The Coffee Barometer report gauges how much progress the coffee industry has actually made over the last two decades. Photo credit: Coffee Barometer
The coffee sector faces numerous challenges, from entrenched poverty to the hazards of climate change. For the past 20 years, the Coffee Barometer report has monitored the industry’s biggest players and chronicled how they have or have not responded to these challenges.
Published every three years, the Coffee Barometer is a joint effort by Conservation International, Ethos Agriculture, Solidaridad, and VOCAL. The 2026 edition, released on June 11, takes a broad view of the current state of sustainability in the coffee industry. The report examines issues such as income distribution, climate vulnerability, and the interplay between companies’ sustainability commitments and impending regulation.
Crucially, the report zooms out to discuss the industry not simply as a collection of individual companies and people but as a system. With this view, structural inequities become clear. “We tend to focus on sustainability and the solutions very much at farm level without really touching on any of the other elements that should also be part of our sustainability discussion,” says the report’s lead author, Sjoerd Panhuysen. “If you start looking at the industry itself, you see a lot of structures that tend to take value out of the sector and not reinvest it back in countries of origin.”
Panhuysen and his co-author Frederik de Vries explore several issues and assess how the industry has done in addressing them over the past two decades. One is farmer poverty: the rise in commodity prices over the past five years has done little to change the reality for smallholder coffee farmers, many of whom still live in poverty.
“A Kenyan smallholder farming 0.7 hectares, for example, would need farmgate prices to rise to roughly six times their 2020 level to close the gap through price increases alone,” the authors note. At the same time, the Barometer finds that 10% of the cost of a bag of coffee is effectively subsidized by farmers in the form of unpaid family labor.
The report also looks back to the price crash of the early 2000s that inspired the first Coffee Barometer. The response to that crisis led to a rise in certifications such as Fairtrade and voluntary sustainability standards from the largest coffee brands, with the goal of rewarding quality and sustainability with higher prices. However, Panhuysen and de Vries write that while these private sector solutions have made some progress, they have failed to fully address the underlying issues. Now, new regulations loom, particularly from the European Union. These will tackle, among other problems, deforestation and forced labor, and require companies to report and verify the impact of their sourcing and sustainability measures. How the industry responds will be key, the report notes.
Another important element that the report focuses on is the industry’s power imbalances: “Market concentration gives a small number of traders and roasters significant influence over pricing and margins,” Panhuysen and de Vries write. The biggest companies can extract value through, for example, extended payment terms, and capture profit with preferential tax structures and shareholder payouts. At the other end of the supply chain are farmers: “Exposed to price volatility, climate risk and rising input costs, they retain only a modest share of the value their coffee ultimately commands.”
In conclusion, Panhuysen and de Vries call for comprehensive market reform and for the biggest brands to rededicate their efforts to creating a more equitable industry. “The choice is not between sustainability and profitability,” they write. “It is between a model of sustainability that manages the appearance of progress and one that accepts the redistribution of value that a resilient coffee future requires.”