This is why Starbucks are not responsible for my poverty

I recently was on a panel evaluating the projects of university students based on analysis of young enterprises, one of the groups had looked at the operations of an organisation that was looking at increasing the incomes of small holder coffee farmers in “Africa”.

One of the reasons for the enterprises mission was based on the fact that a cup of a Caffe Latte Grande at Starbucks is US$ 4:15 (Kes. 430/-), the same at Java House in Kenya is US$ 3:10 yet the farmer who grew the coffee only receives

If we assume that the coffee is 20% of the value of the cup of the Latte then the price for the coffee is US$ 0.83 (Kes. 87.15) for the 15g used to make the cup of espresso this would translate to US$ 55/- per KG of roasted coffee bean or US$ 46/- for green coffee bean as you loose 16% of volume from roasting.

The cost of green coffee grade AA, which makes up less than 20% of the harvested coffee, is US$ 7.2/- per KG at the auction house in Kenya of which the farmer gets about US$ 5/- which converts to about US$ 0.70 for cherry, 7 kg of cherry produces 1 kg of dried green bean. 

It would be good at this point to make a comparison with an alternative product such as milk, where the shelf price for a litre of milk is US$ 1/- while the producer price which is what the farmer is paid by the dairy is roughly US$ 0.40 per litre and this is within Kenya.

On average a well-tended coffee farm will yield between 350 and 500 kg per acre of cherry, at US$ 0.7/- kg that would translate to about US$ 300/- per acre whereas a well-managed cow would provide 15 to 20 litres per day. 

An extremely well-tended farm would produce 500-800 kg per acre with newer varieties going as high as 1,000 kg per acre but for those who already have producing coffee trees it would mean chopping down and replanting then waiting 2-3 years before the first cherry harvest.

But since our small-scale farmers still do no maintain any kind of financial records making this decision would be very difficult. What our farmers need to do is maintain financial records of their farming activities which should not be difficult with the level of literacy in the country. It is traumatising to find a graduate farmer behaving no different from his “illiterate” grandfather who was able to educate their father.

That’s enough of the money issues that get millions all fired up against large conglomerates like Starbucks as it has been weaponised over the years by politicians and social enterprises instead let’s try and understand where the rain started beating us as coffee producers.

I had never compared the price of a coffee latte between Starbucks and Java House, it is clear that our farmers would have served themselves better by buying off Java House instead of letting it get purchased by a foreign entity, but that is a story I have already covered before in my article Kenya, a corporate incubator

When I was younger I would visit my grandparents in the rural areas of Kenya, they had a small 10 acre farm which was split into 4 almost equal segments used for subsistence crops, coffee, the homestead and livestock. Unlike many of us today who have inherited their coffee, my grandfather had planted and tended his until it was productive.

The income from the milk, eggs and coffee was enough to educate their 8 children and allow them to live a fairly comfortable life. This was the general case in many homesteads around the village as I suspect was the same across the country.

As my grandparent’s children came of age they would, in what is called tradition even though my grandfather bought his own land, demand a space to build a house. As the entire farm area was being utilised this would mean that some income activity would need to be abandoned or its allocated space reduced.

First to go was the chicken pen that was replaced by a new timber house with a parking space for an old ramshackle car that would be under repair for many years to come. Apart from the departure of a source of protein for the aging couple it also meant that the manure from the chickens which would have gone to fertilise the coffee and subsistence crops was gone.

The next targeted activity was the cow shed and its related spaces such as milking shade, napier grass patch and fodder storage, the farm went from ten cows to none and gone too was the protein for the aging couple and the manure for the subsistence crops and the coffee not forgetting the income.

This pattern continued until finally the coffee patch was all that remained unsettled it cut down to make room for yet another offspring to settle and bear grandchildren for the aging couple.

It has been many years and the couple have been dead a while, the third generation is now cutting up the farm even further replacing crops and animals with ugly stone houses with individual grand gates to drive their cars through and green lawns to entertain their friends once a twice a year.

Last I checked, less than an acre was still under coffee which was so sickly looking and I doubt it would produce anything more than a kilogram per tree.

If you drive around Kenya’s rural areas you will find this as the norm, arable land being subdivided into uneconomical sizes forcing the new owners to move into urban areas to live in slums as they look for wages that are then spent on products such as processed maize flour and milk whose prices keep rising as their rural land remains fallow.

I therefore wonder is this spiralling poverty because of Starbucks or did we take the wrong turn at Albuquerque, as Buggs would say Buggs Bunny's face lines and are now at a destination we did not anticipate?

It is time we took responsibility for impoverishing our communities who we moved away from agriculture a little too soon as we had not yet met our 1965 sessional paper number 10 objectives on food for all and punishment for idle land otherwise we shall continue to be the wealthy poor waiting for handouts.