East Africa eyes harvest recovery

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Coffee growers across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda are hopeful that, after five years of drought and extreme heat, the 2024-25 harvest will bring in a small recovery to communities in most regions.

Rising against the backdrop of the majestic snow-covered Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the lush green coffee trees at the Machare Estate are getting ready for the final part of the 2024-25 cycle with cherries starting to mature on branches.

“The trees are looking quite good at the moment and after a few difficult years because of the weather, this year we should have a decent harvest,” says Machare Manager Bente Luther-Medoch, speaking to Global Coffee Report during a visit to the farm in late February.

Climate change is taking a toll across the region, but unlike most of the world’s coffee producing countries that primarily have been affected by severe drought, dryness and extreme heat, in Tanzania the problems for the coffee crop development have predominantly been from excess rains.

“With climate change it’s either too much rain or too little, but here it has been the opposite of other countries and we have had too much rain. Our rain fall has actually doubled and last year we only harvested 25 per cent of the regular crop,” says Luther-Medoch.

“In this part of the Kilimanjaro region, this year the rainfall has also been higher than usual but only by 20 per cent, so the crop development is still doing okay.”

In parts of East Africa a second smaller harvest known as the fly crop is typically harvested from April to June, and has traditionally accounted for between 20 and 25 per cent of total annual coffee production in these regions.

The official Tanzania Coffee Board (TCB) has forecast the 2024-25 harvest to reach about 1.3 million 60-kilogram bags, a small improvement from output of about 1.2 million bags in the 2023-24 cycle. Of this, a little more than 60 per cent was Arabica coffee and the balance was Robusta beans of the Canephora species.

Tanzania is home to an estimated 320,000 smallholder coffee farmers, with an average of 200 trees each on an average land size between 0.2 to 0.8 hectare, according to official TCB statistics.

If the mid-harvest results for average yields from Tanzania holds through the end of the season, the new 2024-25 crop will bring a whisper of hope to the global coffee market that is facing an unprecedented supply deficit in the hands of massive losses from climate change across near all producing countries. Producers from these regions face at least two more crop cycles before coffee trees stressed out by and damaged from weather losses will be able to post at least a modest recovery.

In neighbouring Kenya, last October coffee growers had high hopes at the beginning of the 2024-25 harvest that the new crop would be able to produce a recovery and return to 750,000 bags. For a country that in the mid-1990s produced close to 1.7 million bags, but for years has been struggling to reach between 650,000 and 700,000 bags, this would have seemed within realistic expectations. By mid-February, however, these hopes were clearly not materialising. In a report published on 28 January 2025, Swiss multinational coffee merchant Sucafina said the harvest was expected to end lower but highlighted good quality.

“Kenya’s 2025 coffee volumes are down 10 to 15 per cent, but quality is significantly higher, with premium grade making up to 80 per cent of the harvest,” Sucafina quoted Richard Mugi Ndiang’ui, Field Sourcing Coordinator at Kenyacof, an incorporated trading partner in Kenya.

At the Endebess Coffee Estate in the western Kenyan town of Endebess, Farm Manager Collins Ndwiga confirms that, except for a few farms and regions, the dry weather has persisted across most of Kenya’s coffee producing regions. Inspecting the crop development ahead of the fly crop, weather continues to be much too dry for comfort and the accumulated stress trees are enduring from five years of prolonged drought, heat, and insufficient rains are visible across the farm.

“Right now the trees are very thirsty and we really need the rain soon. At the moment we still have an opportunity for a good fly crop to complement the main harvest, but it’s already been more than two weeks since the last rains and it’s not just the bean development for the fly crop but also the flowering for the next crop in the 2025-26 cycle that is starting to suffer without rain,” Ndwiga says.

Over a month later, rain had still not arrived in many parts of East Africa and pictures of trees with a fast-growing loss of leaves due to defoliation caused by dry and hot weather spread across social media. When trees shed a significant percentage of leaves, a minimum average of 50 per cent of the next flowering will have to go towards the production of new foliage rather than fruit in order for the tree to survive, hence cutting into the potential for the next crop.

Coffee growers and climatologists suggest the smaller second harvest in Kenya and parts of Tanzania and Uganda is starting to  disappear from the coffee map.

“The weather here in Kenya and in most of East Africa continues to be more dry and hot every year, exactly as we have seen in so many other parts of the world. Today, we continue to see regions here in Kenya where there isn’t a fly crop any longer,” says Ndwiga.

The global coffee market had high hopes the new 2024-25 coffee crop across East Africa would provide a healthy recovery of at least 2 to 3 million bags, which would help offset at least a part of global losses to crops elsewhere from weather damage. Most of this recovery was expected to emerge from Uganda, Africa’s second largest grower, where political support towards increasing output is high and growers are working hard to heed the call of the central government to expand production. As the harvest is being wrapped up, any new growth has been limited by the lack of timely rains and most growers interviewed by Global Coffee Report said they are harvesting less as the dry weather caused the bean size to shrink and yields are lower.

“Last year we had the problem with the drought, which left the coffee in a bad situation. This year the trees lost a lot of leaves because of the drought, so we have been getting fewer coffee beans,” says Rose Chepsikor, a grower of the Mount Elgon Coffee and Honey Cooperative in Western Uganda.

Adding to the weather problems impacting trees’ overall coffee development from flower to fruit, farmers across both Arabica and Robusta regions are increasingly struggling with crop pests. There are increased reports of the rust and wilt fungous diseases, which attack the leaves and roots respectively and eventually cause the tree to die unless treated early.

Since 2017, the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) has worked on implementing a policy paper named The Coffee Road Map, which seeks to increase total national production to 20 million bags between 2025 and 2030. However, official figures from the UCDA in February suggest the 2024-25 crop will end at about 6 million bags, unchanged from the previous year. The lion’s share of Uganda’s coffee crop is Robusta beans. At the heart of the plan is the replanting of old trees as well as expanding the cultivated area through the distribution of “millions of coffee seedlings”, a key challenge for growers together with access to pesticides.

“I have 16 coffee trees and I would like to grow more coffee because the prices are very good this year, but it’s a real struggle because we don’t have a lot of land and we don’t have access to financing to buy new plants, seeds, or pesticides,” says Isa Sempijja, a smallholder farmer in the Robusta region of Jinja. According to the UCDA, Uganda’s 1.7 million smallholder farmers have an average of 0.1 to 0.15 hectare.

Back at Uganda’s main Arabica region around the eastern town of Mbale on the slopes of Mount Elgon, growers are reporting not just lower-than-expected yields but also final crop numbers below those reached in the last 2023-24 harvest cycle.

According to Wasibi Rogers, General Manager of the Mount Elgon Coffee and Honey Cooperative, women coffee growers, who make up more than half of the farmers across East Africa, struggle more than most. Each day, they have to make between four and five trips by foot to fetch basic necessities for their homes and families. This includes a minimum of three times walking a total four to five hours to the nearest river to collect water. Children as young as four must help with carrying four to six litres back to their homes. Women also have to fetch firewood and food supplies, and are still expected to contribute with at least two to four hours of work in the farm tending to the coffee crop as well as taking care of the home, meals, and children.

“More than half of our 850 members are women. We founded the cooperative in 2017 with special attention to the situation of the women in order to help them get more income and better opportunities to sell their coffee at a better price, but the lack of water in the communities still is a big problem for almost all the women,” says Rogers.

Chepsikor adds that growers are happy with the recent high prices that have resulted in better prices for their coffee and eased the pressure on their daily survival.

“If we had a source of water or a well in the community, we women could save at least four to five hours daily which we could use on growing other crops like tomatoes, and go down to the market once or twice a week to sell some of our produce and earn some extra money for our families,” she says.

“Life here is very hard but at least the prices are better this year and that is helping us with everything in the community.”

From the early efforts to replant old coffee fields in Tanzania launched more than 25 years ago, to the more recent political goal of expanding production in Uganda, results have been slow to show in global coffee statistics. But combined with similar initiatives in Kenya, industry officials believe the three East African countries could expand combined output to about 10 million bags in the next three to five years from the current number of about 8 million bags.

However, this will only be achieved with continuing political and financial support from the governments and stake holders such as multinationals and roasters. Constraints from the increasingly extreme weather events like storms, flooding, drought, and excessive heat will, however, be taken into account whenever growers consider coffee against other agricultural crops and few doubt that coffee production will get easier.

“We started the renovation at Machare in 1998 after leasing the farm from the Government and we have come a long way, replanting all the old coffee area,” says Luther-Medoch.

“Here at Machare we are much higher at 1350 to 1550 meters, but across the coffee growing belt in Tanzania as soon you go lower there is a challenge with rain and it will be increasingly difficult to grow coffee on the lower altitudes at 1000 meters or below,” she says.

Like the rest of the world, coffee production is set to become ever more difficult in the future ahead. Yet for the next year, at least, in East Africa there will be a small recovery.

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