Atlas coverage and method

How the list of producers was drawn up

What each kind of coverage means

A full entry (33 countries)

A page of its own in the atlas, written from documents that were opened, with its sources listed on the page.

An entry written and waiting (13 countries)

A full entry exists and is being held back. An independent reader found something it still needs: a present-day source, an explanation for two official figures that disagree, or a passage only one person has read. Until that is found, the country has the account below, written only from what the second reading confirmed. The account says what is missing.

An account and no entry (9 countries)

At least one substantial source was opened: enough for a sourced paragraph, not enough for an entry. For these producers an account is the right amount of coverage on the evidence read so far, and it is not a queue for a longer page.

How to read the figures

• Each account opens with the one clause a dataset supports, and that clause names its unit. The Department of Agriculture counts 60-kilogram bags in a marketing year that starts in a different month from country to country; the food agency counts tonnes in a calendar year. The two are never added together or joined into one series.
• Where two official figures for the same country differ by a factor of three or more, the line says that they disagree and gives both. Nothing here chooses between them.
• Every statement in an account is one sentence with its own numbered source, and carries its period and whether a number is an estimate, a forecast or a final figure. Many of these statements are about the past, and the sentence says when.
• Nothing is inferred from a neighbour, a continent or the usual range of a species. If a source read for a country does not name a species, a variety, a process or a harvest month, the account does not either.
• "Not stated here" is part of each account. It lists what a reader might expect to find and the reason it is absent.

Entries written and waiting

Each of these countries has a full entry that is not yet published. The account opens in place.

• Angola: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Angola was one of the world's large robusta exporters until 1975 and is a small producer now. Its plantations were owned mainly by Portuguese settlers and worked largely by migrants on labour contracts, in a colony where forced labour was not abolished until 1962, and the sources read say the crop collapsed after independence as owners and labourers left and war followed. Very little has been read about the present.

  What the sources say about coffee in Angola

  • The agricultural census of crop year 1971/72, as a 1977 United States government report summarises it, counted 540,000 hectares planted in coffee, of which 2,515 commercial plantations held 361,000 hectares and produced 142,000 metric tons, and 286,000 traditional producers held 178,000 hectares and produced 64,000 metric tons. [source 1]
  • Coffee exports were 219,000 metric tons in calendar year 1973 and 163,000 in 1975, as the same report tabulates them: the first from the colony's trade statistics, the second from an FAO yearbook. [source 1]
  • The Library of Congress country study says forced labour in Angola was not abolished until 1962, and that by the early 1960s up to 100,000 Ovimbundu men were migrating on one- and two-year contracts to the coffee plantations of Uíge and Cuanza Norte, for low pay and with little alternative; it gives no source for the number. [source 2]
  • The same study says that by August 1976 more than 80 per cent of Angola's plantations had been abandoned by their Portuguese owners, on the governing party's statement, and that by 1988 commercial production of coffee had almost wholly stopped. [source 2]
  • Production in the six crop years from 1994/95 to 1999/2000 ranged from 55,000 to 100,000 60-kilogram bags, on International Coffee Organization figures as printed in an FAO paper in 2000. [source 3]

  Harvest: The 1977 report gives the harvest as June to September; an FAO paper of 2000 gives June to October without a source. (The northern robusta crop, as described in 1977) [1]

  Not stated here

  • Why the crop collapsed, in proportions. The sources name the departure of settlers, the loss of labour, the war and failed state farms, and measure none of them.
  • That the rising of 1961 was caused by the plantations. The sources place it in the coffee districts and do not make that claim.
  • Where coffee grows today, who grows it and which selections are planted. Nothing recent and independent was read.

  Sources

  1. Angola's Agricultural Economy in Brief (Foreign Agricultural Economic Report No. 139)
  2. Angola: A Country Study
  3. Post Harvest Handling and Processing of Coffee in African Countries

  Read next: Robusta (The species Angola's industry was built on.); Natural processing (How the dry-processed coffee of the northern zone was made.); Brazil (An entry that also sets out who did the work on the plantations.).

• Bolivia: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Bolivia's coffee is arabica grown almost entirely in the Yungas of La Paz, three quarters of it, by area in the 2012 census, in the single province of Caranavi. Its official production figure is more than nine times what it exports, and no document read explains the difference. What it does export has been earning more for less: 2025 was the highest year by value in the trade institute's series on a smaller volume than 2022.

  What the sources say about coffee in Bolivia

  • Bolivia reported 23,064 tonnes of green coffee to the FAO as its official production for calendar year 2024. [source 1]
  • Bolivia exported 2,169 tonnes of coffee worth 17.1 million US dollars in calendar year 2025, on preliminary figures of the national statistics institute published by the Bolivian trade institute, which calls the value a record; 99 per cent was unroasted green coffee, and the United States, Belgium and France took 31, 17 and 13 per cent. [source 2]
  • The same institute's bulletins give exports of 3,596 tonnes in calendar year 2014 and 1,234 tonnes in 2019, a fall of about two thirds in five years, as final figures. [source 3]
  • The 2012 coffee census, as a 2020 thesis reproduces it, counted 17,491 coffee holdings in the 2011-2012 season, 15,925 of them in La Paz department and 10,524 in the municipality of Caranavi, and a crop of 14,123 tonnes measured as damp parchment coffee, not green coffee. [source 4]
  • A plant-health survey of 186 holdings in Caranavi in July 2015 found the local Typica, called criolla, on 44 per cent of plantings, Caturra on 40 and Catuaí on about 12, and more than half of the plantings between 22 and 32 years old. [source 4]

  Harvest: Harvest falls between April and August. (The thesis's crop description sheet, with no place given) [4] Picking lasts four to five months, from May to September, depending on the altitude of the farm. The same document gives both windows. (Family farms in the Yungas of La Paz) [4]

  Not stated here

  • How much green coffee Bolivia produces. The official figure, the 2012 census and exports cannot be reconciled, and CoffeeHQ does not choose between them.
  • What Bolivian coffee tastes like. No sensory study was read.
  • An altitude range for the country. The altitudes found each belong to one study in Caranavi and are given in the full entry.

  Sources

  1. FAOSTAT: Crops and livestock products — Coffee, green (production, 2024)
  2. Cifras, Boletín Electrónico Bisemanal Nº 1.428. Bolivia: Exportación de Café, período 2016-2025 (p) y avance al mes de abril de 2026 (p)
  3. Cifras, Boletín Electrónico Bisemanal Nº 1.228. Bolivia: Exportaciones de café 2014-2023 y avance al mes de febrero del 2024
  4. Evaluación del estado fitosanitario del cultivo del café en el municipio de Caranavi

  Read next: Typica (The variety Bolivian growers call criolla, and the oldest plantings on their farms.); Coffee pests and diseases (Leaf rust and the berry borer, both measured in the Caranavi survey.); Washed processing (What drying to parchment involves, and why coffee sold damp is a risk.); Peru (The neighbouring origin on the same side of the Andes, with a full entry.).

• Burundi: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Burundi is a small, landlocked arabica producer where several hundred thousand households each grow a few hundred coffee trees at most, much of it processed at washing stations the state built in the 1980s. The trade was opened to private buyers over three decades and taken back by the state in January 2020. CoffeeHQ has read nothing later than March 2022, and the latest crop it can report, for 2019, is given three ways by its sources.

  What the sources say about coffee in Burundi

  • The latest crop in the documents read is given three ways: the World Bank's 2022 completion report gives 10,600 tonnes of green coffee for 2019 in one place and 14,580 tonnes in a footnote, and the International Coffee Organization's historical table gives 272,000 bags, which is 16,320 tonnes, for crop year 2019/20. Nothing read says which is right. [source 1]
  • The International Coffee Organization's table shows a crop that swings from year to year: 499,000 bags in 2006/07, then 133,000, 412,000 and 112,000 in the three seasons after it. [source 2]
  • A World Bank assessment of 2011 says coffee is grown throughout the country except in Mugamba, on about 60,000 hectares, that each farm has between 50 and 250 trees mixed with food crops, and that arabica is 98 per cent of output and robusta 2 per cent. [source 3]
  • The same assessment records that between about 1980 and 1993 the state built 133 washing stations, partly with World Bank funding, and that the number of coffee trees rose from about 90 million to more than 220 million, with variations depending on the source. [source 3]
  • The World Bank's completion report cites a decree of 7 January 2020 that created a state coffee development office with a mandate over the whole chain, in place of the regulator, the trade association and the growers' confederation; it says this was done without consulting the Bank, whose project closed early in June 2021. That is the lender's account, and the government's reasons are in no document read. [source 1]

  Harvest: March to July. The footnote adds that picking coincides with the rainy season, when rural roads are often impassable. (Medium altitude, on one footnote of a World Bank report of 2022) [1] April to August, on the same footnote; it is the only statement of months found. (High altitude, on the same footnote) [1]

  Not stated here

  • The present day. Nothing read is later than March 2022: how much coffee Burundi grows now, who runs its washing stations and what growers are paid under the state office that has governed the sector since 2020 are not in any document opened, and that is why the country has this account and not yet an entry of its own.
  • How coffee came to Burundi under Belgian rule. One study says in a single uncited sentence that it was introduced by coercion; CoffeeHQ has not read a history of the period for Burundi itself.
  • The share of the area under any variety, and how the export grades are defined.

  Sources

  1. Implementation Completion and Results Report on a grant to the Republic of Burundi for the Coffee Sector Competitiveness Project (Report No. ICR00004849)
  2. Total production by all exporting countries, crop years 1990/91 to 2019/20
  3. Rapid Strategic Environmental Assessment of Coffee Sector Reform in Burundi (Report No. 71823)

  Read next: Rwanda (The other half of the same Belgian mandate territory, with the same varieties and the same defect, and a full entry.); Bourbon (The group the catalogue places most of Burundi's named selections in.); Washed processing (What a washing station does, and what it leaves in the water.).

• Côte d'Ivoire: 1.3 million bags, USDA estimate for 2025/26.

  Côte d'Ivoire is a robusta producer that was once far larger: a 1988 handbook put its crop at an average of 252,000 tonnes a year between 1965 and 1984, against a USDA estimate of 1.3 million bags, or 78,000 tonnes, for 2025/26. Its colonial plantations ran on forced labour, which a law of 1946 abolished, and it makes nearly all of the soluble coffee that Africa exports. What CoffeeHQ has read describes the country up to 2015 and says very little about the present day.

  What the sources say about coffee in Côte d'Ivoire

  • The USDA's circular of July 2026 estimates Côte d'Ivoire's production, all of it robusta, at 1.3 million 60-kilogram bags for 2025/26; the same table prints 650,000 bags for 2024/25, half the years on either side, and no source read explains that figure. [source 1]
  • A handbook published in 1988 called the country the third-largest coffee producer in the world, without saying in which years, and gave an average crop of 252,000 tonnes a year between 1965 and 1984. [source 2]
  • The sources do not agree on when the fall began: a farm survey published in 2017 dates it from 1980, when growers began to prefer cocoa, while a 2017 study by the International Coffee Organization says output went on growing after export quotas ended in 1989 and collapsed with the conflict of the early 2000s. [source 3]
  • A survey of 156 coffee plots visited in late 2014 found a mean yield of 325 kilograms of saleable coffee a hectare, 61 per cent of plantings more than twenty years old and 72 per cent planted with unselected material; the plots were chosen along roads, so the percentages describe the survey and not the country. [source 4]
  • A historian working from the colonial archives counts between 25,000 and 30,000 forced recruits a year in the colony from 1942 to 1945; the law of 11 April 1946 that abolished forced labour in the French overseas territories was sponsored by Félix Houphouët-Boigny, an Ivorian planter and deputy. [source 5]

  Not stated here

  • The present day. Nothing CoffeeHQ has read is dated after 2015 on trade, harvest, processing or the number of growers, and no document of the Conseil du Café-Cacao on coffee was opened; that is why the country has this account and not yet an entry of its own.
  • When coffee is harvested. The only months found are a 1988 handbook's, August and November to January, which is why no harvest row is given.
  • How the coffee is processed and graded today. No document read describes a method, so no processing row is given.

  Sources

  1. Coffee: World Markets and Trade (July 2026)
  2. Ivory Coast: A Country Study
  3. Value addition in the African coffee sector (ICC-120-7)
  4. Diagnostic agronomique des pratiques culturales paysannes dans les vergers caféiers de Côte d'Ivoire
  5. Counting Workers in Côte d'Ivoire (1946-1960): Tensions and Debates Between the Colonial Administration, European Settlers, and African Planters

  Read next: Robusta (The species all of this crop belongs to, and the two wild groups within it.); Instant coffee explained (How soluble coffee is made, which is what a large share of this country's robusta becomes.); Uganda (Another African robusta producer, with a full entry.).

• Cuba: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Cuba was a large coffee exporter in the first half of the nineteenth century, on plantations founded by French planters from Saint-Domingue and worked by enslaved Africans, whose ruins in the Sierra Maestra foothills were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2000. Today it grows arabica and robusta, mostly in four eastern provinces, imports coffee to supply a household ration, and since 2011 has cut that ration with roasted peas. No statistical series was read: the modern figures are officials' statements.

  What the sources say about coffee in Cuba

  • The advisory body that evaluated the site for UNESCO in 2000 records that French plantation owners fleeing the uprisings in Saint-Domingue from 1790 came to eastern Cuba with many of their African slaves, and that the remains of 171 coffee plantations were identified in an area of 81,475 hectares. [source 1]
  • A trade history of 1922 dates coffee in Cuba to 1748 and says the island had 2,067 plantations and exported 50 million pounds a year about a century before it was written. [source 2]
  • A state news site's account of a television programme with the president of Cuba's state agroforestry group in December 2019 gives a record crop of 60,330 tonnes of green coffee in 1961 and has him say that 8,220 tonnes were collected in 2018; these are statements as state media reported them, not published statistics. [source 3]
  • The same official said that Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, Granma and Holguín grow 90 per cent of Cuba's coffee, three central provinces 7 per cent and two western provinces 3 per cent, without giving a reference year. [source 3]
  • A lender's project report of 2019 set baseline yields for the cooperatives it supports at 0.18 tonnes a hectare for arabica and 0.23 for robusta, on land in production, and noted that Cuba imports growing quantities of coffee while exporting small volumes. [source 4]

  Harvest: Picking in Santiago de Cuba was due to begin at the end of September in 2024, and a processor in Artemisa spoke in 2022 of the harvest that begins in September. (The start of picking in Santiago de Cuba in 2024 and in Artemisa in 2022; no source gives the end) [5]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Cuba produces now. The latest national figure read is the International Coffee Organization's for crop year 2019/20; Cuba's statistical yearbook for 2018 has no line for the coffee crop, the USDA gives no figure and Cuba reports no official figure to the FAO for 2024.
  • What Cuban coffee tastes like, at what altitude it grows and which varieties are planted. No source read gives any of the three.
  • The number of people enslaved on the plantations. The heritage evaluation does not give one.

  Sources

  1. Advisory body evaluation No 1008: Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba
  2. All About Coffee
  3. ¿Cómo marcha la producción de café, coco y cacao en Cuba?
  4. President's report: Proposed financing, Republic of Cuba, Agroforestry Cooperative Development Project (EB 2019/LOT/P.1/Rev.1)
  5. Santiago de Cuba se prepara para una cosecha cafetalera de 4 000 toneladas

  Read next: Cuban cafecito and espumita (How coffee is prepared and shared in Cuba: the sugar foam, the small cup, the colada.); Robusta (The species in the rationed blend and in the seedlings raised for Cuba's lowland plantings.); Brazil (The producer whose rise a 1922 history blames for ending Cuba's export trade, and another coffee economy built on slavery.); Haitian kafe (Coffee in the country the French planters left for eastern Cuba.).

• Democratic Republic of the Congo: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  The first coffee sold under the name robusta was raised from wild seed collected in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and by 1950 its research station at Yangambi was, on one paper's account, the most important centre for selecting the species. The country's own crop has since collapsed: it reported 1.58 million bags for crop year 1990/91 and 391,000 for 2019/20, the last year of the table CoffeeHQ holds. Nothing read describes the country after that.

  What the sources say about coffee in Democratic Republic of the Congo

  • The International Coffee Organization's historical table gives production of 1.58 million 60-kilogram bags for crop year 1990/91, 363,000 for 2000/01 and 391,000 for 2019/20, its last year, and between 279,000 and 451,000 bags in every year from 2000/01 on. [source 1]
  • National figures for the same year differ between bodies: the country's own office gave 63,000 tonnes of production for 2012, as an exporter reported it, against the Organization's 334,000 bags, about 20,000 tonnes, for the crop year beginning that October. The two are not joined here. [source 2]
  • In 1900 the Belgian horticulturist Linden put a coffee on sale under the name Coffea robusta, raised from seed of wild plants from the Sankuru region; two papers from the Meise Botanic Garden group call that introduction probably the key to the crop's success, and describe the Congo basin as the hypothesised region of origin of many cultivated robusta varieties. [source 3]
  • A research station was set up at Yangambi in 1927, and from 1930 to 1960 it led robusta breeding in the Congo and sent its 'Lula' and 'INEAC' lines around the world. [source 4]
  • A 2023 paper screened 730 shrubs in the national robusta collection at Yangambi and sorted them into 263 genetically distinct accessions, after a survey found field maps that did not match what was planted and many plants with no label. [source 4]

  Not stated here

  • The present day. The last national production figure read is for 2019/20, no document of the Congolese state was opened, and nothing read covers the east of the country since 2022, where most of its arabica is grown; that is why the country has this account and not yet an entry of its own.
  • How much coffee crosses into Uganda and Rwanda unrecorded. Each present-day source read says that it does, and none can measure it.
  • Harvest months, altitudes and arabica varieties. No document read gives any of the three, which is why no harvest or processing row is given.

  Sources

  1. Total production by all exporting countries, crop years 1990/91 to 2019/20
  2. The DR Congo and Coffee: presentation to the 4th African Coffee Symposium, Yaoundé
  3. Genetic diversity of wild and cultivated Coffea canephora in northeastern DR Congo and the implications for conservation
  4. Characterization of the genetic composition and establishment of a core collection for the INERA Robusta coffee (Coffea canephora) field genebank from the Democratic Republic of Congo

  Read next: Robusta (The species whose history as a crop begins with seed from the Congo basin.); Robusta cultivars (What breeding programmes released from material such as Yangambi's.); Rwanda (The other shore of Lake Kivu, with a full entry.).

• Guinea: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Guinea lies in the native range of the Guinean group of robusta, one of the two great genetic groups of the species, yet nearly all the coffee on its farms is Congolese robusta introduced from the 1930s or a hybrid with it. The native kind survives as one wild forest stand near Mamou and four trees in a botanical garden. Guinea also holds the protected name Ziama-Macenta, and once exported a different species, stenophylla, as Rio-Nunez coffee.

  What the sources say about coffee in Guinea

  • A search of Guinea's farms, forests and collections between 2017 and 2019 found that the robusta grown in Guinée forestière belongs mainly to the Congolese group, introduced from Central Africa from the 1930s, and that 32 of the 62 samples analysed outside one wild forest were hybrids between Congolese and Guinean coffee. [source 1]
  • The same search found native Guinean canephora growing wild in a forest of about 50 hectares near Mamou, where all 53 trees sampled matched herbarium specimens collected there since 1905, and found the old Macenta cultivar Gamé only as four trees in the botanical garden at Sérédou. [source 1]
  • The study attributes the rarity of native coffee to those introductions and to coffee wilt, which affected Guinea's plantations from 1958 and led to native trees being uprooted and replaced with Congolese robusta in the early 1960s. [source 1]
  • The International Coffee Organization's averages for Guinea are 56,000 60-kilogram bags a year in the 1970s, 86,000 in the 1980s, 168,000 in the 1990s, 397,000 in the 2000s and an estimated 400,000 for crop year 2013/14, a rise the document does not explain. [source 2]
  • Café Ziama-Macenta is one of the first three African product names registered as geographical indications by the African Intellectual Property Organization, after Penja pepper and Oku white honey. [source 3]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Guinea produces now. The only long series found ends with an estimate for 2013/14; its sevenfold rise since the 1970s is unexplained, and its level for the 2000s is borne out by nothing else read.
  • What Guinean coffee tastes like, including Ziama-Macenta. No sensory study was read and the name's specification was not found.
  • Harvest months, processing and altitude. The only statements found are two unsourced lines in an FAO paper of 2000 (December to March; dry method), reported in the held entry and not relied on; no document gives an altitude.

  Sources

  1. Les caféiers Robusta endémiques de Guinée : une ressource rare et menacée
  2. Sustainability of the coffee sector in Africa (ICC 114-5)
  3. Aspects institutionnels concernant l'administration des indications géographiques : cas de l'OAPI

  Read next: Robusta (The Guinean and Congolese groups of the species, which this country's farms mix.); Robusta cultivars (Why breeders want crosses between the two groups, and so why the native trees are worth conserving.); Excelsa (The Central African species one study says is also farmed in Guinea.); Coffee pests and diseases (The diseases that have reshaped coffee growing, to set beside the wilt that reached Guinea in 1958.).

• Laos: 475,000 bags, USDA estimate for 2025/26; its own figure reported to the FAO for 2024 is 174,900 tonnes, and the two disagree.

  Laos is a small producer whose coffee comes almost entirely from one volcanic plateau in the south, the Bolaven. It was a robusta country that set out, as policy, to replant with arabica, and did much of it with rust-resistant Catimor. Two official production figures for it differ about sixfold, and CoffeeHQ has read nothing that explains the difference or says how the crop divides between the species today.

  What the sources say about coffee in Laos

  • The USDA's circular of July 2026 estimates Laos's production at 450,000 60-kilogram bags for 2024/25, which is 27,000 tonnes, and 475,000 for 2025/26; Laos's own figure reported to the FAO for calendar year 2024 is 174,900 tonnes. The second is about six and a half times the first, and neither is preferred here. [source 1]
  • An FAO growers' manual of 2005 puts about 95 per cent of the national crop on the Bolaven Plateau, on coffee land between 600 and 1,300 metres, and says that in 2001 robusta covered 88 per cent of the coffee area and arabica 12 per cent. [source 2]
  • A study published in 2015 put arabica at a quarter of production and rising, and found that the large plantations grew Catimor almost exclusively; it describes shade trees being pulled out, by companies and smallholders alike, to plant it. [source 3]
  • The same study records that by mid-2010, on the national inventory, 20,194 hectares in Paksong district had been granted to 81 agricultural projects, most of them for coffee, and that among the twenty companies it examined 57 per cent of the land granted was in use. [source 3]
  • It also reports that 3,000 hectares of coffee were destroyed by frost in January 2014, on large and small plantings alike, and cites exports of green coffee rising from 11,000 tonnes in 2009 to 28,000 in 2013. [source 3]

  Harvest: October through December. A policy article of 2022 gives October to January for arabica. (Arabica on the Bolaven Plateau, as an FAO manual described it in 2005) [2] December through February. A policy article of 2022 says robusta starts in February. (Robusta on the Bolaven Plateau, as an FAO manual described it in 2005) [2]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Laos grows. The USDA's estimate and the country's own figure reported to the FAO differ about sixfold and nothing read explains the difference; that, with the unknown split between the species, is why the country has this account and not yet an entry of its own.
  • How the crop divides between robusta and arabica today. The newest source that describes the plateau in detail describes 2014.
  • The history of the plateau before 2005 and the land concessions as its geographers reported them, which rest on an article CoffeeHQ could not open a second time.

  Sources

  1. Coffee: World Markets and Trade (July 2026)
  2. Arabica coffee manual for Lao PDR
  3. Land Acquisition, Investment, and Development in the Lao Coffee Sector: Successes and Failures

  Read next: Catimor (The rust-resistant group the plateau was replanted with, and what it needs to do well.); Vietnam (The neighbouring producer, with a full entry, and one of the main buyers of Lao green coffee.); Coffee pests and diseases (Leaf rust, the disease that drove arabica off the plateau in the first place.).

• Madagascar: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Madagascar has more wild coffee species than any other country, 65 of the 130 known, and almost none of them is what it grows to sell. Its crop is robusta on the east coast and a little arabica in the highlands, taken up by Malagasy smallholders under French rule. Coffee was the island's leading export crop in the 1980s and is a small one now. CoffeeHQ gives no figure for what the island grows today: the published figures disagree with one another, and none is current.

  What the sources say about coffee in Madagascar

  • A paper in the Kew Bulletin in 2021 described six new species of the coffee genus from forests in northern Madagascar, bringing the island's count to 65 and the world's to 130; these are separate wild species, most of them never cultivated, not varieties of the coffee that is sold. [source 1]
  • An assessment of every coffee species against the Red List criteria in 2019 found 60 per cent threatened with extinction worldwide and Madagascar with the largest number of threatened species of any country: 43, or 72 per cent of those it then had. [source 2]
  • A 2024 report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, citing a 2004 document of the Malagasy agriculture ministry, puts robusta along the east coast from Sambava to Vangaindrano and in the north-west, and arabica in the highlands at 1,000 to 1,500 metres; the altitudes are the ministry's bands, not measurements of farms. [source 3]
  • A French agricultural economist's report of 1987 says that in 1930 Madagascar accounted for 83 per cent of the coffee exported to France by all its African colonies, and that Malagasy farmers took the crop up quickly, in part because a permanent tree marked land as taken. [source 4]
  • The same report puts coffee marketed at an average of 62,780 tonnes a year in 1976 to 1980 and 57,930 in 1981 to 1985, and observes that growers went on selling while the real price paid to them fell. [source 4]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Madagascar grows. The International Coffee Organization's table prints 383 thousand bags for 2019/20, about 23,000 tonnes; the FAO's database carries larger figures, flagged as official, for 2019 and 2020; both are many times the recorded exports, and neither says how it was arrived at. That comparison has so far been made and checked by one reader only, which is one reason the country has this account and not yet an entry of its own.
  • What caused the uprising of 1947. One historian's summary names the contest over coffee land as a major cause; another's article on its origins does not mention coffee; CoffeeHQ has read neither in enough depth to say.
  • Harvest months and processing. No document read gives a harvest season as such or describes a Malagasy processing practice, which is why neither row is given.

  Sources

  1. Six new species of coffee (Coffea) from northern Madagascar
  2. High extinction risk for wild coffee species and implications for coffee sector sustainability
  3. Climate risk analysis for adaptation planning in Madagascar's agricultural sector
  4. Riz ou café, ou riz et café: contribution à l'analyse de situation de la côte Est de Madagascar (rapport de mission ODASE, 1er au 20 mai 1987)

  Read next: Robusta (The species the island grows to sell, as distinct from the wild species of its forests.); Coffee species (The four species with a guide here, beside the 130 the genus is now counted to hold.); Coffee pests and diseases (Why wild relatives matter to breeders of the cultivated crop.).

• Malawi: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Malawi grows a small arabica crop in two separate ways: on estates in the south and on smallholdings in the northern hills. The northern growers took over a bankrupt state authority through a trust and made it a cooperative union they own, and replanted with Catimor populations that a 2005 paper found resistant to leaf rust and generally susceptible to coffee berry disease. CoffeeHQ holds no production figure later than 2006.

  What the sources say about coffee in Malawi

  • National production peaked at 8,160 tonnes in 1992 and had fallen to 1,500 tonnes by 2005, as a 2007 working paper states without naming its source. [source 1]
  • Smallholders produced 95 tonnes of green coffee in 1999 and 235 tonnes in 2006, final figures credited to their cooperative union, which set a target of 3,713 tonnes for 2020. [source 1]
  • Coffee in the north and centre is grown mainly by smallholders on customary land, most of them in the Misuku Hills of Chitipa district, and in the south by commercial estates, on the same paper's account. [source 1]
  • Under the state authority that ran smallholder coffee from 1971, growers were paid 20 to 30 per cent of the sale price; a growers' trust replaced it in 1999 and became the Mzuzu Coffee Planters Cooperative Union in 2007. [source 1]
  • In a 2007 survey of northern smallholders, 86.5 per cent grew Catimor populations and 62.5 per cent grew Geisha; the survey did not cover the estates. [source 1]

  Harvest: The 2007 paper gives June to October for smallholders, picked by hand every ten to fifteen days; an FAO paper of 2000 gives December to February without a source. (Smallholders in northern Malawi) [1]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Malawi produces now. The latest national figure held is for 2005, and Malawi has no figure in either governed dataset.
  • Anything about the estates beyond where they are and their share of the crop.
  • Whether the cooperative union met its targets, or how it has fared since 2008.

  Sources

  1. Reforming the Smallholder Coffee Sector in Malawi: A Case Study of Smallholder Commercialisation

  Read next: Catimor (The group most northern smallholders had planted by 2007.); Coffee pests and diseases (Leaf rust and coffee berry disease, which decided what was planted.); Washed processing (The method the smallholders' pulperies use.).

• Malaysia: 1.5 million bags, USDA estimate for 2025/26; its own figure reported to the FAO for 2024 is 2,861 tonnes, and the two disagree.

  Two official sources describe two different countries. The USDA's table gives Malaysia 1.5 million bags of robusta for 2025/26; Malaysia's own figure for 2024 is 2,861 tonnes, most of it Liberica, on fewer than 3,000 hectares. Nothing published explains the difference, and CoffeeHQ does not choose between them. What is not in doubt is that Malaysia imports far more coffee beans than it grows and exports a great deal of instant coffee.

  What the sources say about coffee in Malaysia

  • The USDA estimates Malaysia's production at 1.4 million 60-kilogram bags for 2024/25, which is 84,000 tonnes, and 1.5 million for 2025/26; Malaysia reported 2,861 tonnes to the FAO as an official figure for calendar year 2024, and its agriculture minister gave the same number to the Senate. The first is about twenty-nine times the second, and no document read explains the gap or says whether the national tonnage is of green coffee. [source 1]
  • In the USDA's database Malaysia's table for 2025/26 reads production 1.5 million bags, bean imports 1.5 million, soluble exports 2.5 million and domestic consumption 500,000, with no other line; the USDA does not say how it estimates the crop. [source 2]
  • The agriculture minister told the Senate in December 2025, as the national news agency reported it, that coffee covered 2,924 hectares in 2024, concentrated in Johor, Sabah and Sarawak, that 87 per cent of it was Liberica, 10 per cent robusta and 3 per cent arabica, and that the country imported 126,062 tonnes of coffee beans that year. [source 3]
  • The same reply gave a self-sufficiency rate for coffee of 33.2 per cent in 2024, where production set against bean imports comes to about 2 per cent and a deputy minister had said 3 per cent in 2023; the report does not give the basis of the rate. [source 3]
  • A 2019 paper from a Malaysian research institute, working from FAO trade data by value, found that Malaysia exported 470 million US dollars' worth of coffee extracts in 2017, 6.3 per cent of world trade in them, against 2.6 million dollars of green coffee. [source 4]

  Not stated here

  • Which production figure describes Malaysia. The two are about thirty times apart, no method statement or report from a USDA post on Malaysian coffee was found, and the unit of the national figure is not stated in anything read; that is why the country has this account and not yet an entry of its own.
  • A harvest season, a processing method or an altitude. A 2025 paper reports that cultivated Liberica in Malaysia flowers and fruits throughout the year, and no document read describes how the coffee is processed on the farm.
  • How much of the planted area any of the research institute's clones occupies. None of them has a guide here.

  Sources

  1. Coffee: World Markets and Trade (July 2026)
  2. Production, Supply and Distribution database: coffee (file of 22 July 2026)
  3. Why does Malaysia import most of its coffee beans? Local supply meeting only 33pc of demand, says minister
  4. Coffee: The World's Favourite Cuppa' Caffeine (Views 18/19)

  Read next: Liberica (The species most of Malaysia's own coffee belongs to, which the USDA's tables have no column for.); Instant coffee explained (What Malaysia's factories make from the beans the country imports.); Indonesia (The largest supplier of Malaysia's imported beans in 2013, with a full entry.).

• Mozambique: a member of the International Coffee Organization; no production figure read.

  Mozambique has no tradition of growing arabica or robusta; the coffees traditionally grown there are two native lowland species, Coffea zanguebariae on Ibo and Quirimba islands and Coffea racemosa in Inhambane. Arabica has been planted under forest shade on Gorongosa Mountain, where a study found its genetic diversity very low. No source read says how much coffee the country grows.

  What the sources say about coffee in Mozambique

  • A 2024 paper that sequenced the genomes of 36 coffee plants from Ibo and Quirimba islands and four from Inhambane identified the island coffee, known as Ibo coffee, as Coffea zanguebariae and the Inhambane plants as Coffea racemosa. [source 1]
  • The same paper says Mozambique has no tradition of farming Coffea arabica or Coffea canephora, that Ibo coffee has been known for almost two centuries and is still grown on small domestic farms, and that the two native coffees were routinely confused with each other in the literature from 1925 to 1992. [source 1]
  • A 2023 field survey of central and southern Mozambique found one wild coffee species, Coffea racemosa, in Maputo, Inhambane and Sofala provinces, and reports that its cultivation in Inhambane was first recorded in 1876. [source 2]
  • The papers give Coffea racemosa a natural range from sea level to about 500 metres and Coffea zanguebariae from near sea level to about 350 metres; these are the species' reported ranges, stated in papers of 2023 and 2024, and a 2025 paper puts both upper limits somewhat higher. [source 2]
  • A 2025 paper sampled Coffea racemosa under cultivation at six places in Inhambane and Gaza provinces and Coffea zanguebariae on Ibo Island in 2023 and 2024, 22 plants of each. [source 3]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Mozambique produces, on what area and by how many growers. No source read gives any of these.
  • The caffeine content or taste of Coffea racemosa or Coffea zanguebariae. No chemical or sensory study was opened.
  • A harvest season or a processing method. The papers give one study's sampling dates and a laboratory's drying routine, which are neither.

  Sources

  1. Mozambican Coffea accessions from Ibo and Quirimba Islands: identification and geographical distribution
  2. Genomic Evaluation of Coffea arabica and Its Wild Relative Coffea racemosa in Mozambique: Settling Resilience Keys for the Coffee Crop in the Context of Climate Change
  3. Mass and Nutrient Content of Beans and Husks of Coffea racemosa and Coffea zanguebariae Grown in Mozambique

  Read next: Arabica (The species planted at Gorongosa, for comparison with the two native ones.); Liberica (Another coffee species outside the main two, with its own page.); Robusta (Coffea canephora, the other species of world trade, which Mozambique has no tradition of growing.).

• Zambia: a member of the International Coffee Organization; no production figure read.

  Zambia's coffee industry was planned by its government with the World Bank and the United Nations from 1978 and first exported in 1985. It was built on two irrigated state estates near Kasama, which were privatised in 1996, went into receivership in 2008 and were sold again in 2012, while the smallholder schemes around them largely failed. CoffeeHQ holds no production figure later than 2004.

  What the sources say about coffee in Zambia

  • National production from all growers was 71.25 tonnes in the coffee year 1982-83, 153.7 tonnes in 1983-84 and 380.5 tonnes in 1984-85, final figures in a United Nations project's terminal report. [source 1]
  • The International Coffee Organization granted Zambia a first quota of 330 tonnes in September 1984, and the country exported coffee for the first time in 1985, 377 tonnes in all. [source 1]
  • The research station at Misamfu, near Kasama, recommended SL34 and SL28 for yield and quality and K7 and F839 for small growers in the 1980s, and received fifteen Catimor progenies from Brazil in 1984. [source 1]
  • A 2017 University of Zambia dissertation puts national production at 6,500 tonnes in 2004, of which one company's estates near Kasama produced 3,000; a 2006 project report gives 6,000 tonnes for the same year, and neither names a source. [source 2]
  • The state company that ran the Kateshi and Ngoli estates was sold in 1996; its successor went into receivership in September 2008, and the estates were bought by Olam International in September 2012 for about 6.15 million US dollars, on the dissertation's account. [source 2]

  Harvest: The dissertation gives a picking period of four to six months, May to September; an FAO paper of 2000 gives October to March without a source. (The estates near Kasama, Northern Province) [2]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Zambia produces now. The latest figures held are for 2004, and Zambia has no figure in either governed dataset.
  • Anything about coffee outside Northern Province. None of the documents read describes it.
  • What has happened on the Kasama estates since 2012.

  Sources

  1. Coffee Production in the Northern and Northwestern Provinces, Zambia: Project Findings and Recommendations (AG:DP/ZAM/79/002, Terminal Report)
  2. A History of Coffee Growing in Zambia: The Case of Kateshi and Ngoli Estates in Kasama District, 1967 to 2012

  Read next: SL28 (One of the two Kenyan selections the state estates were planted with.); SL34 (The other, and the one the research station distributed most.); Coffee pests and diseases (Coffee berry disease, which reached the estates in 1998.).

Producers covered by an account

Small producers, and producers whose coffee matters for a plant, a disease or a history more than for its volume.

• Cape Verde: 14 tonnes in 2024, its own figure reported to the FAO.

  Cape Verde's is the smallest of the official coffee figures that countries reported to the FAO for 2024. Arabica was already established in the islands when a naturalist listed their plants in the 1780s, and a 2022 botanical inventory names coffee, on Fogo and São Nicolau, as one of only two of the old export crops not almost abandoned. Nothing read says how it is grown or processed today.

  What the sources say about coffee in Cape Verde

  • Cape Verde reported 14 tonnes of green coffee to the FAO as its official production for calendar year 2024. [source 1]
  • A 2022 inventory of the islands' useful plants says that Coffea arabica is among the species listed by the Portuguese naturalist João da Silva Feijó, who collected in Cabo Verde between 1783 and 1789. [source 2]
  • The same inventory, published in 2022, says that of the plant products once exported from Cabo Verde only sugarcane, for spirit, and coffee, on the islands of Fogo and São Nicolau, are not almost completely abandoned, and gives 1778 as a year of introduction. [source 2]
  • A trade history of 1922 gives the Cape Verde Islands' coffee exports as 1,442,910 pounds in 1916, against a five-year average of 1,100,095 pounds. [source 3]
  • The abstract of a 2021 history article says the Portuguese central government recommended coffee growing to Cabo Verde in 1803, and that the crop then goes unmentioned in the governors' correspondence until a petition by Lisbon merchants in 1826; only the abstract was read. [source 4]

  Not stated here

  • Which island coffee first reached and when. The inventory's sentence can be read as giving 1778 for São Nicolau alone or for both islands, and CoffeeHQ did not open the reference behind it.
  • Anything about coffee on Fogo beyond its being named as a growing area: no area, production, variety, altitude or account of the farms was found.
  • What form of coffee the 14 tonnes reported to the FAO counts, and how it was measured.

  Sources

  1. FAOSTAT: Crops and livestock products — Coffee, green (production, 2024)
  2. Diversity of Useful Plants in Cabo Verde Islands: A Biogeographic and Conservation Perspective
  3. All About Coffee
  4. Cabo Verde e o silêncio em torno da cultura cafeeira durante as primeiras décadas do séc. XIX

  Read next: Arabica (The species the islands' eighteenth-century record names.).

• Central African Republic: a member of the International Coffee Organization; no production figure read.

  The Central African Republic grows robusta that its government says was brought in 1921 from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and its forests hold wild coffee of two kinds: canephora, including the drought-hardy Nana population, and excelsa. Exports fell from 362,000 bags in 1988/89 to about 41,000 after 2002/03. The International Coffee Organization singles it out as a small producer where coffee drinking is widespread.

  What the sources say about coffee in Central African Republic

  • The government's 2008 communication to the International Coffee Organization says robusta was introduced in 1921 from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and that coffee is grown in the south-west (Lobaye, southern Ombella-M'Poko, Mambéré-Kadéï and Sangha-Mbaéré) and the south-east (southern Ouaka, Basse-Kotto and Mbomou). [source 1]
  • That communication gives exports as 362,000 bags in 1988/89, 100,000 in 1997/98 and 41,000 from 2002/03, and production as 1,500 tonnes of green coffee in crop year 2005/06; it blames low world prices, the withdrawal of donors and the political and military crisis of 2002 to 2003. [source 1]
  • The International Coffee Organization's averages for the country are 180,000 60-kilogram bags a year in the 1970s, 271,000 in the 1980s, 173,000 in the 1990s, 68,000 in the 2000s and an estimated 25,000 for crop year 2013/14. [source 2]
  • The Nana coffee trees were found in 1926 by a planter in the gallery forest of a tributary of the Nana river, were valued for withstanding drought and poor soils, and were once planted on about 1,500 hectares, on the account of a 1984 research paper. [source 3]
  • A 2009 genetic study counts Nana among the local cultivars of Coffea canephora taken directly from nearby forest populations, and places the country's wild canephora in the species' Congolese group. [source 4]

  Harvest: Picking from November to January, after flowering from December to March; first shipments in January or February and exports from February to August. (The country's robusta, as the government described it in 2008) [1]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee the country produces now. The most recent figures found are for 2005/06 and an estimate for 2013/14; the 2024 value in the FAO's database is an imputed figure that CoffeeHQ does not use.
  • The state of the growing areas since 2012. Every national figure here predates the conflict that began that year.
  • The altitude of the coffee. The 2008 fact sheet gives one band for the country, and CoffeeHQ has not checked it against anything else.

  Sources

  1. National coffee policies: communication from the Central African Republic (ICC 100-7)
  2. Sustainability of the coffee sector in Africa (ICC 114-5)
  3. Les caféiers de la Nana : résultats des observations faites en collection en Côte d'Ivoire
  4. Current genetic differentiation of Coffea canephora Pierre ex A. Froehn in the Guineo-Congolian African zone: cumulative impact of ancient climatic changes and recent human activities

  Read next: Excelsa (The species that grows wild here, and why it is no longer treated as a kind of Liberica.); Robusta (The Congolese group of the species, to which this country's wild and farmed canephora belong.); Natural processing (The dry method the government's fact sheet gives for the whole crop.); Uganda (Another country where robusta and excelsa are both native, with a fuller present-day account.).

• Gabon: a member of the International Coffee Organization; no production figure read.

  Gabon produces almost no coffee: about a thousand bags a year on the last figures the International Coffee Organization tabulated. Its interest is botanical. Robusta taken from Gabon early in the twentieth century is recorded behind named coffees grown in Côte d'Ivoire, and a little-known wild relative of Liberica grows in its forests.

  What the sources say about coffee in Gabon

  • The International Coffee Organization's averages for Gabon are 7,000 60-kilogram bags a year in the 1970s, 25,000 in the 1980s, 3,000 in the 1990s, 1,000 in the 2000s and an estimated 1,000 for crop year 2013/14. [source 1]
  • The International Coffee Organization's 2015 report names Gabon among countries where agriculture has traditionally been overshadowed by mining and oil. [source 1]
  • An FAO paper of 2000 calls Gabon a small producer of dry-processed robusta, most of it imported by France and the Netherlands, and prints International Coffee Organization figures of 2,000 to 8,000 bags a year for the six crop years from 1994/95; it names no source for the description. [source 2]
  • A 2009 genetic study records that canephora coffee cultivated in Gabon was introduced to Aboisso in Côte d'Ivoire in 1910, and that the type known as Kouilou of Madagascar, brought to Côte d'Ivoire in 1951, was selected in Madagascar from material that originated in Gabon. [source 3]
  • A 2021 study describes niaouli, the old coffee of Togo and Benin, as a cultivar population that originated in Gabon, where the 2009 study describes it as taken from forest near where it was grown, and gives the range of the Congolese group of Coffea canephora as running from Cameroon and Gabon to Uganda. [source 4]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Gabon produces now, where, and who grows it. The only figures found stop at an estimate for 2013/14.
  • Anything about the national stabilisation fund's programme to revive the crop. It was reported in the press and no document of the fund was opened.
  • That Coffea klainei is, or could be, a crop. The study that names it says it is undomesticated.

  Sources

  1. Sustainability of the coffee sector in Africa (ICC 114-5)
  2. Post Harvest Handling and Processing of Coffee in African Countries
  3. Current genetic differentiation of Coffea canephora Pierre ex A. Froehn in the Guineo-Congolian African zone: cumulative impact of ancient climatic changes and recent human activities
  4. Les caféiers Robusta endémiques de Guinée : une ressource rare et menacée

  Read next: Robusta (The Congolese group of the species, whose range includes Gabon.); Liberica (The species from which Gabon's wild Coffea klainei was separated in 2025.).

• Ghana: a member of the International Coffee Organization; no production figure read.

  Ghana grows a little robusta in a country organised around cocoa, and its coffee research sits inside the cocoa research institute. It is also one of the five countries where Liberica coffee grows wild. The crop has always been small, and had already come and gone once by 1922.

  What the sources say about coffee in Ghana

  • The International Coffee Organization's averages for Ghana are 46,000 60-kilogram bags a year in the 1970s, 12,000 in the 1980s, 51,000 in the 1990s, 29,000 in the 2000s and an estimated 60,000 for crop year 2013/14. [source 1]
  • World Coffee Research describes Ghana's coffee as robusta, grown on a small scale in the forest zones by about 8,000 producer families, a number it gives without a year. [source 2]
  • The Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana, founded in 1938 at Tafo and run by the Ghana Cocoa Board, does research on coffee among other crops, and World Coffee Research lists it as one of seven robusta-producing members of its breeding network. [source 2]
  • A 2025 genomic study names Ghana as one of five countries where Coffea liberica grows wild, and one of the wild plants it sequenced was collected in the Atewa Range Forest Reserve in 1963. [source 3]
  • A trade history of 1922 says the Gold Coast, as Ghana then was, exported 142,000 pounds of coffee in 1896 and almost none by 1916 and 1917, when it shipped 440 and 660 pounds. [source 4]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Ghana produces now. The last figure found is an estimate for 2013/14; Ghana has no row in the USDA or FAO datasets CoffeeHQ uses.
  • Which regions grow it. World Coffee Research says only that production is concentrated in forested zones.
  • The area under coffee. The International Coffee Organization document gives 35,000 hectares in one table and 15,000 in another, and neither is used.

  Sources

  1. Sustainability of the coffee sector in Africa (ICC 114-5)
  2. Ghana (country page)
  3. Genomic data define species delimitation in Liberica coffee with implications for crop development and conservation
  4. All About Coffee

  Read next: Robusta (The species Ghana grows, and why it is not one uniform plant.); Liberica (The coffee that grows wild in Ghana's forests, and how its native range was redrawn in 2025.); Robusta cultivars (What a robusta breeding programme selects for, which is the work Ghana's institute has joined.).

• Guyana: 151 tonnes in 2024, its own figure reported to the FAO.

  Guyana shipped coffee by the million pounds two centuries ago and is a very small producer now: a trade history of 1922 records more than 22 million pounds exported from the colony in 1810 and 160 pounds in 1907, and is silent on the enslaved people who worked its coffee estates in the first of those years. Its government today describes the coffee of the Pomeroon as Liberica and has announced new plantings; no document read measures either.

  What the sources say about coffee in Guyana

  • Guyana reported 151 tonnes of green coffee to the FAO as its official production for calendar year 2024. [source 1]
  • A trade history of 1922 says there was no coffee planting in what is now Guyana, then a Dutch colony, until 1752, and that 26 years later 6,041,000 pounds were sent to Amsterdam from the ports of Demerara and Berbice; another passage of the same book has coffee carried into Berbice in 1725. [source 2]
  • The same history gives the colony's exports as 10,845,000 pounds in 1803 and more than 22,000,000 pounds in 1810, and then 109,600 pounds in 1849 and 160 pounds in 1907. [source 2]
  • It records a modest revival after 1908, to 501,183 pounds exported in 1916 and 267,344 in 1917, when 4,953 acres were in coffee, and says the crop was by then grown mainly for use within the colony. [source 2]
  • University College London's database of the colony's slave registers records that the Plegt Anker coffee estate in Berbice returned 62 enslaved people in the registration of 1818, and that Sandvoort, recorded as a coffee and cocoa plantation in 1794, returned 226 in the same registration and was the subject of a compensation claim at emancipation; two estates are not a survey of the colony. [source 3]

  Not stated here

  • Which species is grown in Guyana today, on evidence. The only statements found are a president's speech and a ministry press release.
  • A history of who worked the coffee plantations of Berbice and Demerara, and why they were abandoned. The 1922 history never mentions slavery and speaks only of a shortage of labour, which is not repeated here as an explanation. Two estate records from the slave registers, given above, show what it leaves out; CoffeeHQ has read no history of labour in the colony.
  • Where coffee is grown now, on how much land, and by whom. The institute's table gives a national row with no region and no unit.

  Sources

  1. FAOSTAT: Crops and livestock products — Coffee, green (production, 2024)
  2. All About Coffee
  3. Legacies of British Slavery database: estate records for British Guiana

  Read next: Liberica (The species Guyana's government says its coffee is, and what is known of where that species grows.); Arabica (The other species named in the planting plan the ministry recalled in 2025.).

• Liberia: a member of the International Coffee Organization; no production figure read.

  Liberia is one of five countries where Liberica coffee grows wild, and the one a 2025 genomic study singles out as having far more natural forest left than the other four. Its coffee crop was about eleven times larger in the 1970s than in the last year the International Coffee Organization tabulated, 2013/14. A seed project has since handed out seedlings in four counties.

  What the sources say about coffee in Liberia

  • A 2025 genomic study reduces the countries where Coffea liberica grows wild from the seventeen of the current Red List assessment to five: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria. [source 1]
  • The same study says forest loss has been continuing in all of those countries except Liberia, which it describes as having considerably more natural forest than the other four and as botanically under-explored, so that further wild populations are likely there. [source 1]
  • The study proposes that wild Liberica be reassessed from Least Concern to Vulnerable, on an area of occupancy of 52 square kilometres calculated mainly from records made between 1900 and 1980. [source 1]
  • A trade history of 1922 describes coffee as native to Liberia and growing wild in the interior, says the cultivated crop was grown chiefly in Grand Cape Mount and Montserrado, and gives exports of 761,300 pounds for 1917. [source 2]
  • The International Coffee Organization's averages for Liberia are 111,000 60-kilogram bags a year in the 1970s, 106,000 in the 1980s, 6,000 in the 1990s, 9,000 in the 2000s and an estimated 10,000 for crop year 2013/14. [source 3]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Liberia produces now. The last figure found is an estimate for 2013/14, and the country has no row in the USDA or FAO datasets CoffeeHQ uses.
  • Why the crop fell between the 1980s and the 1990s. The table that shows the fall gives no cause, and CoffeeHQ read no history of those years.
  • How much of the crop is Liberica, robusta or arabica, and which species the seedlings distributed in 2025 were.

  Sources

  1. Genomic data define species delimitation in Liberica coffee with implications for crop development and conservation
  2. All About Coffee
  3. Sustainability of the coffee sector in Africa (ICC 114-5)

  Read next: Liberica (The species that carries the country's name, and how the 2025 study separated it from excelsa.); Excelsa (The Central African relative long sold as a kind of Liberica, now treated as a species of its own.); Indonesia (One of the lowland countries where the study says Liberica is actually farmed today.).

• Nigeria: a member of the International Coffee Organization; no production figure read.

  Nigeria is a very small coffee producer whose national research institute keeps a station for arabica coffee and tea at Mambilla in Taraba State. It is one of the five countries where Liberica coffee grows wild. On the International Coffee Organization's figures its crop stayed between about 29,000 and 49,000 bags a year from the 1970s to 2013/14.

  What the sources say about coffee in Nigeria

  • The International Coffee Organization's averages for Nigeria are 49,000 60-kilogram bags a year in the 1970s, 29,000 in the 1980s, 46,000 in the 1990s, 48,000 in the 2000s and an estimated 42,000 for crop year 2013/14. [source 1]
  • The Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria, founded at Ibadan in 1964, was given coffee as a research crop by an Act of that year, and says its Mambilla substation in Taraba State caters for arabica coffee and tea. [source 2]
  • A 2025 genomic study names Nigeria as one of five countries where Coffea liberica grows wild; its wild Nigerian sample was collected at Omo in 1946. A second, cultivated sample is labelled as collected at Lagos in 1895 in one passage of the paper and as Ivorian in two others, so it is not relied on here. [source 3]
  • A trade history of 1922 gives Nigeria's coffee exports as 35,000 pounds in 1896, 57,000 in 1901 and 70,000 in 1909, falling to about 3,000 pounds in 1916 and in 1917, and calls the country commercially unimportant as a source. [source 4]
  • An FAO paper of 2000 says robusta and a little arabica are grown in Nigeria, all processed by the dry method, calls coffee a minor export, and prints International Coffee Organization figures of 45,000 to 53,000 bags a year, classed as robusta, for the six crop years from 1994/95; it names no source for the description. [source 5]

  Not stated here

  • Which states grow coffee, and robusta's share of the crop. An FAO paper of 2000 says robusta with a little arabica, without a source or a share; nothing more recent was opened.
  • How much coffee Nigeria produces now. The last figure found is an estimate for 2013/14; Nigeria has no row in the USDA or FAO datasets CoffeeHQ uses.
  • The altitude of the Mambilla station, and anything about the quality of its coffee. The institute's pages give neither.

  Sources

  1. Sustainability of the coffee sector in Africa (ICC 114-5)
  2. About CRIN, and Mambilla station
  3. Genomic data define species delimitation in Liberica coffee with implications for crop development and conservation
  4. All About Coffee
  5. Post Harvest Handling and Processing of Coffee in African Countries

  Read next: Liberica (The coffee that grows wild in Nigeria's forests, and how its native range was redrawn in 2025.); Arabica (The species the institute's Mambilla station works on.).

• Togo: named by the USDA as a producer, with no figure.

  Togo is a small robusta producer whose old plantings were a local coffee called niaouli, grown in the Plateaux region. Two genetic studies do not tell niaouli's origin the same way, which makes it a useful case of how little is settled about West African robusta. The crop peaked in the 1980s on the International Coffee Organization's averages and has fallen since.

  What the sources say about coffee in Togo

  • The International Coffee Organization's averages for Togo are 155,000 60-kilogram bags a year in the 1970s, 251,000 in the 1980s, 223,000 in the 1990s, 143,000 in the 2000s and an estimated 100,000 for crop year 2013/14. [source 1]
  • An agronomist's account of 1987 says Togo's old plantings of local niaouli coffee covered about 60,000 hectares in the Plateaux region and dated mostly from 1940 to 1960. [source 2]
  • The same account says production averaged 13,000 tonnes until 1963 and then fell, by 43 per cent in the years 1979 to 1983, which it puts down to a producer price frozen from 1963 to 1971 and to ageing trees; a state company created in 1971 ran the replanting that followed. [source 2]
  • That account names low rainfall and a very long dry season as the greatest risk to coffee growing in Togo. [source 2]
  • A 2009 genetic study treats niaouli as one of the local cultivars of Togo and Benin that were taken into cultivation from nearby forest populations of Coffea canephora, and places its Togolese samples in one of the Central African genetic groups of the species. [source 3]

  Not stated here

  • How much coffee Togo produces or exports now. The last figure CoffeeHQ can attribute is an estimate for 2013/14; more recent export figures credited to the national committee were seen only in news coverage.
  • Which prefectures grow coffee today. The 1987 account names the Plateaux region and the Akposso and Akébou plateaux, and describes a project, not the present.
  • Whether niaouli is still what is planted. The renovation project replanted old plantings, and no document read says what share of niaouli remains.

  Sources

  1. Sustainability of the coffee sector in Africa (ICC 114-5)
  2. Les projets de développement de la caféiculture au Togo, au Vietnam et en Nouvelle-Calédonie
  3. Current genetic differentiation of Coffea canephora Pierre ex A. Froehn in the Guineo-Congolian African zone: cumulative impact of ancient climatic changes and recent human activities

  Read next: Robusta (The Guinean and Congolese groups of the species, which is the distinction the niaouli question turns on.); Robusta cultivars (How a local population such as niaouli differs from a selected clone.); Uganda (A robusta origin where the plant is native, with a fuller account of how it is grown and sold.).

• Zimbabwe: 572 tonnes in 2024, its own figure reported to the FAO.

  Zimbabwe grew arabica on commercial farms and smallholdings in its eastern highlands and produced well over a hundred thousand bags a year in the 1990s. Production collapsed after 2000, which the two accounts read put down to the land reform and the evictions of large-scale farmers and to the economic instability that followed, and the figure reported for 2024 is a small fraction of the old crop. The recovery described so far is in the Honde Valley and is told mainly by those funding it.

  What the sources say about coffee in Zimbabwe

  • Production in the six crop years from 1994/95 to 1999/2000 ranged from 106,000 to 174,000 60-kilogram bags, on International Coffee Organization figures as printed in an FAO paper in 2000. [source 1]
  • Zimbabwe reported 572 tonnes of green coffee to the FAO for calendar year 2024, an official figure. [source 2]
  • A development organisation's case study says one company, Zimbabwe Coffee Mill, processed and marketed 15,000 tonnes of coffee in 1993 and 260 tonnes in 2010; it gives no source for either figure. [source 3]
  • The same case study says smallholder production fell from 700 tonnes in 1991/92 to 2.5 tonnes in 2009 and the number of smallholder growers from more than 2,500 in 1993 to fewer than a hundred by 2010, and attributes the halt to the economic instability that followed the land reform begun in 2000, with inputs, advice, markets and credit all becoming hard to obtain. [source 3]
  • A 2023 news feature attributes the collapse to the evictions of large-scale farmers from 2000, says the country produced an average of 15,000 tonnes a year until then, and puts recent output at about 500 tonnes a year, from two commercial estates and some 450 small farms; it names no source for either figure. [source 4]

  Harvest: An FAO paper of 2000 gives the harvest as July to October, without a source; its harvest months for two neighbouring countries disagree with local accounts, so this is recorded and not relied on. (The country, as described in 2000) [1]

  Not stated here

  • Why production collapsed, beyond what two interested or journalistic accounts say in a sentence each. No scholarly study of coffee and the land reform was found, so the note reports the attribution and does not adopt it as established.
  • What Zimbabwe produced at its peak. The figure of about 15,000 tonnes appears in two documents without a source; the nearest sourced series is in bags for the late 1990s.
  • Which varieties are grown. The 2013 paper says all the varieties grown were susceptible to the stem borer and names none.

  Sources

  1. Post Harvest Handling and Processing of Coffee in African Countries
  2. FAOSTAT: Crops and livestock products — Coffee, green (production, 2024)
  3. Recovering Lost Livelihoods: The case of smallholder plantation crops in Zimbabwe
  4. Reviving Zimbabwe's coffee industry

  Read next: Arabica (The only species the sources say Zimbabwe grows.); Coffee pests and diseases (The borers, leaf rust and coffee berry disease the 2013 paper lists for Zimbabwe.); Washed processing (The method the FAO paper records for Zimbabwe's arabica.).