Major challenges brewing in the coffee industry

With a plethora of challenges ranging from climate change, diseases and a constantly dwindling youthful workforce to stiffer competition on the world markets affecting the local coffee industry, John O. Minott, general manager of Jamaica Standard Products (JSP), is lamenting that the sector could be in for an uncertain future.

Minott’s JSP, which is headquartered at Williamsfield in Manchester and owns Baronhall Estate, Baronhall Farms, Island Blue, Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee, Blue Baron Estate, and Jamaica High Mountain Coffee, is one of the oldest and largest coffee-roasting factories in Jamaica.

In a recent interview, he told The Gleaner that one of the key challenges facing the sector is climate change.

Traditionally, he said, Jamaica was known to have two major rain seasons – April to June and September to November, one in spring and the other in autumn. Cultivation and production were planned around those seasons because they were predictable.

However, over the past five or six years, the rainfall pattern has been changing consistently. Nowadays, the rainfall has been sporadic.

“It falls when it wants to fall, if it wants to fall, any day, any month,” he explained, noting that timing the weather was important in coffee production.

“As a farmer, you can start your production, your planting arrangements, based on the weather,” he noted, saying that unfavourable weather could result in smaller yields as the berries need rain to develop.

There is also higher-than-normal temperatures, which remove the moister faster from the soil.

“It’s real, whether you want to believe it or not. Climate change is affecting coffee production generally in Jamaica,” Minott said.

And before the impact of climate change became noticeable, leaf-rot diseases have been killing the trees for the past eight to 10 years. Now, there is a new strain, which is a “bother to us”, Minott revealed. It is more lethal than the previous strains, which were “more controllable”, and is wiping out coffee trees all over the country.

Minott surmised that it came into the island following the passage of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, “which is the real start of the devastation”.

There are challenges from overseas producers, especially the ones in Latin America, who have more competitive prices. They have been consistently penetrating the European markets, which Jamaica no longer dominates. These competitors are moving from commodity coffee to specialty coffee, which is cheaper than Jamaica’s.

Coffee prices, on a world basis, are said to be at a 10-year high, while production of Blue Mountain Coffee is at a 10- to a 15-year low.

Another bothersome reality was that operational costs in Jamaica have also escalated, cutting into profit margins.

“Fertiliser prices have gone through the roof, more than double in the past two years, and other costs in relation to what we can get for the final price,” Minott divulged.

All this is coupled with the continuously dwindling young labour force, threatening to bring the industry to its knees.

Minott noted that young people want quick money, which coffee production does not give, and are not attracted to the cultivation and reaping of coffee, which is labour intensive.

According to Minott, 70 per cent of field workers in the industry are over 60 years old. When they die, they are not being replaced by 20- and 30-year-olds.

On his farm at Baronhall in Cave Valley, St Ann, during the picking season, just about 300 pickers are needed on the 200 acres, but he cannot hardly find 100.

“It’s a real challenge to find people to work … . This is a worrying trend,” he said.

The Government is seeking to prop up the industry, with the recent announcement of a joint project with the Caribbean Export Development Agency (Carib-Export) to boost exports into the European market.

A recent JIS story noted that managing director of Windward Commodities, which is undertaking phase one of the partnership, Chris Daugherty, said that emphasis will be placed on a “highly inclusive process known as the product development process” with the relevant stakeholders.

“We will then look at the supply-side analysis, the competitive contracts, how the other Latin American coffee producers have effectively penetrated the EU market as case studies and for comparison, and then find a specific Jamaican approach to the coffee sector, in order to maximise value and support smallholders and producers in Jamaica,” he reportedly said.

editorial@gleanerjm.com