Pennine Tea And Coffee Ecuador Washed Strictly High Grown Arabica Green Coffee Beans (1kg)

As diverse in microclimates as in bird species
Ecuador, a small South American country that borders Colombia and Peru, is mostly known to the world as one of the most diverse countries on the globe, with almost as many bird species as Brazil despite being 30 times smaller, and home to the Galapagos Giant Tortoise. Despite having ideal conditions for the cultivation of coffee all around the country, the sector is not of major importance to Ecuador’s economy, lagging behind other exports such as bananas, shrimps and mainly oil.

The country is divided into three regions: the coast, the Andean mountains and the Amazon. Arabica was introduced in the early 1800s in the coastal province of Manabí and Robusta arrived in Ecuador much later, in 1951, in the province of Los Ríos. Despite the country’s diverse environmental conditions with varied topography, biodiversity and microclimates, it is the Ecuadorian economy and its history that makes the local supply chain so interesting.

A crisis that nearly killed Ecuadorian coffee
After cacao, coffee was one of Ecuador’s main agricultural products for over 100 years. The sector boomed in the 1970s and a record number of 2 million bags was exported in 1994. However, an economic and political crisis in the late 90s killed the competitiveness of Ecuadorian coffee in the international market. The crisis came to a head with a coup d’état and the replacement by the sucre for the American dollar. Around the same time, coffee prices sunk due to the collapse of the ICA (International Coffee Agreement) in 1989, Vietnam surged as a major producer of robusta, and the El Niño of 97-98 crushed the country’s agricultural production.

José Eguiguren of Hacienda Santa Gertrudis, a third-generation coffee farmer in the Loja province, remembers that coffee production nearly disappeared after the 1990s. “The currency change to the dollar made coffee production a lot more expensive if compared to our neighbours in Colombia or Brazil. Then we had the Vietnam crisis in 1996, which dropped the commodity prices even further… We couldn’t cover our costs! Many farmers cut their trees and exports went from 2 million bags to less than 500,000”, he says.

A rebirth in specialty with prices that work
In the early 2000s, a small number of producers organised themselves into associations such as FAPECAFES (Federación Regional de Asociaciones de Pequeños Cafetaleros Ecológicos del Sur del Ecuador). Others, like Jose’s father, simply abandoned coffee. But things are changing again. With the rise of the specialty coffee market and buyers willing to pay higher prices for quality, Ecuadorian coffee is becoming more competitive again. With fertile volcanic soils, agroforestry systems, a big percentage of coffee being grown in altitudes from 1.200 m to above 2.000 m above sea level, and varieties that yield good cup profiles, the country has everything that specialty roasters are looking for.

Today, Ecuadorian specialty coffee is largely traded on fixed prices that bear little relation to the commodity exchange. “We don’t sell coffee priced with differentials”, Jose explains. “This means we don’t sell a lot of coffee and our market is smaller but we can sell at profitable rates. There is a sense of peace in Ecuadorian coffees because farmers are well paid and the minimum wage for workers is US$ 500,00 a month, much higher than our neighbours.”