Coffee

Coffee is produced by around 12.5 million farming households in over 50 countries around the equator and constitutes an important contributor to their economic livelihoods.

Most of the farming households are smallholder farms, millions of who often cannot cover their production costs with their income. The main challenges that producers face are the highly fluctuating prices for green coffee, rising production costs and the consequences of climate change. Extreme weather conditions caused by climate change threaten coffee cultivation. They lead to crop failures and a shift of cultivation areas to higher, often forested, locations.  At the same time major investments are needed to increase soil health, climate adaptation and ultimately productivity of coffee farms.

Value creation majorly takes place downstream of the global coffee supply chain, particularly in consumer countries, such as Germany. Germany is the second largest importer of coffee world-wide and the biggest re-exporter of coffee products in the European Union (2022). But a lot of coffee is also consumed here. The per capita consumption of coffee in 2022 was 167 liter per year, which is higher than the consumption of mineral water (130l).