A Stronger Future for Coffee Starts Where It Is Grown

A stronger future for coffee starts by strengthening the places and communities where that journey begins. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPSOpinion by Boubaker Ben Belhassen (rome)Wednesday, September 30, 2026Inter Press Service ROME, September 30 (IPS) - Imagine your morning coffee. You smell the aroma as steam rises from the cup. It wisps and swirls, thins, then disappears. You lift the cup to your mouth. The first pure joy of the day. That coffee may have begun beneath shade trees in Ethiopia, on a Colombian hillside, in Viet Nam’s highlands or among the coffee farms of Brazil. Long before it reached your cup, someone planted and tended the trees from which it came. Then came the harvest. Ripe cherries were picked with care, and the coffee began a journey that would carry it far from the place where it was grown.Few agricultural products connect people across such long distances. Coffee is among the world’s most widely traded commodities. Coffee supports the livelihoods of up to 25 million farmers worldwide, while millions more people participate in the economic activity created along the coffee value chain.Coffee’s extraordinary global reach has created livelihoods and economic opportu...