Panama

Why this origin matters

Panama matters for a reason out of all proportion to its crop. It is the country where one arabica variety, Geisha, was entered in a competition in the mid-2000s and broke the auction record of the time for green coffee. The crop itself is small: the statistics institute's preliminary figure for the 2022/23 agricultural year is 127,600 milled quintals, and Panama has no row at all in the USDA circular CoffeeHQ uses. A learner should read it for three things that the famous variety hides: a domestic market that still has to import coffee, a lowland robusta sector that, on the ministry's registers as a newspaper reported them in 2026, has more growers than arabica has, and a harvest picked largely by people from the indigenous territories.

Where coffee grows

Coffee is grown in most of Panama's provinces, and by two different kinds of farm. The west leads: the statistics institute's table puts Chiriquí at 89,600 of the 127,600 milled quintals harvested in 2022/23, and its commentary says Chiriquí and Coclé together produced 83.5 per cent. The FAO's 2023 study places the main coffee districts in the highlands of Chiriquí and describes a coffee circuit through Renacimiento, Tierras Altas, Boquete and the Hornito and Bugaba area; of the 105 farms at the circuit's core it counts 39 in Boquete, 31 in Renacimiento, 22 in Tierras Altas and 13 in Hornito and Bugaba. Arabica is concentrated there. Robusta is a lowland crop of the centre and the Caribbean side: the ministry's registers, as reported in 2026, put the largest robusta areas in Coclé, Colón and Panamá Oeste, with smaller ones in Darién, eastern Panamá, Veraguas, the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca and Bocas del Toro.

Two official counts of one harvest, nearly a factor of two apart

Panama's harvest is measured by two public bodies, and their figures for the same year do not resemble each other. The statistics institute's table gives 136,890 milled quintals for the 2021/22 agricultural year, a figure it flags as estimated. The agriculture ministry, as the FAO's 2023 study reports it, gives 248,997 quintals for 2021-2022, harvested from 18,064 hectares by about 8,503 growers.

Neither document explains the difference. Part of it may be coverage: an explanatory note the institute published with an earlier edition says its survey visits selected provinces and the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, which together produced 96 per cent of the crop at the 2011 census, and that the census total is therefore higher. Part may be the unit: the institute counts milled coffee, and the study describes the ministry's figure as dry green coffee in one passage without defining its quintal. Coverage of four per cent cannot account for a gap this size, and CoffeeHQ does not know what does.

So this entry gives no single production figure in tonnes or bags. The institute's series is the one with a published table, a stated unit and flags for estimated and preliminary years, and it runs from 138,300 milled quintals in 2018/19 to a preliminary 127,600 in 2022/23, with Chiriquí falling from 103,700 to 89,600. The ministry's is the one with area and growers attached. A reader should treat any confident statement of Panama's output, including the 200,000 metric tons that appears in one peer-reviewed paper's introduction, with that in mind.

Species and varieties

Panama grows both arabica and canephora, which is sold there as robusta. On the ministry's registers as reported in 2026, robusta occupied 6,512 hectares and involved 4,864 growers, out of 12,843.7 hectares and 6,213 growers for both species: about half the land and most of the growers. No source read gives each species' share of the harvest except the ministry's estimate for 2025-2026, which puts robusta at 53,000 of 170,708 quintals. For varieties there is no census, only what studies happened to sample. A 2026 chemistry paper took arabica of the Caturra, Catuaí, Pacamara, Venecia, yellow Bourbon and Geisha varieties, collecting its samples of both species in Boquete and Renacimiento in Chiriquí and in Penonomé in Coclé; the 2025 sensory study used Geisha alone. Neither says how much of any of them is planted.

The lowland robusta that, on the ministry's registers, most growers farm

The better-known Panama is highland arabica; the larger number of growers, on the one count CoffeeHQ could open, is in lowland robusta. The ministry's registers, as a national newspaper reported them in August 2026, count 4,864 robusta growers on 6,512 hectares, out of 6,213 growers of both species. That is a newspaper's account of a register, with no reference date, and its totals for both species are well below the 8,503 growers and 18,064 hectares the same ministry gave the FAO study for 2021-22. Coclé has the most, 2,360 growers on 2,500 hectares, then Colón with 1,020 on 1,081 and Panamá Oeste with 164 on 950. The eight places the report lists add up to 6,132 hectares, 380 fewer than the total it states.

The ministry presented a national robusta plan in January 2025 at Capira, in Panamá Oeste. Its stated aim, in the words of the official the report quotes, is not to compete with Geisha or high-grade arabica but to replace imports: the industry buys in 90,000 to 120,000 quintals of robusta a year, about twice what the country was estimated to grow in 2025-2026. The report gives an average yield of 8.1 quintals a hectare in the sentence that states both estimates; 53,000 quintals over 6,512 hectares comes to 8.1, so CoffeeHQ reads it as the robusta yield. It describes a quality label the ministry is promoting for lots that score above 80 points.

Independent evidence that the species is grown and sold comes from a 2026 paper that analysed eight Panamanian canephora samples beside thirteen arabica ones. Its robusta samples had been grown at 450 to 700 metres and its arabica samples at 1,300 to 1,600 metres; those are the elevations of the lots sampled for that study, not a description of where each species is grown nationally. The FAO study had made the argument for robusta in 2023: that it suits the lowlands, yields more, resists disease better and can be planted where arabica does poorly.

Geisha: handed out for rust tolerance, then left alone for forty years

The variety that made Panama's name was not bred there and was not planted for its cup. The World Coffee Research catalogue records that it was collected from coffee forests in Ethiopia in the 1930s, sent to the Lyamungu research station in Tanzania, and brought in 1953 to the CATIE research centre in Central America, where it was logged as accession T2722. CATIE distributed it through Panama in the 1960s because it had been recognised as tolerant of leaf rust. Farmers did not favour it, the catalogue says, because its branches were brittle, and it was not widely planted.

It came to notice when the Peterson family of Boquete entered it in the Best of Panama competition and auction, where it received exceptionally high marks and broke the record of the time for green coffee at auction, at over 20 dollars a pound. The catalogue dates this to 2005; a 2025 paper, citing the growers' association and the farm, dates the rediscovery to the 2004 competition. CoffeeHQ records both and has not resolved them.

Two of the catalogue's other points matter to anyone buying the name. It rates the variety's yield potential as low and its quality potential at altitude as exceptional; the catalogue draws no conclusion about cost from that pairing, and CoffeeHQ notes only that a low-yielding plant gives less coffee from the same land. And it warns that several genetically distinct plants have been called Geisha; its own analyses confirm only that the Panamanian type descended from T2722 is distinct and uniform. The spelling varies because there is no fixed transliteration: germplasm records used Geisha, and the mountain in Ethiopia near which it was collected is most commonly written Gesha in English.

Harvest

The only harvest months CoffeeHQ found are a century old: a trade history of 1922 said, in its paragraph on Panama, that coffee matures from October to January; it names no province for those months. The statistics institute counts the harvest by an agricultural year running from 1 May to 30 April, and the recent studies refer to the 2023-2024 and 2025 harvests without naming months. No modern source read gives a picking calendar for either species.

A harvest picked by people from the indigenous territories

The FAO study states it in one line of its table of weaknesses: most of the labour for field work comes from the indigenous comarcas, and needs accommodation that the farms must provide. It lists beside it that the health of the people doing the work can be affected by conditions in the field and by pesticide use, and, among the strengths, that the number of farms offering favourable conditions is rising. It gives no count of pickers, no wage and no description of the housing.

A peer-reviewed ethnography of 2023 shows the same labour force from the other end. It follows Ngäbe families from the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca who travel each year to pick coffee in Costa Rica, a movement that the studies its author cites date to the first half of the twentieth century and that, she writes, intensified in the 1960s. On her account, which draws on earlier studies and on her own interviews, pay in Costa Rica is not much higher than in Panama; families go because there is more work, free health care, somewhere for children to be looked after, and better housing and treatment from employers. That is a statement about why people leave to pick elsewhere, from six months of fieldwork in one community and on one farm, and it is the nearest thing to a description of conditions on Panamanian farms that CoffeeHQ could open.

How the coffee is processed

What is documented is the processing of coffees entered in competition or chosen for study, not of the crop. Of 96 arabica samples from the Best of Panama tasting events of 2018 and 2019 that one paper analysed, 55 were washed and 41 natural. The 2025 sensory study used washed Geisha throughout. The 2026 chemistry paper lists washed, natural and honey lots of arabica, natural and honey lots of robusta, and two other methods, an extended fermentation and a slow anaerobic drying; for four of its eight robusta lots the process was not recorded. The FAO study adds an environmental point about wet milling in general: it lists heavy water use in pulping, and the difficulty of disposing of pulp and waste water without polluting soil and streams, among the sector's weaknesses. No source read says what share of the national crop is processed in which way.

One variety, three districts, one consumer panel

Whether Panama's districts differ in the cup has been tested once, on a small scale. A 2025 study took 24 washed Geisha coffees of the 2023-2024 harvest from Boquete, Tierras Altas, Renacimiento and Potrerillos Arriba, roasted and brewed them identically in a university laboratory, and had a panel of consumers rate a list of descriptors. The farms sampled lay between 1,300 and 2,000 metres. Laboratory measurements of the beans and the brew showed few differences between districts. The panel's ratings did: taken together, the coffees of Boquete, Tierras Altas and Renacimiento were statistically distinguishable in aroma, flavour and taste, though individual coffees from different districts often clustered together.

The authors are careful about what this is. It is one harvest, one roast and one brewing method, judged by untrained drinkers, with two samples from one district that had to be left out of the comparison; they say the result needs repeating across harvests and that they did not look for the cause. CoffeeHQ reports it as the only measured comparison found, and draws no district profile from it.

How it is graded and sold

The FAO study describes a home market that takes the ordinary coffee and an export trade that takes the rest. It says national companies buy the greater part of the medium and lower grades, and that prices for the bulk of the crop are set mainly by those companies. Its conclusions put exports at 2,500 tonnes in 2020 and 1,300 tonnes in 2022, with gross export income falling from 20.3 to 16.5 million US dollars; its review of exports says direct coffee sales bring the sector roughly 16 to 25 million a year, without naming the currency or saying whether sales at home are counted. For what is exported, the study's analysis of customs records from 2017 to May 2023 makes the United States the destination of 79 per cent. A newspaper's reading of trade data for 2024 shows a different picture by value, with the United States, South Korea and China close together at about six million dollars each; the two are different years and different measures, and CoffeeHQ has not reconciled them. The study judges most Panamanian coffee uncompetitive abroad on cost, because of what inputs, labour, processing and transport cost in Panama, and notes that the tax incentives go to exporters and not to growers who sell at home.

What the Best of Panama shows, and what an auction price is not

The Best of Panama is a competition and auction organised by the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama. It is documented in the research literature mainly as a source of samples: one study drew its 96 coffees from the association's tasting events of 2018 and 2019, all of them from the districts of Boquete, Renacimiento and Tierras Altas.

An auction price is the price of one lot at one sale. The 2025 paper repeats the association's report that a single micro-lot of Geisha was auctioned the year before for 10,013 dollars a kilogram. It is not what Panamanian coffee sells for, and it is not a grower's income: the same FAO study that praises the specialty trade says most of the country's coffee is bought by national companies at prices those companies set, and it puts the gross income from all of Panama's coffee exports at 16.5 million US dollars in 2022, for 1,300 tonnes. The catalogue's remark that the variety yields little belongs beside any auction figure.

Farm size is the other corrective. Of the 105 farms the FAO study counts at the core of the Chiriquí coffee circuit, 38 per cent are under ten hectares and only 13 exceed a hundred. It says elsewhere that only a minority of growers in the Chiriquí highlands earn from visitors as well as from coffee.

How coffee is drunk in Panama

Panama drinks more coffee than its industry can buy at home. A 2026 newspaper report of the agriculture ministry's records says the country imports between 90,000 and 120,000 quintals of robusta a year for industrial roasting, against a ministry estimate of 53,000 quintals of robusta grown in the 2025-2026 cycle. An FAO study of 2023 describes the same market from the other side: national companies buy most of the medium and lower grades and the rest is exported, and it lists imports as a point of dispute within the sector. The pattern is old. A trade history of 1922 said that Panama grew coffee only for domestic use, that the local supply did not meet demand and that a great deal was imported from neighbouring countries.

The import and production figures are the ministry's as a newspaper reports them; the ministry's own documents were not opened. No source read defines the weight of the quintal used.

History

The record CoffeeHQ could open begins in 1922, and it describes a small industry for the home market. A trade history of that year says the province of Chiriquí produced the bulk of Panama's coffee, about 4,000 sacks of 100 pounds a year, all of it from the Boquete district, since the trees planted in the uplands of Bugaba, which it calls the best district, were still too young to bear. It attributes the quality of Boquete's coffee to the care taken by the American and English planters there, says the local supply did not meet demand and that coffee was imported behind a protective tariff, and records exports of occasionally 200,000 to 250,000 pounds a year. It says nothing about when coffee was first planted in Panama or by whom, and CoffeeHQ has read no history of the century between that account and the 2000s.

Pressures on the sector

• Uneven flowering and ripening. The FAO study lists as a weakness of the sector that arabica is being affected by a changing climate, which it says disturbs the evenness of flowering, fruit development and ripening.
• Disease and pests. The same study says the traditional arabica varieties are the ones most attacked by fungi, and robusta by the coffee berry borer.
• Rain and heat in the lowlands. The 2026 report of the ministry's robusta plan names variable rainfall and high temperatures that can disrupt flowering among the obstacles to expanding robusta.
• Cost. The FAO study judges most Panamanian coffee uncompetitive abroad because of what inputs, labour, processing and transport cost.
• A home market short of its own coffee, with imports that the sector's own committee disputes.
• Labour that travels from the indigenous territories and needs housing, in competition with farms across the border.
• No national certification of seed or seedlings, and little research on the genetic lines of the specialty varieties, both of which the FAO study lists as weaknesses.
• Official figures that do not agree, which makes every plan for the sector start from an uncertain base.

These are items in a strengths-and-weaknesses table and a newspaper report, stated without measurements. No Panamanian climate or plant-health study was read.

Institutions worth knowing

• Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuario (MIDA) — the agriculture ministry, whose directorates keep the registers of growers and area and which presented a national robusta plan in January 2025
• Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censo (INEC) — the statistics institute, which publishes the harvest by province in milled quintals
• Specialty Coffee Association of Panama (SCAP) — the growers' association that organises the Best of Panama competition and auction
• Instituto de Innovación Agropecuaria de Panamá (IDIAP) — the public research institute the FAO study names as validating new varieties

Explore Panama'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 1GeshaThe variety itself: what the catalogue rates it for, and why the name on a bag does not guarantee the plant.
2. Step 2EthiopiaWhere the plant was collected in the 1930s, and what landrace and heirloom mean there.
3. Step 3RobustaThe species the ministry's registers put most Panamanian growers in, and why it is not one uniform plant.
4. Step 4Coffee pests and diseasesLeaf rust, the reason Geisha was distributed in the 1960s, and the berry borer the ministry is training robusta growers to trap.
5. Step 5Natural processingTwo in five of the competition coffees one study analysed were processed this way; this is what it involves.
6. Step 6MexicoAnother producer whose industry imports coffee to supply what the home market drinks, on a far larger scale.
7. Step 7Tasting LabTaste a washed Geisha beside another washed arabica and record what differs, without a national flavour note to steer you.