Charis Gresser and Sophia Tickell
Oxfam
January 1, 2002

There is a crisis destroying the livelihoods of 25 million coffee producers around the world. The price of coffee has fallen by almost 50 percent in the past three years to a 30-year low. Long-term prospects are grim. Developing-country coffee farmers, mostly poor smallholders, now sell their coffee beans for much less than they cost to produce – only 60 percent of production costs in Vietnam’s Dak Lak Province, for example. Farmers sell at a heavy loss while branded coffee sells at a hefty profit. The coffee crisis has become a development disaster whose impacts will be felt for a long time.

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