The paradoxes of climate-smart coffee (PACSMAC)

Project summary

Coffee, especially the valuable Arabica cultivar, is vulnerable to climate change. Warmer and wetter weather and spreading fungal disease have encouraged farmers to experiment with a variety of strategies, including shifting uphill, shade growing, new irrigation techniques, crop switching and transitioning to new hybrid varieties. Meanwhile, governments and large coffee firms have been exploring ways to support climate-smart production innovations to preserve their lucrative supply bases. Focused on Ethiopia and Tanzania, The paradoxes of climate-smart coffee (PACSMAC) project will investigate how climate change - and the ways actors across the value chain are trying to adapt to or mitigate it - affect coffee farmers’ livelihoods and land-use decisions. While observers often describe emerging coffee production experiments and the market opportunities they generate as resilient, vibrant and environmentally beneficial, these assessments are preliminary and speculative. In fact, the opportunities and incentives for growers to adopt and benefit from any of these innovations will depend on what downstream firms and even consumers do. Conversely, firm strategies will depend on how producers respond to changes in prices, demand, climate, and support programs.
PACSMAC will illuminate the connection between smallholders’ opportunities to innovate to improve their livelihoods and firms’ and governments’ efforts to build and profit from global value chains. The project will combine in-depth qualitative research using participant observation and expert interviews of downstream coffee firms with focus group, interview, survey and satellite data in selected villages in coffee-growing regions in the two countries. Combining these valuable data sources will allow us to develop scenarios of future coffee value chain development in the two countries that connect farmers’, states’ and firms’ actions with livelihood and land-cover impacts.