Nepal

Why this origin matters

Nepal grows very little coffee: 641.9 tonnes of green beans in its fiscal year 2081/082, on its coffee board's own table, and an official 501 tonnes reported to the FAO for 2024. It is worth a learner's time for three reasons that have nothing to do with volume. The board publishes area, production, exports and imports for twelve years in a row, so the sector can be read from its own figures. Those figures show a producing country that imports several times what it exports and, on the board's spokesperson's account, drinks more than four times what it grows. And two peer-reviewed papers describe pressures that small arabica origins elsewhere share: a stem-boring beetle that kills the tree, against which synthetic pesticides are strongly discouraged where coffee is promoted as organic, and a climate model in which most of today's suitable land stops being suitable within the life of a tree planted now.

Where coffee grows

Coffee is grown in the mid-hills, the hill country between the southern plains and the high Himalaya. The board says it has reached 40 of the country's districts and become a commercial crop in 20 to 22 of them, in the western and central hills, and names Gulmi, Palpa, Arghakhanchi, Lalitpur, Tanahun, Kavre, Sindhupalchok, Lamjung, Kaski, Gorkha, Syangja, Parbat and Baglung. These are administrative districts; no document read describes a registered geographical indication for Nepali coffee. A 2022 review, using the board's figures for the year it calls 2019/20, puts Kavrepalanchok first by production at 34 tonnes, then Gulmi at 24 and Ilam at 18.5, and Kaski first by number of growers at 4,125. A 2016 model found about 7 per cent of Nepal, and 11 per cent of its farmland, climatically suitable for coffee, mostly in the central mid-hills.

Three documents give an altitude and each means something different by it. The board says all Nepali coffee is produced between 1,000 and 1,600 metres. A 2023 paper describes growers in the mid-hills at 700 to 1,600 metres. The 2016 model places most of the climatically suitable land between 600 and 1,350 metres, which is a statement about climate and not about where farms are. The model's own account of what suits the plant in Nepal is rain: it finds coffee where the coldest quarter of the year still brings rain and where rainfall is strongly seasonal. The same paper notes that eastern Nepal gets more of the summer monsoon and the west more winter rain, and projects that the band holding most of the suitable land will move uphill by about 150 metres by 2050. The 2022 review, citing a trade magazine, says the white stem borer has spread as high as 1,300 metres.

Twelve years of figures, in the Nepali calendar

The board's table runs from fiscal year 2070/71 to 2081/082. Those are years of the Bikram Sambat calendar, which the Nepali state uses, and the page gives no equivalents. A newspaper report of 2024 supplies two: 2079/80 is 2022/23 and 2080/81 is 2023/24. CoffeeHQ keeps the years as printed and converts no others.

Read down, the table tells a plain story with one break in it. Production moved between about 430 and 530 tonnes for six years, fell to 273 tonnes in 2076/77 as the recorded plantation area dropped from 2,761 hectares to 1,891, and has risen every year since, to 641.9 tonnes from 5,501 hectares in 2081/082. The board does not explain the break. A 2022 review calls that year's crop the lowest in a decade and puts it down to reduced plantation area, with figures of its own that differ from the board's present table: 296.5 tonnes from 2,360 hectares.

The board's 501.3 tonnes for 2080/081 and the 501 tonnes Nepal reported to the FAO for calendar year 2024 agree to the tonne, and CoffeeHQ takes them to be the same number. That matters for how the FAO figure is read: it would be a fiscal year's crop filed under a calendar year. What the table cannot say is how the area is counted. It does not separate young plantings from bearing ones, so no yield should be worked out from it.

A model in which most of today's coffee land is unsuitable by 2050

In 2016 a group of researchers mapped where coffee is planted in Nepal, fitted fifteen climate-envelope models to those places and ran them forward to 2050 under four emission pathways. On average the models leave about 27 per cent of the currently suitable land still suitable. Newly suitable land, mostly higher up and further west, comes to about 12 per cent of today's.

The authors set this beside banana, which they modelled the same way and which gains more land than it loses, and draw a practical conclusion: on roughly a third of the land now suited to coffee, banana could be grown over it as shade. They are also clear about what the model is not. It describes climate, holds land use fixed and knows nothing of pests, soil or how a farm is run. And it notes, in passing, that coffee in Nepal was then still a curiosity crop for many of the farmers planting it, with little access to advice on where it would do well.

Species and varieties

The coffee is arabica. The board says all of it is Typica and Bourbon. That is the board's general description, not a survey, and the national research collection holds more than that: a 2023 paper identified nine of its samples by DNA, found all nine to be Coffea arabica, and lists them as Bourbon Vermello, Catisic, Pacas, Catimor, a line called Selection 10, one called Chhetradeep, and three local selections from Gulmi, Syangja and Sankhuwasabha. A collection shows what researchers keep, not what farmers plant, and no document read gives the share of any variety in the field. The same paper says that, for all the years coffee has been grown in Nepal, almost no work on its genetic identity had been done before.

A beetle in the stem, and growers who do not spray

The coffee white stem borer is a longhorn beetle whose larva tunnels through the wood of the stem. A 2022 review by Nepali agricultural scientists calls it the most damaging coffee pest in the country. It was first reported in Nepal in 1998, and by 2016, on a source the review cites, had become an epidemic in Gulmi, the district where Nepali coffee began. Young trees die within a year; older ones survive a few seasons with less fruit. An affected tree has to be uprooted.

Arabica is its preferred host, which is the whole of Nepal's crop. The review explains why robusta largely escapes: its stem and main branches are thicker and harder, and its smooth bark leaves eggs exposed. In India's Kodagu district, it reports from an Indian study, the beetle was the reason nine in ten growers moved from arabica to robusta.

What makes the pest a particular problem in Nepal is the way the coffee is sold. The review says synthetic pesticides are strongly discouraged because the crop is promoted as organic, so control falls to labour: keeping shade over the coffee, since the beetle lays in bright sun; scrubbing stems once a year to dislodge eggs; wrapping them; hanging pheromone traps in the flight seasons; and pulling out and burning infested trees. Growers also spray fermented plant extracts. The loss figures the review quotes, up to 70 per cent in one research report of 2007 and 60 per cent of yield from infected trees in a later source it cites, are not from a national survey, and it says the study of the pest's effect in Nepal remains vague.

Harvest

No document CoffeeHQ read says when coffee is picked in Nepal. The board's pages give no months, and the papers are about climate, a pest and DNA. The entry therefore gives no harvest season.

How the coffee is processed

The board says that almost everywhere the fruit is picked by hand and pulped in hand-turned or small pulping machines. Its price table shows that coffee changes hands in three states: fresh cherry, parchment and dry cherry. Parchment is what pulping produces; dry cherry is fruit dried whole, the natural method. The board's history adds that the company set up in fiscal year 2040/41 to supply the home market bought dried coffee from farmers. So both routes exist and both have a published price, but no document read gives the share of the crop that takes either.

Three prices for one fruit

The board publishes what it calls the minimum agreed price of coffee for each year from 2072 to 2082 of the Nepali calendar. There are six rows: fresh cherry, parchment and dry cherry, each in grades A and B. The page prints no unit and no currency, so the figures are given here only as the board's numbers. Fresh cherry A went from 80 to 105 over the eleven years and parchment A from 400 to 535. Dry cherry A stood at 140 for five years, then rose to 148, 170 and 200, and stands at 280 in the last two years, twice where it began.

Two things can be read from that without knowing the unit. A grower in Nepal has three points at which to sell, and the choice between pulping and drying the fruit whole is a priced one. And the price of dry cherry has risen much faster than the other two since 2079, which the table records and does not explain. A minimum agreed price is a floor that somebody negotiated, not a record of what was paid; the page does not say who agrees it or whether a buyer is bound by it.

How it is graded and sold

The board describes Nepali coffee as going mainly to Japan, the United States and European countries, and as being treated as a specialty product abroad because nearly all of it is grown by organic methods. Both are the board's own statements. Its table gives the size of the trade: 88,856 kilograms exported in fiscal year 2080/081, which a newspaper report equates with 2023/24, and 63,998 kilograms in 2081/082. The price table has two grades, A and B, for each state of the fruit and does not define them. No document read describes how lots are graded, auctioned or certified.

More coffee comes in than goes out

In the first four years of the board's table Nepal's exports and imports of coffee were about level, near a hundred tonnes each. From 2074/75 the two part. Exports stay between 47 and 89 tonnes a year. Imports reach 450 tonnes in 2079/080 and 443 in 2080/081, when they cost 419.8 million rupees against 149.3 million earned from exports. In 2081/082 recorded imports fall back to 203 tonnes.

The newspaper report that carries the board's explanation says the recorded figures understate the trade, because coffee also enters under other customs headings. It quotes the spokesperson putting the export price at about 16 US dollars a kilogram and imported coffee at 5 to 6. On those figures, which are his and are not in the table, Nepal sells a small quantity of coffee dear and buys a larger quantity cheap. One row of the table should not be used at all: the import quantity for 2075/76 is over a thousand tonnes, several times the years either side, with a value that is not.

How coffee is drunk in Nepal

Nepal drinks far more coffee than it grows. In November 2024 a newspaper reported the coffee board's spokesperson as saying that annual consumption exceeds 2,200 tonnes, on a survey the board carried out with support from the International Coffee Organization, against production of about 500 tonnes in fiscal year 2080/81, of which about 90 tonnes were exported. He put the coffee arriving through unofficial channels at about 1,200 tonnes, and said beans are often imported under unrelated customs headings. The report credits the rise in demand to young people and a growing number of cafés. A 2016 paper dates the change earlier: tourism expanding after 1990 raised consumption, it says, while coffee drinking became popular among Nepalis themselves.

The consumption and unofficial-import figures are an official's statements as a newspaper reported them. The survey behind them was not found, and no figure for consumption appears on the board's own pages.

History

The board's account begins around Bikram Sambat 1995, when a man named Hira Giri, of Aanpchaur in Gulmi, is believed to have brought coffee seed from Burma and planted it there; papers and the press give the year as 1938. For four decades, the board says, coffee remained a curiosity among Nepali farmers. It began to spread after the government brought seed from India and distributed it, around the 2020s of the Nepali calendar; a 2023 paper gives 1968. The Nepal Coffee Company was set up at Manigram in Rupandehi in fiscal year 2040/41 to buy dried coffee from farmers and process it for the home market, and a growers' association followed in 2048. A 2016 paper dates the first commercial plantation to 1981 and counts coffee in 41 of what were then 75 districts.

Hira Giri and the seed from Burma: how the board words it

The accounts CoffeeHQ read tell the beginning in one flat sentence. A 2024 newspaper report says Hira Giri introduced coffee seed from Burma in 1938 and planted it in Gulmi; two papers say coffee was introduced in 1938, one adding from Myanmar and to Gulmi, and neither names a record from the time. The board's own history is more careful than any of them. It says he is believed to have begun coffee growing this way, around Bikram Sambat 1995, a year that runs from April 1938 to April 1939, and calls him a resident of Aanpchaur and nothing more. Descriptions of him that circulate elsewhere are in no document CoffeeHQ opened and are not repeated here.

CoffeeHQ records it as the board's account, in the board's wording, and has found no contemporary document for it. What the board says next is better evidence of how the crop actually spread: forty years in which almost nothing happened, then government seed from India, a processing company and a growers' association.

Pressures on the sector

• A shrinking suitable zone. A 2016 model projects that about 73 per cent of the land now climatically suitable for coffee in Nepal will no longer be so by 2050, averaged over four emission pathways, with newly suitable land amounting to about 12 per cent of today's.
• Trees that cannot move. The same paper points out that a coffee plant stands for 30 to 50 years, so plantings made now are committed to the climate of the decades ahead.
• A pest that is climbing. A 2022 review says the white stem borer was once seen only on plants at lower altitude and, citing a trade magazine, that rising temperatures have let it spread higher.
• Erratic rain and drought, which the same review lists among the constraints on Nepali coffee without measuring them.
• The white stem borer, which kills arabica trees and which growers selling organic coffee control by hand.
• Scale. The whole national crop in fiscal year 2081/082 was 641.9 tonnes, on the board's table.
• A home market supplied from abroad. Recorded imports have been between 2.7 and 5.8 times exports in every year since 2076/77, on the board's table.
• Skilled labour. The 2022 review says a profitable coffee business remains hard to achieve for lack of people trained to prune coffee and manage shade trees.
• Advice. The 2016 paper says smallholders had limited access to information on where coffee is climatically suited.

The projection is one model's output for climatic suitability. Its authors say it cannot account for pests, soils or management and that it holds land cover constant. It is not a forecast of how much coffee Nepal will grow.

Institutions worth knowing

• National Tea and Coffee Development Board (राष्ट्रिय चिया तथा कफी विकास बोर्ड), Kirtipur — the government board that publishes the statistics and the minimum agreed prices used here
• Nepal Agricultural Research Council — the research body whose collection at Lalitpur supplied the nine coffee samples identified in a 2023 paper
• Nepal Coffee Producers' Association — founded in Bikram Sambat 2048, on the board's account, to organise growers
• Nepal Coffee Entrepreneurs' Federation and its district associations — named by the board among the bodies that spread coffee growing
• Nepal Coffee Company, Manigram, Rupandehi — set up in fiscal year 2040/41 to buy dried coffee from farmers and process it for the home market

Explore Nepal's coffee from here

A reading order, not a list of everything related: each step picks up something this page raised and takes it further.

1. Step 1TypicaOne of the two varieties the board says all Nepali coffee belongs to.
2. Step 2BourbonThe other, and a red-fruited Bourbon is among the nine samples in the national research collection.
3. Step 3Coffee pests and diseasesStem borers, leaf rust and the other problems the 2022 review lists for Nepali coffee.
4. Step 4Washed processingWhat pulping to parchment involves, the route the board describes for most of the crop.
5. Step 5Natural processingFruit dried whole, the dry cherry that has its own row in the board's price table.
6. Step 6IndiaWhere the seed the government distributed came from, and where much of the research the 2022 review cites on the stem borer was done.
7. Step 7Tasting LabTaste a Nepali lot beside another arabica and record what differs, without a national flavour note to steer you.