With the sharp drop in production, the price of Robusta coffee reached an all-time high.
Due to a sharp drop in production, the price of Robusta coffee has reached an all-time high. This gives coffee farmers new reasons to be hopeful.
On Friday, the farm gate price of raw Robusta coffee berries hit a record high of ₹106 per kg in the Wayanad market. At the same time last year, the price was only ₹80 per kg.
When the market price of raw coffee was ₹61 a kg two years ago, the State government said it would buy coffee from farmers at a minimum support price (MSP) of ₹90 a kg.
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Trading sources said that the main reason for the price increase was a sharp drop in coffee production in Brazil, a major coffee-producing country, because of severe frost.
Brazil makes an average of 60 million bags (a bag is 60 kg) of coffee each year. But this season, the number of bags made went down to 50 million. Sources say that a drought-like situation in the coffee-growing parts of that country after the harvest also made prices go up.
The average amount of coffee made in India each year is less than six million bags. The main reason prices went up was that production and supply were so far apart. Sources also said that the prices went up because the Indian rupee lost value against the US dollar.
‘However, the current rise in prices won’t help coffee farmers in the country because most of them have already sold their crops at low prices,’ Prasanth Rajesh, president of the Wayanad Coffee Growers’ Association (WCGA), said.
Mr. Rajesh said, ‘The luck of Indian coffee farmers depends on the bad luck of Brazilian farmers.’ He added that this situation should change because it doesn’t give farmers a steady way to make money.
He said that right now, the Coffee Board needs to act quickly to get more people to drink coffee at home. Also Read | Why Kerala farmers abandoning rubber in favour of rambutan, dragon fruit?
Even though the State government announced an MSP of ₹90 per kg, he said, most farmers haven’t gotten any money from it yet because the government has set a limit of one acre for purchasing.
He also said that the MSP should be given to all farmers, no matter how much land they own, because the cost of inputs, especially fertilizers, had gone up by more than 200%. In its final estimates, the Coffee Board said that the country’s crop would be 3.42 lakh tonnes in 2021-22.
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