Coffee cultivation is losing its charm

The Coffee Board of India recently released estimates for the country’s coffee crop grown in the two southern States of Karnataka and Kerala at less than three lakh tonnes across the plantation districts of Kodagu, Chickmaglur, Hassan and Wayynad.

Karnataka accounts for 85 per cent of the coffee crop with the remainder comes from Kerala. The average decline is 20 per cent over the earlier post-blossom crop estimates which had projected 3.5-lakh tonnes with 2.47-lakh tonnes for robusta and 1.03 tonnes for arabica according to the Coffee Board.

The coffee plant is shade loving which thrives in its natural habitat — subjected to two months of drought — after which sufficient rain triggers its annual flowering. Thereafter, adequate moisture is needed to sustain this, which determines the crop for the following year. Coffee ideally requires around 70 inches of rain through the year with clear periods of dry weather to enable its ripening. However, during the last year the average annual rainfall was confined only to a few pockets which explain the lower crop this year.

Coffee cultivation requires about 2.5 workers per acre to adhere to the specified calendar of operations. For instance, fertiliser application is ideally carried out around April-May after sufficient rains to enable the plant to optimally ingest the applied nutrition. The availability of adequate labour during this period becomes critical to cultivation as delays adversely affect the plant’s uptake of nutrition which reduces the crop output — and in turn increases the production costs.

Tasks like pruning the plant, shade management of trees, demand high skill levels. However, with depletion of skilled labour force these operations are not being carried out to the required standards. The acute shortage of plantation labour is evident from the thousands of workers from Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam who have migrated to Karnataka.

Higher literacy levels and industrialisation of the economy across the southern States have witnessed high rural-urban migration to the tune of 60 per cent, which thereby creates a vacuum in the plantation work force. Today the older generation of workers are loath to see their children work in conditions exposed to the elements of nature. The coffee plantation environment characterised with rainfall requires work in wet weather that involves leech bites. Given that plantations abut forests, wildlife invariably strays into the cultivated areas, due to reduced forage/fodder, leading to man-animal conflict — involving attacks by leopards, tigers and elephants on plantation labour.

Time to mechanise

Given the growing labour shortage, mechanisation of coffee cultivation is possibly the only option. Picking the ripe fruit uses over 50 per cent of the annual labour requirement in terms of expenditure. Mechanisation proves to be a major challenge considering the undulating terrain that coffee is grown on. Much work needs to be done in this area. In Brazil where coffee is cultivated on flat terrain, mechanisation is employed successfully where a single worker covers 100 acres. Specifically, mechanisation is associated with technologies to harvest the crop and other operations which has to be adapted to coffee plantations in India.

Another challenge to coffee cultivation over the last few decades is the loss of forest cover that has resulted in environmental degradation. Such massive deforestation has manifested in climate change which reflects in reduced rainfall and also affects streams which are irrigation sources.

The country’s coffee plantations have predominantly prospered under natural shade which supports the environment. A US Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre study confirms that “habitat on shade-grown coffee farms outshone sun-grown coffee farms with increased numbers and species of birds as well as and improved bird habitat, soil protection/erosion control, carbon sequestration, natural pest control and improved pollination.” Coffee plantations are a good alternative to a natural eco system without any scope for environmental degradation.

The fragility of the coffee plantation economy is because the bulk coffee prices have actually stagnated compared to other commodities in the food basket. The costs of other inputs such as fertiliser, labour wages, pesticides and fuel have undergone geometric progression over the years. With 2007 as a base, in the last 10 years the international prices of robusta coffee have increased by about 1.75 per cent; whereas the cost of cultivation has increased by two and half times. This reduces profitability by nearly 33 per cent for coffee plantations.

As a result, much needed development work such as replanting old plants, investment into infrastructure like irrigation and drying yards, among others suffers which in turn impacts plantation productivity. This downward spiral has prompted coffee planters to explore other avenues of income. Among the more popular diversifications; the concept of ‘home-stays’ has promoted coffee tourism to supplement poor plantation incomes. To offset dependency on one crop, pepper is inter-planted in plantations which fetched attractive prices till last year. However with the crash in pepper prices since last February it has hit the plantation economy badly.

Climate change hazards

Coffee cultivation is fraught with hazards of climate change, labour scarcity and global currency fluctuation. While corporate plantations are endowed with the financial muscle to cope with such challenges, the proprietary plantations, especially small growers who constitute over 98 per cent of the growers experience cash flow issues which affect their capability to conduct timely cultivation operations and have a significant bearing on crop output.

To ensure plantation profitability growers should not sell dried “cherry” but process it for higher returns. Therefore, their crop quality needs improvement through investment into quality hubs for superior processing to make Indian coffees ‘world class’. To do so Rule 7B ( I ) of the Income Tax Rules 1962 should be deleted to allow coffee growers to progress up the value chain for better prices and profitability.

The coffee plantation sector requires support, as small growers cannot be expected to cope with challenges like global currency fluctuations. These growers therefore have to be supported through the mechanism of minimum support price and generous subsidies. More importantly the Coffee Board should disburse subsidies on time to enable growers invest in infrastructure and mechanisation to be globally competitive as well as adapt to climate change.

(The writer is a former Vice President, Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation based at Kodagu and a plantation consultant)

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