Nicaragua

Why this origin matters

Nicaragua is a country in which coffee is a large employer and investment in it has been slow. On the governed USDA estimate for 2025/26, charted below, the crop is almost all arabica and almost all of it is exported green; the attaché's report says the crop employs more than 330,000 people along its chain. What sets the country apart in the documents CoffeeHQ read is the list of things holding it back, each of them specific. Only about a seventh of the arabica area has been replanted since the leaf rust outbreak of 2013/14, on the estimate of the attaché's industry contacts. Long-term credit is, in the attaché's words, very limited. A law of 2013 takes a fee from every exported bag to pay for renovation, and growers disagree about whether it has worked. And a tenth of the population has, on independent analysts' estimate as the report gives it, left the country since 2018, which is felt at harvest.

Where coffee grows

More than 85 per cent of Nicaragua's arabica farms are in the north-central departments of Jinotega, Matagalpa and Nueva Segovia, according to the USDA attaché's report, which gives the altitude of coffee there as ranging from 365 to 1,500 metres. The rest of the arabica is grown in the department of Carazo and on the outskirts of Managua department. Robusta is grown somewhere else entirely: in the Southern Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, near a large robusta mill at Nueva Guinea. The report counts about 45,000 growers on about 143,000 hectares in 2025/26, some 7,000 of them under robusta. It gives no production figure for any department.

Seven per cent of the farms, more than a third of the crop

The most recent count of Nicaragua's coffee farms is the agricultural census of 2011, which the attaché's 2026 report calls the latest data available. It found that 71 per cent of coffee farms had less than 15 hectares of coffee and that those farms produced 37 per cent of the crop. Farms of more than 70 hectares were 7 per cent of the total and produced 36 per cent.

So Nicaragua's coffee is both things at once: mostly small farms by number, and roughly a third large-farm coffee by volume, with medium farms supplying the rest. The census is fifteen years old, and nothing CoffeeHQ read says how the balance has moved since.

Traditional shade, more than halved in sixteen years

A 2021 review of how coffee landscapes are changing across Latin America cites figures for the share of coffee area grown under traditional, diverse shade. In Nicaragua it fell from 55 to 25 per cent between 1996 and 2012. The review sets that beside falls in El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica and a rise in Honduras and Mexico, and warns that data of this kind for the region are either lacking or out of date. The figures are from another study's supplementary tables, which CoffeeHQ has not read.

Species and varieties

Nicaragua grows mostly arabica: more than 95 per cent of production in 2025/26 in the words of the attaché's report, whose own table for that season works out at about 94 per cent, with robusta making up the rest. Caturra is the most widely planted variety, at 72 per cent of the arabica area. The report lists Bourbon, Pacas, Catuai, Catimor, Maragogipe and Pacamara as other common ones, and says growers have in recent years gained access to higher-yielding varieties, naming Marsellesa, Parainema, Costa Rica 95, IHCAFE 90 and Lempira. It gives a share for Caturra only.

Robusta: banned, allowed in 2013, and stalled since 2023

Nicaragua was one of three Central American countries that, according to the 2021 review, historically banned robusta to protect a reputation for arabica. The industry began testing it in the country's Caribbean lowlands in 2005, the review reports, and the government opened non-traditional regions to it in 2013: the Atlantic coast and lowland areas on the Pacific side, in the attaché's description. By 2016, on a master's thesis the review cites, nearly 900 hectares had been planted. The review also reports, citing a newspaper article of 2016 that CoffeeHQ could not open, a law allowing robusta in regions below 400 metres and in those more than 30 kilometres from arabica plantations.

It has since stalled. The attaché puts robusta at about 160,000 bags a year from around 7,000 hectares, and says production has been stagnant since the 2023 bankruptcy of the trading group that was its largest promoter, with farmers in some areas giving up their projects. Its forecast for 2026/27 has robusta falling to 140,000 bags.

Twenty thousand hectares replanted since the rust

On the account of the attaché's industry contacts, growers have replanted approximately 20,000 hectares of arabica since the rust outbreak of 2013/14: 14 per cent of the total area in about twelve years. The report sets that against a rule of thumb. A farm that replanted five per cent of its area each year would renew itself every twenty years, which matters because, it says, a coffee plant's productivity typically tails off after twenty to twenty-five. In practice most farms replant only when old plants become infected or die.

The reasons it gives are money and timing. A new planting takes at least three years to earn anything; long-term credit on terms that allow for that is very limited; newer rust-resistant varieties are hard to obtain; and when prices are high, as they were when the report was written, growers are reluctant to pull out even their less productive trees. A regional project financed by the United States worked from 2019 to 2025 on breeding, seed lots and the certification of nurseries. The attaché nonetheless projects limited growth in arabica yields, which it estimated at 18 bags a hectare in 2025/26.

Harvest

The attaché's report gives no harvest months, and CoffeeHQ has found none it could source. What the report does date is the rest of the coffee year. Nicaragua's marketing year runs from October to September. The trees flowered in March and April in 2026, and well, on farmers' reports. The rainy season is interrupted in July and August by the canícula, the dry spell described above, which falls while the beans are filling. The table below marks those two periods and no harvest.

A harvest short of pickers

Labour is a constraint the report returns to several times. It attributes a harvested area slightly below the planted area to labour shortages caused by emigration over the previous five years, and quotes independent analysts' estimate that more than 600,000 Nicaraguans, a tenth of the population, have left the country since 2018.

The 2025/26 season went more easily. The report says the industry largely avoided significant shortages because the harvest was more evenly spread than usual, without the typical peaks in demand for workers. Some regions still went short, and one large farmer estimated losing 30 per cent of the crop for want of pickers. That is one grower's estimate, reported as such.

How the coffee is processed

CoffeeHQ has read no present-day account of how Nicaraguan coffee is processed. The one method it lists against Nicaragua, washed, is listed as a historical statement and not as a description of present practice. The only statement read is from 1922: a trade history says the wet method was then mostly favoured, and that many of the large plantations were worked by Americans and Germans who used the country's water power to run cleaning machinery.

How it is graded and sold

Nicaragua exports its coffee as green beans; the USDA's table has no roasted or soluble exports in any season. On central bank figures for 2024/25, reprinted by the attaché and charted below, the United States took 35 per cent of exports and Belgium 18 per cent, with Germany third. The report puts the European Union as a whole at about 32 per cent and says European buyers particularly look for organic and Fairtrade coffee. Prices in the 2025/26 harvest were, in the report's words, record-breaking, with some exporters paying up to 290 US dollars a bag, and growers called the season highly successful although the crop was smaller. A Cup of Excellence competition and auction was held in Nicaragua in 2002. CoffeeHQ has read no document describing how Nicaraguan coffee is graded.

A levy on every exported bag

One of Nicaragua's main coffee policies, in the attaché's description, is a law of 2013, Law 853, which set up a fund to renovate old coffee farms and pays for it with a fee on every 60-kilogram bag exported. The fee averaged four US dollars a bag in 2025/26, and industry sources quoted by the attaché estimate that more than 40 million dollars has been collected since the law began. Growers, the report says, are divided: some may have benefited from the renovation fund, while others see the fee as a burden.

An older law pulls the other way. The Coffee Law of December 2000 gave growers several tax exemptions. In 2019, the report says, the government taxed fertilisers and agrochemicals for the first time, with import duties of up to 30 per cent on some products, which reduced what those exemptions were worth and made inputs harder to afford. Fertiliser prices then rose by about a quarter in the first half of 2026, which the report puts down to disrupted shipping.

How coffee is drunk in Nicaragua

Nicaragua drinks a small part of its crop: 160,000 bags a season on the USDA attaché's estimate, against production of about 2.6 million, and about 1.5 kilograms a person. The report notes a growing taste for good roasted coffee among younger people and more coffee shops in the larger cities, serving everything from cappuccino to cold brew. It expects total consumption to stay flat all the same, because emigration, dearer basic foods and a weak economy pull the other way.

Consumption figures are the USDA attaché's estimates in green-bean equivalent; the per-person figure is its forecast for the marketing year beginning October 2025.

History

William Ukers, in his trade history of 1922, puts the beginning of coffee production in Nicaragua between 1860 and 1870 and gives a run of estimates that rise from 1,650,000 pounds in 1875 to about 30 million pounds in 1918-19. He names the departments of Managua, Carazo, Matagalpa, Chontales and Jinotega as having the most extensive plantings, and notes cultivation begun around Boaco in 1893. He wrote that lack of transport and an excess of political troubles had been important factors in holding back its development. The decades between his account and the present are not covered here, because CoffeeHQ has not read a history of them.

Pressures on the sector

• Drought within the rainy season. The canícula, a dry spell in July and August, ran long in 2025 and, on the attaché's account, affected the filling of the beans in some low-altitude areas.
• El Niño. The attaché's forecast for 2026/27 assumes drought: it cites a United States forecast of a 62 per cent probability of El Niño developing by mid-2026 and notes that the event is associated with drought in Nicaragua.
• Leaf rust. The outbreak of the 2013/14 season, in the attaché's word, decimated production; growers reported no significant pest problems in 2025/26.
• Labour. Emigration has thinned the harvest workforce.
• Long-term credit, which the attaché describes as very limited, and which replanting needs.
• Input costs. Fertilisers and agrochemicals have been taxed since 2019, and fertiliser prices rose by about a quarter in the first half of 2026.
• Price exposure. Exporters quoted in the report feared in 2026 that a large Brazilian arabica crop would bring prices down.

The El Niño probability was a forecast made in the first half of 2026 for that year and is not a standing risk figure. No Nicaraguan climate or plant-health document was read.

Institutions worth knowing

• Instituto Nicaragüense de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA) — the national agricultural technology institute, a partner in the regional project that worked on coffee breeding and nurseries from 2019 to 2025
• PROMECAFE — the regional cooperative programme for the development and modernisation of the coffee sector, another partner in that project
• Banco Central de Nicaragua — the central bank, the source of the export figures by destination used here

Explore Nicaragua'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 1CaturraThe compact Bourbon mutation on 72 per cent of Nicaragua's arabica land, on the attaché's account.
2. Step 2PacamaraOne of the large-beaned varieties the attaché's report lists as common in Nicaragua.
3. Step 3MaragogipeThe other large-beaned variety on that list, and one of Pacamara's parents.
4. Step 4CatimorA group of rust-resistant crosses that the attaché's report lists among Nicaragua's common varieties.
5. Step 5RobustaThe species Nicaragua banned, then allowed in 2013, and what it is grown for.
6. Step 6HondurasThe neighbour to the north, a larger arabica origin that the same leaf rust epidemic reached.
7. Step 7Costa RicaThe neighbour to the south, which appears among the buyers of Nicaraguan coffee in the central bank's export table.
8. Step 8MexicoWhere robusta is being planted for instant-coffee factories, with contracts from the processors.
9. Step 9Coffee Expert: world coffeeWhere Nicaragua sits among the producing countries, and how to read production figures.
10. Step 10SarchimorThe group that Marsellesa and Parainema, two of the newer varieties the attaché names, belong to.
11. Step 11Tasting LabTaste two Nicaraguan coffees side by side and record what differs, without a national flavour note to steer you.