DA: Phl coffee production 'very low’ despite high demand

Despite the Philippines’ high consumption of coffee, its domestic production is very low to meet its local demands, an executive from the Department of Agriculture disclosed.

According to DA’s Project Development Officer of the High-Value Crops Development Program, Enrique Dela Cruz, coffee is among the commodities under the country's development goals.

“There are about ten or nine commodities in the Philippine development goals; coffee is one of them. Unfortunately, the production has gone down over the years because of a lot of things,” he told the DAILY TRIBUNE during the Manila Coffee Festival held at Newport World Resorts in Pasay City.

"First, because the budget is not enough to support it. Secondly, the overall budget for high-value crops [HVC] is also not enough for all the HVCs that we look after,” he continued.

Dela Cruz went on to explain that there are approximately 100 HVCs that the government is currently working to boost.

He further noted that the Philippines grows all four commercially viable varieties of coffee.

“Unlike in other countries, they only grow two, and these are arabica and robusta. In our case, we also grow on top of those two—liberica, which is our barako, and excelsa, which is some kind of variety also of barako, but it's different,” he explained.

He, however, noted that “our production of coffee is very low compared to our consumption and demand.”

“Our self-sufficiency is about 15 to 20 percent at the most, which means we import about 80 percent of our requirements [and] what we consume,” he added.

Moreover, the DA official said that the Philippines is the fifth-largest coffee consumer in the world, and 60 countries grow coffee in the coffee belt around the equator. According to him, the Philippines is only one of the countries out of the 60 that grows all four coffee beans; the others are Malaysia, Indonesia, and India. The rest only has yields of liberica and excelsa.

“We practically import everything. Our production is probably just 30,000 metric tons per year. That’s low. We consume a lot more than that; we consume 200,000 metric tons, and most of those are imported,” the DA official said.

Pinoys top 3-in-1 coffee drinkers worldwide

Dela Cruz revealed that the Philippines last year became the leading nation worldwide to consume three-in-one coffee.

“Curiously also, and maybe something we should not be proud of, in 2023, we became the world’s number one consumer of three-in-one coffee, which is not the best coffee to drink since it has a lot of sugar and cream. In that context, coffee is important because consumption grows by 2.5 to 4 percent per year, even during the pandemic,” he said.

“The production has gone down, so we have to focus on production. The world market is also very lucrative, which means we can export. However, it's very difficult to talk about export when our own local production is very low, so we have to grow for our own requirements.”

DA said in November last year that it needed at least P4.2 billion to implement the Philippine Coffee Industry Road Map, which aims to increase the country’s coffee sufficiency to 47 percent by 2027.