After hitting a 50-year low in production in 2021/22,Costa Rica’s coffee output has been rebounding. The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Foreign Agriculture Service estimates total production of approximately 1.44 million 60-kilogram bags of green coffee in 2023/24, which is up over 15 percent from two years ago. This increase is attributed to better plant management, positive initial flowering, and stabilised fertiliser costs.

Costa Rican producers have been actively innovating for the global specialty coffee market. For example, producers are responding to a trend towards increased product differentiation through microlots, which allow them to capture higher sales prices. The number
of coffee mills has increased from 184 in 2011/12 to 304 in 2021/22,with many new micro-mills
servicing small groups of farms.

Despite production increases, the number of coffee growers in Costa Rica continues to decline. As of 2021/22 (the most recent dataset), there were 26,704 farmers, down nearly 50 percent from 10 years earlier. Factors contributing to this decline include long periods of low coffee prices, aging farmers, and high land prices near urban areas.

The industry faces ongoing challenges with labour supply, particularly for harvesting. Most of the coffee harvest depends on large numbers of temporary foreign workers from Nicaragua and Panama. There have been concerns about changing immigration flows affecting labour availability.

Costa Rica’s economy is increasingly shifting towards services, with the tourism, pharmaceutical, and IT sectors growing rapidly. This economic diversification is providing more attractive employment options for the children of coffee farmers, potentially further impacting the future labour supply for coffee production.

The local Costa Rican currency’s depreciation has also negatively impacted the coffee industry.
The exchange rate has reached its lowest point in 14 years, reducing the competitiveness of Costa
Rican coffee on the international market and causing significant financial losses for exporters and mills.

Improving Resilience
Despite challenges, Costa Rica maintains its reputation for high-quality coffee. The country continues to participate in prestigious events like the Cup of Excellence, with some producers making it to the 2023 finals.

Climate change is threatening coffee-growing areas in Costa Rica, specifically the Coto Brus region. By 2050, absent adaptation measures, experts at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington, DC maintain that climate change “will reduce the global areas suitable for growing coffee by about 50 percent.” An WRI study outlined key findings from this region, including some of the main challenges facing the coffee sector. It also examined existing factors that present opportunities to enhance climate resilience. The study recommends actions that can be taken to improve the sector’s climate resilience and long-term sustainability.
During the course of their research, the WRI’s team of researchers conducted a literature review, interviews, a workshop and field visits with coffee farmers, government ministries, funders, and other stakeholders.
Despite the study’s local focus, the lessons and experiences shared are relevant for other coffee-growing regions and countries: Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Uganda, among others. These are the places where coffee producers are facing some of the harshest the effects of climate
change, and the researchers hope that it will serve as a tool and inspiration for accelerating adaptation action.

Despite the benefits of medium- and long term planning to accomplish the large-scale transformative changes, WRI’s experts concluded that the coffee sector will need to adapt to intensifying climate impacts. However, they found that most producers are integrating smaller, short-term, incremental adjustments that might not be sufficient in the long term.

WRI developed a program to assist Costa Rica’s government as it mapped out short-term, medium-term, and long-term adaptation pathways that are inclusive, equitable, and participatory. WRI developed a framework which underscores that, in some situations and locations, incremental adaptation measures will prove insufficient in the years to come to fully reduce growing risks from climate change impacts. In these situations, more fundamental, or transformative, changes – which may entail creating pathways toward new systems more suitable for changing climate conditions – will be needed to maintain the communities’ livelihoods in the long term. Such changes will often include shifting the mix of crops grown
and livestock raised in particular areas, employing substantially new technology at broad scale, and/or altering the production landscape from one type to another. The first year of WRI’s technical assistance
effort focused on stakeholder engagement, research, and in-country discussions via workshops to introduce the concept of transformative adaptation and establish a dialogue on climate adaptation, vulnerabilities, and impacts. These discussions were held with coffee producers, cooperatives, ministry
officials, research organisations, financing entities, and the private sector, among others.

Findings from these conversations are being used to inform the drafting of a national coffee strategy.
The focus of the second year of the project focused on the lessons learned from the coffee growing region of Coto Brus to better inform, guide, and finance climate resilience efforts for these communities, while extracting insights for other coffee-growing regions in the country.

Reviving Production in Coto Brus

The Coto Brus district, located in the Brunca region, is one of the country’s eight coffee growing areas identified by the Coffee Institute of Costa Rica (Instituto del Café de Costa Rica; ICAFE) and one of the smallest contributors to national production. Coto Brus was chosen by government counterparts in response to smallholder farmers’ requests for support and because this area has been experiencing a rapid decline in coffee production and is highly vulnerable to climate change. In the second year,
WRI conducted literature reviews, expert interviews, farm visits, and a full-day workshop in Coto Brus with key stakeholders.

By 2050,absent adaptation measures, up to half of the areas currently suitable for coffee cultivation in Coto Brus is predicted to become unsuitable across both low and high emissions
pathways scenarios. (For more details, consult the various research reports and studies published by Oriana Ovalle Rivera of the CATIE – Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza – which is located in Turrialba, Cartago, Costa Rica.) Central areas are projected to be more adversely affected while a few locations are projected to see an increase in suitability.

Efforts to increase Coto Brus coffee farmers’ resilience by addressing the most immediate climate change impacts have begun. However, few farmers incorporate adaptation into their planning and huge implementation gaps persist, despite a broad awareness of sustainable practices. According to interviewees, some farmers are further behind than others — especially smallholders with more limited
resources. Despite the benefits of medium-term and longer-term planning to accomplish the large
scale transformative changes the coffee sector will need to adapt to intensifying climate impacts, most producers and the sector are integrating smaller, shorter-term, incremental adjustments that might not be sufficient in the longer-term.

WRI’s study identified key recommendations to increase the short-term, medium-term, and long-term climate resilience of the coffee sector. The recommendations include:
• Promote adaptation options identified by local stakeholders, provide regular technical follow up, and support farmers in exploring additional medium-term and longer-term measures.
• Establish baselines and monitor the impacts of adaptation measures. Building the evidence of farms’ vulnerabilities while tracking the results of adaptation efforts can help maximise the allocation of limited resources over the short, medium, and long terms and inform where and when transformative pathways will be needed. Transformative pathways are coordinated sequences of short to-long-term actions or projects intended to prepare agricultural systems for unprecedented climate conditions.
• Map when and where coffee is likely to lose viability in the coming decades and explore transformative and equitable pathways toward climate resilience, with stakeholder participation (particularly relevant for MAG, ICAFE, and MINAE). At-risk farmers should be supported to experiment with different crops,
technologies, and even livelihoods like eco tourism that will serve them better over the longer term.
• Reinforce existing institutions and enabling factors to increase the uptake of adaptation measures and build greater resilience in Coto Brus. These include strengthening farmer associations and cooperatives, as well as farmer-to-farmer learning; promoting more strategic cross-sectoral alliances; and strengthening support for programs focused on sustainable practices.
• Develop farmer-tailored skills trainings and guidance to build farmers’ capacities to manage costs and access credit and financing, so they can more easily invest in adaptation measures.
• Create open communication channels within public and private entities to bridge crucial information flow gaps around climate risks, existing vulnerabilities, and options to support the implementation of adaptationmeasures. Providing producers with clear, complete, and practical information on different financing options is also essential.

• Gordon Feller, based in California, travels the world reporting about innovations that can change our economies and strengthen small enterprises. Since 1980 he’s been publishing
  reports and magazine articles about coffee/tea innovations on five continents. He is both an ABE Fellow – Japan Fdn and Global Fellow – The Smithsonian

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