Reflections on 1 Million Coffee Farmers Trained with TechnoServe Coffee Head Paul Stewart (Part 2)

Lubaba Mekonnen, a member of the Nano Chala cooperative in Ethiopia, participated in a TechnoServe agronomy program. TechnoServe courtesy photo by Olivia Sakai.

This is part two of a two-part interview with Paul Stewart, the global coffee director for TechnoServe.

The nonprofit recently announced it has helped train more than 1 million smallholder coffee farmers in 16 countries since launching coffee-sector-focused programming in 2009. 

That work has come against a turbulent geopolitical backdrop. These days, conflict, climate shocks and rising inequality are colliding with shrinking aid budgets, fractured corporate sustainability goals and isolationist policies that threaten traditional international development operations.

Coffee grower Carlos Cordero served as a TechnoServe farmer trainer in Puerto Rico. TechnoServe courtesy photo by Olivia Sakai.

Paul Stewart has been navigating both the bureaucratic terrain and the actual coffee lands through numerous roles over the past 23 years.

In part one of this series, Stewart addressed questions related to program development, and part two will get into the poverty paradox within the coffee sector, as well as the rapidly evolving, and turbulent, international development landscape. 

Here is part two of our interview with Paul Stewart: 

Many of the biggest downstream actors — like large roasters and large retail groups, particularly in consumption hubs like the U.S. — continue to post record profits. Yet the issue of farmer poverty continues to hang like a cloud over the global coffee industry. In brief terms, how would you explain this paradox?

Coffee farmers in many parts of the world face the same poverty — or greater poverty — than their parents and grandparents did, even as the sector has grown. Why? The biggest driver is shrinking farm size. In a lot of places where we work, the average farm size falls by 50% with every generation. Even if the price per kilo is high, if you are not harvesting much, your household income isn’t growing.

The other thing I’d argue is that agronomy training is still not happening at the scale we need. We are very proud to have trained a million coffee farmers, but there are over 12.5 million smallholder coffee farms. Many farmers have never been reached with agronomy training.

In what ways might this be a “coffee” problem, as opposed to a broader problem tied to rural livelihoods, international market dynamics or socioeconomic or political issues?

The issue of shrinking farm size, and the connection to rural poverty, broadly holds across different crops and landscapes.

I believe the coffee sector is actually a fantastic opportunity to address rural poverty. That’s the reason TechnoServe, which exists to fight poverty, puts so much focus on it.

First, let’s start with the fact that two-thirds of coffee is produced by smallholders. The coffee industry cannot afford to overlook or ignore the issues faced by smallholders; they have to address them. That is not necessarily the case in other sectors where the main suppliers are large farms. 

There are a few factors that make coffee very smallholder-friendly. It’s not — in most places — heavily mechanized or mechanizable, so smallholders can compete with large farms on cost and quality. It better tolerates poor infrastructure than most crops. And it’s not a pure commodity, and farmers can be rewarded for improving quality.

To unlock these opportunities, though, the coffee industry and others must invest in smallholder producers and help them break the cycle of shrinking farm size. The challenge is that this is a daunting task, even for the largest coffee companies who are faced with so much need while facing their own competitive pressures.

Along those lines, do you find private partners or in-country partners tend to be less enthusiastic about cross-sector development programs? Do you ever find yourself trying to talk project partners out of coffee — or the “coffee silo,” as it were? 

We don’t often talk people out of coffee — it’s a great tool for improving rural incomes — but it has come up. In the early 2000s, when global coffee prices were at an all-time low, we supported some farmers in Mexico in low-altitude areas to transition to high-value horticulture. This was a success, as the farmers were in an area close to high-value markets, but such decisions to transition to other crops must be done very carefully together with farmers, as it requires considerable investment by the farmer. 

Certainly, though, we do want to always look holistically at the livelihoods of coffee farmers. There’s a growing recognition in the coffee sector that we need to look at all of a farming family’s sources of income — their coffee incomes, their other farm activities and their off-farm incomes.

Helping farmers achieve a living income that will enable them to remain on their farms and continue producing coffee sometimes means we need to boost all three. That said, our analysis consistently finds that for most farmers in the places we work, coffee offers more opportunity for income growth than other crops.

When companies in the U.S. tout sustainability premiums tied to programs, why is it so rare to see reporting on how much actually reaches the farmgate? Why is that transparency often missing? 

I think the primary impediment is a fear that the numbers will be misunderstood and will seem very low compared to retail prices. There’s a lot of consumer education that would likely be required.

How are U.S. or European aid cuts — or delays — affecting your program design right now in terms of scope, staffing, future planning or the risk you can underwrite for farmers?

The cuts have impacted our pipeline of projects, but not our approach to project design. Instead, we are having conversations with a broader range of potential partners. It’s exciting to hear the enthusiasm for this kind of work from a range of ecosystem actors. 

At TechnoServe, what are you working hardest to protect right now?

We’re not thinking about it in those terms, exactly. It’s obviously a turbulent time for anything related to international development, but we see a lot of opportunity out there to support farmers.

This year, we published the regenerative coffee business case. A lot of our attention has been focused on sharing that, sitting down with the coffee industry, conservation organizations, public donors and investors to really help them understand the analysis and what it means for the sector. 

My sense is that after a period of decades in which huge strides were made in the coffee industry to at least address sustainability issues such as farmer poverty, gender equity, climate change, etc., we’re entering an era that’s less focused on globalization, and certainly less focused on international development programming. Is that accurate? And if so, what are the dangers? 

I think we’re seeing two overlapping trends over the last year or two. First, of course, there are cuts in public funds for everything related to economic development, including coffee agronomy. Second, given the uncertainty in the coffee sector, many companies are applying greater scrutiny to their investments at origin.

To be clear, reduced investment in smallholder farming would be disastrous — for the farmers and their communities, and for the long-term health of the coffee industry. Fortunately, most coffee companies do recognize that they depend on smallholders.

Going forward, I don’t think funding for these initiatives will go away, but it may look a little different. For example, I think we’re likely to see more involvement from impact investors and conservation organizations who are interested in the nature and climate impacts alongside the impact on farmers and exports.

It’s actually an interesting and exciting moment, and we are looking forward to working with all of these actors.

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