Coffee is Xavier Baluku’s favourite cash crop. And it is not just Baluku’s favourite crop but Uganda’s primary foreign exchange earner. Most of the coffee grown in Uganda’s mountainous Rwenzoris is drunk in Europe and North America. The people on this mountain have special connection to coffee as it is their main source of household income. With proceeds from coffee they are sending their children to school.

Forty-four year-old Regina Mbambu, a single mother of 6, farms coffee on an acre of her land, grows spinach, mangoes, avocados, bananas, beans and maize in Kasese. She says last year all her crops died out and most of the coffee trees dried up due to severe drought.

It’s clear that coffee farmers are finding it harder to grow the same amount of coffee and to sustain the quality of the beans as a result of the warmer weather. In 2008/9 the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) reports that 2.07 million of 60kilo bags of coffee were exported, the exports reduced to 1.78 million bags in 2009/10 and 1.75 million bags in 2010/11. UCDA says the high prices at market helped keep the farmers’ income afloat. Coffee is Uganda’s primary cash crop export and action needs to be taken on threats induced by variations in climate experienced in coffee growing areas if the country is to ensure that coffee can continues its lead as a chief cash crop. Farmers are also worried of the variations in the rainfall patterns given that 80% of Ugandans depend on rain-fed subsistence agriculture.

Previously farmers intuitively cleared the fields and planted crops basing on a seasonal cycle where rains were until recently fairly defined. The farmers worked on an imaginary timetable tin which March to early June was a wet season. June and July – dry season; August to mid December – wet season; December to February – dry season. The farmers plant their crops during the wet season, tend to the fields and harvest during the dry season.

The metrological department that would be giving early warning information to farmers is not making easier for them. The department is handicapped. Consistent meteorological records in Uganda are scarce. Those who would wish to study climate trends in Uganda are limited by absence of long-term meteorological data. The available meteorological data is unreliable due poorly equipped facilities, lack of investment in infrastructure and personnel from a fragile network of 15 weather stations. Gulu weather station is not working; Bundibugyo has none but depends on a weather station in Kasese to determine its weather. So the metrological department which is supposed to be guiding farmers on weather or climatic trends is letting them down.

Uganda’s Minister for Water and Environment Maria Mutagamba says the impact of climate change is manifesting in the prolonged drought periods in parts of the country and intensity in floods in areas that never used to experience flooding. “These climatic changes are mainly caused by the industrialized nations whose carbon emissions are very destructive to the atmosphere. They need to take responsibility and pay the suffering poor countries,” Mutagamba said. The minister’s remarks come days before the UN climate talks under the COP17 in Durban, South Africa. She said Africa deserves climate justice, and support from industrial nations as compensation for global warming.

The Durban COP17 can make world leaders commit to reducing carbon emissions and increase funding to poor countries that are bearing the brunt of climatic variations for which they have little contribution. If this is done, farmers like Baluku and Mbambu can regain the fading smile in their household income resulting from coffee.

Indonesia, now struggling with slumping coffee output due to hot and wet weather, has set an ambitious goal to be the world’s No.2 producer within five years, an executive at an industry association said on Wednesday.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest coffee producer after Brazil, Colombia and Vietnam, and the world’s second-biggest robusta coffee producer after Vietnam.

“We are optimistic that in five years, Indonesia will be the second-largest coffee producer in the world with coffee production of 1.3-1.4 million tons,” Pranoto Soenarto, vice chairman of the Association of Indonesian Coffee Exporters and Industries (AEKI) told reporters.

In the September 2010 to August 2011 coffee year, Indonesia will produce an estimated 600,000 tons of coffee beans, Soenarto said. He added that in 2011/2012, production will rise to about 650,000 tons.

This is far from an industry consensus however. Coffee production in Indonesia could fall as much as 30 percent to around 400,000 tons in 2011 due to a failure in pollination after last year’s persistent rains, the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute said earlier this year.

Hot weather conditions hit crops earlier this year and resulted in current low stock levels, that is causing exports to decline.

Harvests in Sumatra, the main growing island, usually begin in March or April, but yields had been down as farmers have been picking cherries since January after persistent rains caused the flowering season to begin earlier in some districts. The next harvest is due in December or January, but recent rains in Sumatra raised fears of another bad crop.

The coffee crop in Indonesia is currently in the flowering stage.

To reach its production targets of above 1 million tons within the next five years, Indonesia will boost coffee output by developing genetics so that crops fair better in key growing areas in the country, Soenarto added.

“We have been starting the coffee genetic selection to be cultivated in two certain areas in Java island,” Pranoto said, adding that this could double yields to between 700 and 800 kg per hectare each year.

Indonesian coffee plantations currently total around 1.3 million hectares, mostly cultivated by small-holder farmers.

Reuters

THIOTTE, Haiti – Connoisseur Osier Jean steps into the sterile room, pauses and clears his mind.

With notebook and flavor wheel in hand, he quickly turns to the task at hand – checking the quality.

He sniffs, slurps and swirls, allowing his senses to take in the richness.

The liquid is not wine, but caffeine rich Kafe Kreyòl, Haitian coffee. It is the country’s latest effort to revive a once-flourishing industry that has been crippled by decades of deforestation, political chaos and crises.

For years, bitter poverty and plummeting coffee prices around the world have made it much more profitable for farmers to chop trees for charcoal, and invest in cash crops, rather than coffee cherries. Now, with coffee consumption up and a shrinking supply of beans worldwide driving up prices, Haitian coffee is once again becoming a hot commodity.

But the coffee renaissance has its critics who wonder whether this revival, propped up by foreign aid, can sustain itself after the money runs out.

“Our biggest resource is our coffee,” said Archange Mardi, 51, a local farmer in Thiotte, a mountain valley in the southeastern Belle Anse region where the lush landscape is lined with shaded coffee trees growing in back yards, small gardens and family-owned plots. “Before we didn’t understand; now we are beginning to.”

Farmers in Thiotte and other coffee producing regions here are gaining access to new global markets, like Italy and Japan, and fetching premium prices for their exported sun-dried coffee.

Quality beans from Gwo Chwal, a nearby mountain community known for producing one of Haiti’s best coffee beans, once sold for $.30 a pound. Today, Japanese roasters are buying it for $5.50.

“We have a demand that we can never satisfy,” said Robinson Nelson, a local coffee grower and manager of COOPCAB, a cooperative in Thiotte working with more than 5,000 coffee farmers in southeastern, Haiti.

The success isn’t just restricted to the southeast. Some 130 miles north, in the rural highland of Port-de-Paix, a smaller but similar coffee cooperative is also growing. This year, Café COCANO farmers are expecting to double exports of their organically grown coffee – already available on the Internet and in Italian espresso shops – to high end South Florida grocers.

“Haitian farmers can produce great coffee as long as there is an export chain that works and that can get them a fair price,” said Anthony Vinciguerra, director of St. Thomas University’s Center for Justice and Peace, which has been working with the 300 families who comprise the northwest Haiti coffee growers’ co-op for the past five years.

While the northwest farmers have been aided by the South Florida university’s students – they assist with everything from social media and marketing to finding new export markets as part of class assignments – in Thiotte, farmers have benefitted from the attention Haiti received after last year’s devastating earthquake.

Earlier this year, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund provided $1 million to Root Capital, a non-profit social investment fund focusing on rural businesses in developing nations, to help boost small businesses in Haiti. One of its first loans, $150,000, went to COOPCAB, the Thiotte coffee growers. The money since has been paid back with interest.

“Our mission is not profits,” said Nelson, sitting inside the group’s headquarters where Jean, 46, the region’s only professionally trained coffee taster, works with others who dry the coffee beans, pack it in burlap bags and load it for shipment from Port-au-Prince.

“We are interested in helping our planters improve their lives. There is a transformation happening.”

Said Fritz Francois, COOPCAB’s president: “It is almost impossible to find someone today in Thiotte cutting down a tree to make charcoal. Today, because coffee has a price, the farmers are motivated and they are leaving the trees because to cultivate coffee you need shade.’’

Still, there are challenges.

Each year, coffee speculators from the neighboring Dominican Republic come across Haiti’s porous borders to smuggle in an estimated 120,000 bags of Haitian coffee, avoiding Dominican taxes and paying desperate growers pennies on the pound.

“If you go to the Dominican Republic, you may drink a coffee that is very good and most probably that coffee is from Haiti, but you wouldn’t know it,” said Marcel Duret, a former Haiti ambassador to Japan, working with COOPCAB to get its three varieties of coffee into new markets.

Duret estimates that Haiti loses $50 million annually to the illegal coffee trade. Money, he said, that could “provoke drastic changes for the better in the lives of the coffee growers.”

Not everyone views the Dominicans, the biggest consumer of Haitian coffee, as the threat to growing Haiti’s coffee economy.

Critics say growers and exporters need to focus quality and quantity while the international community needs to help create an economic model that focuses less on subsidies and more on sustainability.

“Haitian farmers have lost the long-term vision,’’ said Stephan Jean-Pierre, who has worked in Haiti’s coffee industry as a consultant, exporter and roaster for years.

“They live on a day-to-day basis, and waiting five years for a coffee tree to produce cherries is too long. They are mining whatever trees there are today until they run out.”

While Thiotte farmers may be reaping the success of the global coffee market, the cooperative model is not the answer to the country’s “dangerously troubled” coffee industry, Jean-Pierre said. Twenty years after the U.S. Agency for International Development organized a group of coffee growers into the Fédération des Associations Caféières Natives (FACN) co-op, and invested more than $10 million into helping them produce and market a high-end brand of coffee known as Haitian Blue, all it has to show for the effort is the copyrighted brand, existing on paper only.

“[The cooperatives] are very sexy on paper but we you start digging you realize that without subsidies they can’t survive,” Jean-Pierre said.

Haiti needs to reorganize its entire coffee chain, said Jean Marc Ewald, production and quality manager of REBO, one of three traditional Haitian coffee exporters that remain.

“This is not the moment to be exporting small batches of 30 bags, 40 bags for $5 and then there are 400,000 bags in here that are not being sold,’’ Ewald said. “The system they are promoting will give a lot of money to just a few.”

If Haiti is to once again become a thriving coffee market, the effort needs to be a national project that begins with a massive tree planting campaign while convincing farmers that there is a strong future in Haitian coffee.

“We have to reorganize the whole chain, government has to get involved,” Ewald said. “We just need to start planting again.”

Over the next three to four decades, temperatures in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa are expected to rise about two degrees Celsius. Scientists say without immediate innovations in farming, crops will be devastated and the region will be thrown into chaos. So Rwanda is experimenting with what is already widely practiced in some neighboring countries. They are growing banana and coffee plants on the same soil to prepare for the new climate in the long term, and to grow the economy in the short term.

Frederick Musangwa has a farm in Rwanda. He grows bananas to eat, and coffee to sell. He cooks over a wood fire, and has no electricity or running water. In the past, he grew food crops to feed his family and sell in the market, and earned about $115 a year from coffee plants.  More recently, he said, he has almost tripled his income from coffee.

Musangwa said he began harvesting more beans after he followed an agriculture expert’s advice to plant the coffee directly under his banana trees. He says he is not worried about climate change – he is just trying to make a living.

Innovative farming techniques

But scientists say new agricultural techniques in this region like this one are not just about poverty alleviation – they are a critical component of preventing the region from destruction due to climate change. In one of the most densely populated parts of Africa, temperatures are going up, while the population continues to boom, and more and more erratic weather can be expected.

Sanginga Nteranya, the incoming director general of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, said that if farms systems are overhauled, people will not have to suffer.

“We have to be bold, actually. The consequences are difficult to contemplate because the population growth in this Great Lakes is the highest in Africa. It’s about 500 people per square kilometer and most of the wars that have been happening here is just about that,” said Nteranya.

Efficient land use

In countries like Tanzania and Uganda, farmers already are planting coffee bushes and banana trees on the same land, a technique called “intercropping.” Farmers say the bark from the banana trees serves as fertilizer for the coffee, a cash crop. The leaves shade the coffee from the bright sun, and the bananas feed their families while they wait for the coffee to harvest.

Laurence Jassogne, an agricultural systems scientist with the Consortium for Improving Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa, said growing coffee and bananas also can – in a small way – help attempts to stave off climate change by reducing carbon emissions.

“We are doing research at that moment that shows – the more shade you put – I know we are talking about bananas, but we are also talking about shade trees – then you also sequester carbon much more – and that’s good for carbon mitigation,” said Jassogne.

Food security concerns

Some officials are not yet convinced and want more research done before Rwandan farmers adopt intercropping as a widespread technique. They say coffee – one of the country’s largest foreign currency earners – is too important to the Rwandan economy to risk it being farmed haphazardly and mixed with other crops.

Burundi also has been reticent to abandon the single-crop policy in favor of banana-coffee farms. Jassonge said the concern is over food security, and farmers may take intercropping as a cue to overrun their coffee fields with food crops.

VOA – H. Murdock

Marie Claudine Yansoneye is a Rwandan farmer who is not keen on mixing bananas and coffee, October 2011.

But the technique is not gaining quick acceptance here. Even though farmers like Musangwa are making more money from intercropping, other are more cautious. Marie Claudine Yansoneye grows beans, corn and potatoes – just enough to feed her family in the same neighborhood as Musangwa.

She said it makes sense that people grow crops together, because there is hardly any land. But given a choice, Marie Claudine said, she will always separate her coffee and bananas.

 Too early for clear estimate of damage
    * Blocked roads could complicate harvesting
    * Excess moisture could spread fungus
    By Alex Leff
    SAN JOSE, Costa Rica, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Central America
coffee growers are counting their losses after two weeks of
rainstorms have felled coffee trees, ruined roads and
threatened to spread fungus on plants.
    The rains have already killed more than 80 people in the
isthmus, where the countries of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua,
El Salvador and Costa Rica all produce high-quality arabica
beans contributing to global supplies.
    The rains are still coming down, and national coffee
associations in Central America say it is too early to estimate
total damage from problems hitting farmers as they gear up to
begin harvesting.
    Damage to crops and slowed exports can pressure coffee
prices, which have been volatile in recent days with December
arabica futures KCc1 on ICE tumbling 2.3 percent on Monday
after hitting the highest in three weeks at $2.4355.
    The harvesting season in Central America and Mexico, which
together produce more than one-fifth of the world's arabica
coffee, begins in October and comes to a close in September.
    In Costa Rica's southern growing regions, heavy downpours
knocked ripe cherries off trees and caused road damage,
complicating the transport of freshly picked beans to mills for
export processing.
    "We've already had nine days of uninterrupted rain and the
coffee is ripe. Too much rain makes the berries swell up full
of water and burst, and then they fall off," Hernando Urena,
manager of Costa Rica's national coffee cooperative federation,
told Reuters.
    The southern coffee regions like Perez Zeledon and Coto
Brus account for 20 percent of Costa Rica's 1.2 million 60-kg
bags of annual exports.
    Specialty coffee region Tarrazu could have lost up to 5
percent of its crop and losses will rise if rains continue,
said Ricardo Zuniga, local agronomist of farming cooperative
CoopeTarrazu.
    "It's been days without seeing the sun, diseases are
starting to spread," Zuniga said.
    FUNGUS EXPLOSION
    In Honduras, which this year passed Guatemala as Central
America's No. 1 coffee producer, officials say the storm
severely damaged highways, cutting off isolated towns and
killing at least 13 people.
    "If the rain keeps up, we could see coffee falling from
trees but the biggest worry right now is serious damage to
infrastructure," said Victor Molina the head of the Honduras'
national coffee institute, IHCAFE.
    "We are urging the government to fix the roads quickly so
that we don't lose a significant amount of coffee."
    Honduras is expecting to export a record 4.6 million 60-kg
bags of coffee in the 2011/12 growing cycle.
    Similar worries are looming in Guatemala, which says it
will have an official estimate of damages later this week.
    Luis Arimany, owner of a coffee farm in Santa Rosa on
Guatemala's Pacific coast, where recent rains flooded entire
communities, said he has lost roughly one percent of his mature
crop just weeks before he begins harvesting.
    "Fungus has exploded in the last week," Arimany told
Reuters. Arimany plans to fumigate his farm and if the weather
clears, he hopes to recover part of his moldy crop.
    Luis Osorio, the technical secretary of Nicaragua's
national coffee council Conacafe, said between 3 to 5 percent
of the country's crop could be damaged, although it was too
soon to make a complete assessment.
    The region also grows sugar for export and Honduras
reported flooding in some cane fields. But industry officials
are not yet sure if there will be drop in output