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Struggling Origin

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, it be-
came clear that sheltering in place and social distancing
created a range of retail market disruptions, and that these
disruptions caused a host of supply chain issues and uncer-
tainties. Those immediate challenges are now compounded
by real concerns about a prolonged global recession.
In the wake of these accumulating challenges, it is
important to consider the longer-term implications of the
COVID-19 pandemic for specialty coffee supply chains.
We talked with Alejandro Mendez, who is the 2011 World
Barista Champion and owner of Four Monkeys Coffee
roasters. Alejandro says that the hardest part of current
situation is reduced number of clients for any business
along coffee chain: “It is hard for producers and also for
roasters and cafe owners. For the producers there is no
many buyers coming in this year, so that means that some-
times buyers that discover new small producer won’t be
able to do so. And to-be-discovered producers won’t be
able to get better pay for the hard work. I see some pro-
ducers that have a lot of coffee still in their warehouses
because it was simply hard to sell.”
This uptick uncertainty and problems to sell ultimate-
ly push losses to producers who are not only losing the
coffee that they worked so hard to grow, but they are not
able to get an income for whatever they already harvested.
And this might reduce even further the amount of coffee
farmers, as it was already seen as not very prestigious work
by young generation.
The other side of the deal for coffee producing coun-
tries is deglobalization. There is every reason to worry
that a historic process of deglobalization is underway,
threatening to scuttle the growth models of origin coun-
tries that previously used trade as a path to prosperity.
How will COVID-19 affect developing countries’ growth
prospects? The answer will depend largely on how global-
ization—and intellectual support for it—evolves in the
pandemic’s aftermath. The prospects are not encouraging.

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