Are global coffee sustainability strategies falling short?

The price of coffee recently spiked to the highest levels seen in around half a century, with peaks seen in early 2025 as well as mid-2026. Arabica coffee prices reached an unprecedented US$4.40 per pound in February 2025, the highest ever recorded.

These were primarily driven by climate disruptions affecting yields in Brazil, the world’s leading coffee producer at 35% of total global coffee, which in turn also led to a severe drop in inventories worldwide.

Amid this setting, sustainability strategies to ensure the stability of the coffee sector as well as to help coffee farmers are playing an ever more important role than ever before — but a new report, the Coffee Barometer 2026, has revealed that many of these may be missing the mark at a time when the sector is in the most need.

“Two decades after the first Coffee Barometer report [in 2006], the structural conditions shaping the coffee sector remain largely unchanged: Producer incomes still fall below living income benchmarks, labour is poorly rewarded, climate vulnerability continues to deepen, and most value is captured downstream rather than in producing countries,” the report stated.

“Sustainability commitments have multiplied, yet systemic reform has not followed. [And the threat is still present]: Although the price of Arabica has retreated from its February 2025 peak by April 2026, it remains far above levels seen in recent decades, [so the industry] faces rising operating costs, shrinking margins, and consumer resistance to higher retail prices.”

According to the report’s lead author Sjoerd Panhuyse, what is more worrying today is that the primary concerns being reflected are not as focused on the core issues as they should be.

“In the past 20 years [since the global coffee price crash crisis in 2001], the language has shifted: worrying less about hunger in the coffee lands, and more about the cost of a daily espresso,” he said.

“During these two decades, the coffee sector has generated no shortage of sustainability promises, standards, partnerships, and corporate commitments. Yet beneath the language of transformation lies a more uncomfortable question: who benefits, who bears the risks, and who is held accountable when claims fail to match reality?”

The crucial problems

At its heart, the coffee industry is primarily in the hands of many smallholder farmers — some 12.5m farming households farming on less than two hectares worldwide, according to Coffee Barometer data — and the continuity of the sector needs to start from securing their welfare.

Unfortunately, many current sustainability strategies are not focused enough on fixing core issues in this area, say the authors.

“For farmers, today’s elevated prices represent a rare moment in which coffee production approaches financial viability, but the fact is that high prices alone do not constitute progress,” they said.

“The challenge is not simply to push prices upward or shield them from market corrections. It is to ensure that, when markets move in producers’ favour, the gains are not captured elsewhere in the chain.”

They stressed that high commodity prices are no guarantee for long-term improvements in farmer welfare when because the underlying vulnerabilities and challenges facing these producers are not fixed.

“Even at current price levels, many farmers still fall short of a living income, especially when factoring in rising input costs. The result is a system in which they absorb the greatest share of market volatility while downstream players capture consistent margins,” Panhuyse added.

“Sustainability investment continues to cluster around commercially visible targets rather than the underlying conditions on which the sector’s long-term resilience depends.”

Three of the most crucial challenges faced by farmers today are: Low farmgate prices, small farm size, and limited labour availability — and another underlying core challenge is that these three factors serve to reinforce each other.

This is a vicious network of interactions, whereby:

• Farmers need much higher farmgate coffee prices than current levels so they can profit enough to invest in improving productivity, sustainability or farm size
• Small farm sizes and lack of investment restrict coffee yields, which in turn affect profits
• A lack of labour due to poor working conditions means even if they successfully upgrade to larger farms, continuous operations would be challenging

“By the time farmers receive payment for their beans, a large share of their income is already committed to debt repayment and production costs, [which means there is little] capital for investment versus sustaining household consumption and replacing worn-out assets,” said the report.

Voluntary standards not driving structural changes

The most widely-recognised international sustainability standards today that directly impact coffee are voluntary ones, such as Fairtrade, Organic, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ. Unfortunately, the authors believe that this model has not been as successful as hoped.

“Unlike binding regulations and enforcement, [voluntary standards] offered a practical, market-driven alternative [and] became the default solution, for industry and NGOs to address social and environmental concerns without requiring coordinated political action,” they said.

“But while high expectations were placed on [systems like] Fairtrade, Organic, Rainforest Alliance, UTZ, and 4C to transform the sector, this model rested on a structural dilemma that civil society never fully resolved: engaging corporate actors through adherence to voluntary standards offered scale, but scale came at the cost of ambition.”

While a great deal of transformation was promised, research has shown that most of the original problems such as deforestation, climate vulnerability and labour exploitation still remain — and more worryingly, that certification is not working to benefit producers beyond the larger operations.

For instance, in Latin America only 17% of farmers are certified sustainable but its certified coffee production volume is at 78% globally; whereas Africa has 75% certified farmers but only makes up 13% of certified coffee production.

“This shows that the voluntary standards have largely scaled through larger, more commercially integrated operations [such as in Latin America], and this is the opposite in Africa which has primarily smaller farms and lower productivity levels,” they said.

“[This indicates that] the implementation of voluntary certification schemes in isolation has lacked the potency to foster alternatives that economically benefit producers, uphold workers’ rights, and address climate adaptation in any consistent way, a pattern that is not unique to coffee.”

The next logical step is a move towards mandatory regulation, where some regions are currently more advanced than others. For instance, the European Union is mandating due diligence regulations, the United States is putting forth forced labour regulations, Australia has modern slavery disclosure regimes and China has been rolling out various environmental frameworks.

“Regulations mean that compliance has become a condition of market access, with the terms set by regulators [and] sustainability is no longer something companies can add to, or claim within, existing sourcing models through a set of voluntary projects,” the report stated.

“[However, issues still remain where] in practice power and pressure is shifted along the supply chain, where large buyers and retailers would push requirements upstream, often faster and more unevenly than policymakers intend, [and] bringing more friction, gaps, and unintended consequences.”

The accountability gap

Many current global sustainability strategies involve multiple stakeholders, and big coffee companies tend to be part of these multi-stakeholder initiatives, which operate on the premise that voluntary collaboration encourages improved practices and delivers sustainability improvements at scale, assuming that participants with the greatest market share and supply chain reach are engaged and scrutinised accordingly.

Unfortunately, none of these ‘consistently hold’ in practice, according to the report.

“Major multinational roasters and traders, including Nestlé, JDE Peet’s, NKG and ofi, participate in multiple initiatives, providing funding, holding seats on governing boards and actively shaping the agenda,” it stated.

“[However], participation does not entail obligations. Since disclosure remains voluntary, significant data gaps persist even among companies that are formally engaged. Disclosures are partial and uneven, leaving large gaps in the publicly available information.”

Even more worryingly, some of the world’s largest coffee companies are completely absent from these initiatives.

“Several large players, including Strauss and Kraft Heinz, are absent, alongside many mid-sized roasters. These actors collectively hold substantial market power while operating outside shared transparency and accountability frameworks,” the authors said.

“Their absence matters: it weakens collective norms, dilutes market signals, and risks discouraging first movers from going further.”

What needs to be done?

The report also featured insights from a survey conducted on 15 of the largest coffee companies worldwide, an exercise that has revealed a lack of data transparency as one of the greatest loopholes in the move towards coffee sustainability.

“When we asked 15 of the largest coffee companies how much of their coffee is ‘sustainably produced’, answers ranged from 9% to 99% and were each measured against a wide range of internal and external standards, reflecting all kinds of definitions of what ‘sustainable’ means,” said the authors.

“[A striking example is that] none of them disclose pricing structures or contract terms — the very mechanisms through which value reaches, or fails to reach, farmers.”

Another rising phenomenon in the industry that needs to be addressed is that of greenhushing, the opposite of greenwashing. Greenhushing happens when companies continue sustainability work while reducing public reporting in order to avoid scrutiny, litigation risk, or the accusation of overclaiming.

“In coffee, greenhushing looks like managed caution: less ambitious targets, longer timelines, fewer specific numbers, and more process description with less outcome data,” they said.

In conclusion, the report has called for a move beyond voluntary standards in order to effect real change for the coffee sector.

“Voluntary standards have raised awareness and multi-stakeholder initiatives have built shared frameworks, but both have sidestepped the reforms that matter most: mandatory price transparency, enforceable living income benchmarks, and procurement practices that reflect the real costs of production,” they said.

“Regulation is now imposing from outside what the sector has been unwilling to accept from within, but regulation alone will not be enough: Companies must redistribute value [and] the sector faces a clear choice: keep managing the appearance of progress, or undertake the structural change a resilient coffee future demands.”