World Coffee Producers Forum

The Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) has led the first ever World Coffee Producers Forum, producing a signed declaration and plan aiming to aid producers of the special beans throughout the world. Hoxton Coffee supports these goals in our aim to buy sustainable, fair-trade coffee.  

“We have just started a new process in the world coffee sector,”

“Today we finished a reflection, assembling ideas, a process of listening each other, but it is only the beginning of what we hope is a new stage.”

The group released a statement saying the action plan will be “developed co-responsibly by stakeholders of the global value chain.” Their four key points in the declaration were:  

• Profitability of coffee farming in many producing countries faces a critical situation, even going through periods of losses, due to different factors such as: lower international coffee prices, …low agricultural productivity, increasing production costs related to climate change and variability, and rising labour costs of production activities such as harvest.
• Lower profitability has led a significant percentage of coffee producers in the world to live in poverty, with deprivations in their quality of life (housing, utilities, delayed or poorly attended education, low access to health systems, etc.), and reduced ability to reinvest in their farms.
• Even if development of specialty coffee in the last decades has generated some premiums to producers, these have not been enough to offset the costs associated with certifications, and the analysis of value of the global coffee chain shows that the share reaching producers is very low, in contrast to that remaining in the hands of traders, coffee roasters, and distributors to final consumers.
• If corrective actions aiming to address the aforementioned problems in a coordinated way are not undertaken and their financing is not guaranteed, in the medium term the world may face a crisis characterized by a structural reduction of the global coffee supply, with the consequent impacts on quality of life of producers and their regions’ social stability, while global demand will continue growing without being met, which will generate undesirable imbalances in the coffee market that may put sustainability of the global chain at risk.

It is with these issues in mind that Hoxton Coffee aims to trade with Colombian (and other) coffee growers in a sustainable way that enhances their ability to direct their own lives, producing high quality coffee at source, and bringing local communities along with them.

Within the action plan, the forum included working co-responsibly with stakeholders around the world within the global coffee chain to improve social conditions for producers, and undertaking an independent study on correlations between coffee prices globally, and the cost of producing coffee, in the past 40 years.