are grown in the area.

And without land to grow subsistence crops or money to buy food, the people in this rural community face threats to their food security.

“We don’t have anywhere to plant corn or beans, we depend on our work on this farm for a living,” said Membreño.

There are approximately 19,500 coffee growers in the country, 86 percent of whom are small farmers with less than 10 manzanas of land, who represent 21 percent of the total national output, according to the CSC.

“Outside of harvest time, we gather firewood, that’s how we support ourselves, because there isn’t anything else here,” said Membreño, who has an eight-year-old son. Her husband works in the same activities.

Coffee leaf rust, found in El Salvador since the late 1970s, began to spread rapidly in 2012. But the devastating effects were not felt until 2013, and caught coffee growers as well as the government off guard.

“The disease caught us with our pants down,” Julio Grande, a researcher at the governmental National Centre of Agricultural and Forest Technology (CENTA), told IPS.

In one area of the Montebelo farm, he is studying the biology of the parasite and the epidemiology of the disease, while testing fungicides.

The idea is integral treatment of the disease, simultaneously focusing on fertilisation of the plant, pruning, and the use of fungicides, he said.

These three elements together can bring good results, he added.

In fact, in the areas where he used fungicides, the coffee bushes are relatively healthy, and out of danger.

“The fungicides work, but if the other aspects of the equation are neglected, the effect is limited,” he added.

Renewing coffee plantations is an effective technique, because the older the plants, the more vulnerable they are to the fungus, the researcher added. El Salvador’s coffee trees are considered old – over 30 years old.

Besides technical assistance, fungicides and other inputs, the government distributed around eight million coffee rust-resistant plants to 4,200 farmers, to begin a process of renewal of their fields, Adán Hernández, manager of Centa’s coffee division, told IPS.

And on their own, farmers have planted another eight million, he added.

But large-scale renovation would require heavy government investment, to buy from private nurseries the 300 million seedlings needed to plant the 217,000 manzanas of coffee bushes in the country. And at any rate, there are not enough seeds available to do that.

Meanwhile, sitting next to the pile of coffee cherries, Ilsy Membreño has just one thing on her mind: how to get by on three dollars a day.

Edited by Verónica Firme/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Coffee being dried on the roadside in Busoga, Eastern Uganda. Credit: Will Boase/IPS

By Fred Ojambo
KAMPALA
, Sep 28 2012 (IPS)

Uganda, Africa’s biggest coffee exporter, is racing against time to boost its production of the crop by 60,000 tonnes, or one million 60-kilogramme bags, within the next three years. But some industry players believe that the feat is unattainable.

This East African nation’s target is to raise annual output from 3.5 million to 4.5 million 60-kilogramme bags, and it plans to do this through an ongoing government replanting programme.

Francis Chesang, the production manager at the state-run Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA), told IPS that he was confident that this landlocked nation would soon reach its target.

“Our replanting programme is yielding results and we should be able to lift annual production in 2015… because more of the new fast-growing and high-yielding trees are coming into production.”

Uganda, the continent’s second-biggest grower of the crop after Ethiopia, launched its coffee replanting programme in 1994, a year after the country detected the coffee wilt disease that devastated half its stock of Robusta trees.

The programme aims “to gradually replace old, diseased coffee trees with new, genetically pure and high-yielding coffee varieties at a rate of five percent per annum for Robusta and two percent per annum for Arabica.”

Currently, Uganda has a combined stock of 300 million Robusta and Arabica trees, according to the authority.

At least 140 million trees, mainly Robusta, were planted over the last 18 years, with the goal to plant a total of 200 million trees by 2015, Chesang said. The replanting aims to “optimise foreign exchange earnings into the country and payments to farmers,” he said.

The crop accounts for 20 to 30 percent of the nation’s annual export earnings, with Uganda earning 448.9 million dollars from the export of 3.15 million bags of coffee from Oct. 1, 2010 through September 2011, according to the UCDA.

The country was the world’s ninth-biggest exporter of the crop during that period, ahead of Ethiopia, which was in 10th place, according to the International Coffee Organization.

Farmer Sera Nafungo picking coffee berries in Bukalasi, eastern Uganda. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

According to David Muwonge, the deputy executive director of the National Union of Coffee Agribusiness and Farm Enterprises, Uganda is unlikely to meet its increased coffee production target as yields remain lower than potential because the country is yet to replace all the coffee trees destroyed by the 1993 wilt disease.

“I think it will be really hard to achieve this target because we are yet to plant 60 million trees,” he said. “The target is achievable, but only when all the new trees are in production.”

Muwonge added that the insufficient number of trees, aging trees, poor farming methods and the effects of climate change meant that it was unrealistic to increase coffee production by one million 60-kilogramme bags over the next three years.

Fred Kyobe, a 64-year-old farmer in the Wakison District in Uganda’s Central Region, told IPS that production volumes have taken long to recover from the wilt disease devastation as the youth did not have the patience to venture into coffee farming. He said that the lure of fast-paying jobs in urban centres resulted in the youth abandoning coffee farming because it takes more than three years before the crop starts yielding.

“My sons have abandoned farming in favour of motorcycle taxi businesses in town, and my vigour is reducing due to old age,” he said. “The blow I received when the coffee wilt disease attacked my crop made me less enthusiastic about it.”

Coffee here is grown by at least half a million smallholder farmers, 90 percent of whom own fields ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 hectares, according to the UCDA. The sector employs 3.5 million people.

“Coffee continues to play a pivotal role in the Ugandan economy, contributing immensely to the export earnings to the tune of 449 million dollars in 2010/11 and providing a livelihood to about 1.32 million of the 3.95 million agricultural households,” the UCDA said on its website.

The crop remains a key export commodity for Uganda in spite of it dropping from contributing 60 percent of export earnings to the current 20 to 30 percent, Muwonge said.

“Coffee is still central to the Ugandan economy for employment, farmer incomes and hard currency earnings in spite of the drop in its export revenue share due to the diversification of exports,” he said. “Increased investment in the sector may bear fruit in the government’s poverty reduction programmes.”

Uganda reduced a heavy reliance on coffee for its hard currency earnings by promoting non-traditional exports including fish, horticultural products, maize, cocoa, hides and skins.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni underlined the importance of the crop last week by stating that anyone caught contaminating the coffee quality should be arrested and prosecuted. In the past, some farmers have been accused of harvesting immature beans, while dealers were accused of mixing low-grade coffee with higher grade brands and selling it as superior quality.

“The urge to pick immature coffee is driven by poverty, since at times urgent needs may arise before your crop fully matures,” Sunday Mugaga, a coffee farmer in of Kayunga District in Uganda’s Central Region, told IPS.

Mugaga’s income from coffee is barely enough to support his family so he supplements it by selling the fish he catches from the Nile River, which flows through his district. The lure to expand his almost one-hectare coffee farm is strong, but he is constrained by a lack of available land.

“My two brothers and I inherited only four hectares of land from our father, which limits my expansion. But with time I will plant more coffee when I acquire more land,” he said.

“I treasure coffee because income from the crop has enabled me to send my five kids to school, although I must admit that the money isn’t enough to cover my needs,” he said.

But Uganda can still bank on the crop for most of its export revenue over the next three years, ahead of the planned commencement of its oil production in 2016, Robert Kasozi, an independent economics researcher, told IPS.

London-based Tullow Oil Plc, France’s Total SA and China National Offshore Oil Corporation are jointly developing Uganda’s oilfields, whose reserves the government upgraded to 3.5 billion barrels from 2.5 billion barrels.

“With oil production not expected to reach commercial levels until 2016, coffee production still has a significant role in the country’s economy,” he said. “Uganda could thus benefit from increasing its output over the coming three years in the form of higher export revenue.”

The country also stands to benefit from rising global demand, which is projected to outstrip production in the next few years. This is especially driven by rising demand for coffee in Russia, India, and China, Kasozi said.

Meanwhile, many farmers remain committed to coffee because of the high prices they receive for their crops amidst the rising global demand, Isaac Ntumwa, a coffee farmer in the Central Region district of Masaka, told IPS.

“Many farmers in my district have embraced the crop with hopes for a better harvest in the next few years,” Ntumwa said.