A surge in world robusta coffee prices promises a windfall for Africa's top coffee exporters, but many farmers are ill prepared to capitalise after years of low prices, civil unrest, disease and regulatory chaos.
Africa's share of world coffee production has virtually halved since the late 1970s, to around 13 percent. Output in the continent's main robusta producers like Ivory Coast and Uganda has been falling steadily in recent years due to a variety of factors, but mainly because of low prices on world markets in recent years.
Now those prices have recovered, and with benchmark London prices marking a fresh 7-1/2 year peak of $1,653 a tonne last week, farmers are scrambling to ramp production back up.
"Growers have not been taking care of their plantations for a long time. It takes a lot of work to produce high quality coffee," said Fulgence N'Guessan, head of exporting co-operative PCA Kavokiva in Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast was long Africa's top grower of the robusta beans used in instant coffee, but is now rivalled by Uganda.
Many Ivorian farmers ditched coffee after the 1999 industry liberalisation left them more vulnerable to low international market prices. Some tore out their coffee trees to plant other crops like cocoa, others simply let their fields revert to bush. Official robusta output has fallen further since a 2002-03 civil war split the country in two. The half held by rebels includes the main north-western coffee growing regions, to the north of the main cocoa areas in the world's top cocoa grower.
International Coffee Organisation statistics show Ivory Coast's robusta output fell to 130,000 tonnes in 2005, down from well over 200,000 in the late 1990s. But industry sources say part of that fall is due to smuggling, with some of the coffee grown in the rebel zone passing through Guinea and other neighbouring countries.
"This year I told the farmers to clean up their plantations and harvest the coffee because there was profit in it. The farmers know about the rise in coffee prices," said an agronomist working in Ivory Coast's western Daloa region.
"During the price crisis, governments hastily liberalised the sector without sufficiently organising the sector to compete in a free market system," Caleb Dengu, project manager at the Common Fund for Commodities, a United Nations body set up to promote diversification in economies dependent on raw materials.
"The price recovery is leading to renewed interest in the production and trade of coffee. But production in Africa remains low because of the weak production capacity of farmers."
Fred Luzinda, secretary of the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) told Reuters last week that 2006-07 production was tipped to reach 2.6 million 60 kg bags - or 156,000 tonnes - from 2 million bags the previous season, almost all robusta.
"We have very good rains just as the trees are flowering. Rains are forecast to continue even until January. A lot of coffee will go into production," he said.
Uganda, which has caught up with Ivory Coast's robusta output, is planting wilt-resistant strains of coffee and investing in irrigation to offset future droughts.
Only Ethiopia grows more coffee, with 270,000 tonnes, though almost all of that is the more aromatic arabica type of coffee used more in filter blends and other high-end uses, which has not seen such a meteoric price rise as robusta in recent months.
"The buyer from Nestle came to see me and told me to take good care of my coffee so I get lots of money this year, like last year," said Mamadou Kone, who farms 34 hectares near the town of Duekoue in western Ivory Coast. "This year's harvest will be bigger than last year because then I didn't maintain my plantations."