Have you ever considered the journey that coffee takes from the farm to your cup? Behind every sip of your favourite brew - at home, in a café, or from a takeaway - lies the toil of coffee farmers facing unique challenges. Farmers in developing countries face myriad risks that threaten their livelihoods and security. These include extreme weather events, pests and plant diseases, which can devastate crops and reduce yields. Then there is the unpredictable nature of coffee prices. Farmers on small holdings across the world are affected by international markets that determine how much money they will receive for their products. Prices are famously unpredictable, swinging up and down due to weather, market demand, and the global economy. This adds another layer of worry and uncertainty – casting a shadow over their professional and family lives. Farmers cannot easily change how much coffee they produce based on price changes, and the price instability means they cannot be sure about their income at harvest time. The resulting stress can lead to depressive symptoms and a feeling you have lost control – helplessness, hopelessness. Our research shows how these volatile prices affect the mental health of farmers in Vietnam, which has accelerated over the last three decades from accounting for just 1.2 per cent of world output in 1989, to become the second largest coffee producer in the world, after Brazil. BEYOND THEIR CONTROL Looking at the picture from the pointof-view of coffee farmers shows how few things they can control. The coffee tree takes about three years to bear fruit and lasts around 50 years. There is little the farmer can do to change the output. They know, for example, they have 100 trees, and from experience approximately how many beans they will get. But they do not know the price they will receive. The farmer will be asking ‘how much will I get per pound of coffee beans? How much income will I have?’ They cannot control the price – their hands are tied by factors beyond their land, their harvest, and their work. Some of these farmers may be just about keeping their heads above water. If there is even a small drop in income for one or two months, that could be all it takes to push them under. But poor or not, the fact there is income uncertainty – that you do not know how much money you will have in your pocket one day from now or one month from now – creates a lot of stress and tension. You do not know how to plan; you cannot budget. As a coffee drinker, you might see the price of your cup of coffee go down or – far more likely – up. But does this feed back to the farmer? If you pay 10p more per cup, are they seeing the same benefit? Simply put, no. There are a lot of steps between what we pay and what the farmer gets. The money the farmer receives is a small fraction of what we pay in the coffee shop. It is not just one farmer or one village increasing or decreasing their supply that influences the price they get; it is a whole bigger market sometimes thousands of miles from their homes. For example, if there is a drought in Brazil, that can lead to global coffee 40 |
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