For the second chapter of the World Coffee Analytics project, we are excited to introduce Producer Profiles (Part I). In it, we analyze several quantitative economic indicators for coffee producers, such as production, yields, exports, farm size and GDP per capita. We also discuss some more qualitative factors that influence these unique industries, such as government support and access to capital. We believe this template will be useful for future looks into some of the major global producers that are not included in this report. Such producers as Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala and China – all with their own unique stories.

Below is a list of the relevant data we explored and why we think it’s important:

• Production Data: This includes share of global production, share of production that is Arabica vs Robusta and production trends. Production data gives us insights into which countries are investing heavily into production – maybe aided by government programs – or which countries are afflicted by “La Roya.”
• Yield Data: Yield data is incredibly interesting to compare because it is so variable between countries. The highest yielding country in this report is Vietnam with a 5-year average of 2.4 MT/Ha. Compare that to Mexico, whose 5-year average yield is 0.3 MT/Ha. Such a difference is hard to find among other tree fruit industries. Yield data gives us insights into the modernity of the production practices employed by each country and it exposes just how little uniformity there is in coffee production.
• Export Data: We wanted to look at how dependent each of these economies is on just the coffee industry. Compare a country like Ethiopia, where coffee accounts for almost half of the its annual exports, to a country like Mexico, where coffee is only the 234th highest export and no single item accounts for more than 10% of total annual exports. Reliance on coffee is important to study because it has important effects on the countries currency and its people’s mobility between industries.
• GDP Data: Coffee producers are notoriously poor African, Latin American and Asian countries. GDP Data gives us a look at the magnitude of this phenomenon.

About the data: We collected production data from the USDA FAS and FAOSTAT websites. Export and import data was collected from the Comtrade website. Marketing year data was collected from the International Coffee Organization. And qualitative information was collected from USAID. In a landscape made up of independent smallholder farmers (SHFs) of varying sizes and levels of sophistication, precise data collection is currently impossible. As such, most of the figures presented in this report should only be considered directional.