Venezuela

Why this origin matters

Venezuela matters to a reader of coffee history more than to a buyer of coffee today. A Library of Congress country study says a boom in the 1830s made it the world's third largest exporter of coffee, and in the table of world exports that a trade history printed in 1922 it still stood third on a five-year average, behind Brazil and Colombia. On that study's account coffee money paid for the young republic's first infrastructure and, later, helped a president keep his supporters loyal. Then oil arrived, and the same study dates the end of what it calls the coffee era to the oil boom of the 1920s. A century later the USDA's world table gives Venezuela 500,000 bags, which its database counts as all arabica, and prints that same figure for six years running. The decade before that flat line is the other reason to read on: a country with two centuries of coffee growing behind it became a net importer, made the state the only lawful buyer, and by 2020 had growers telling the attaché they lacked the fuel to harvest the crop and carry it to market.

Where coffee grows

The attaché's 2015 and 2017 reports say coffee is grown in the Coastal Range and in the western Andean region, and name seven states: Lara, Portuguesa, Anzoátegui, Trujillo, Táchira, Monagas and Mérida. They give no production for any of them. The 2015 report describes the typical farm as very small, about five hectares on average; the country study, writing of 1988, calls coffee primarily a peasant crop grown on farms of under twenty hectares in mountainous areas. A 2023 news report quotes a coffee educator as counting twenty producing zones, a number no document CoffeeHQ read defines. The 1922 trade history places the coffee on the slopes and foothills of the Andean chain where it approaches the Caribbean coast, and remarks that Venezuela had no great coffee belts: districts lay days' ride apart and the plantations were isolated.

Six years, one number: reading the 500,000 bags

The USDA's July 2026 circular gives Venezuela 500,000 bags for 2021/22 and for every year after it, including its forecast for 2026/27. The database the circular is drawn from shows more than the one line. In each of those six years it has production at 500,000 bags, consumption at exactly the same 500,000, and imports, exports and stocks at zero. The two years before them, 550,000 and 480,000 bags, are the figures of the last attaché report CoffeeHQ could find.

A crop is unlikely to come in at exactly the same size six times, with exactly as much drunk as grown and nothing traded or stored. CoffeeHQ reads the figure as a placeholder carried forward and not as six measurements. That reading is CoffeeHQ's own: the circular does not explain the figure, and neither does the database.

What can be said is where the trail of reports stops. The last attaché report CoffeeHQ could find is dated May 2020. It estimated the 2019/20 crop at 550,000 bags, forecast 480,000 for 2020/21, and noted that the USDA's official tables carried no area or tree estimates for Venezuela. The earlier editions trace the decade before: 700,000 bags in 2013/14, 460,000 in the rust year that followed, then a slow climb to 585,000 in 2018/19. Each of those is an attaché's estimate or forecast (the 585,000 was its forecast of May 2018, which the USDA's official table then carried), built on what a producers' confederation and trade contacts told it, in a country where the 2015 report says no reliable official numbers existed for the planted area.

A second body counted the same years differently. The International Coffee Organization's production table, which ends at crop year 2019/20, gives Venezuela 804,000 bags for 2013/14, 650,000 for 2014/15, 500,000 for 2015/16 and 650,000 for 2019/20, where the attaché has 700,000, 460,000, 500,000 and 550,000. The table does not say where its figures come from. The two series are not joined here; they are set side by side to show how far apart two international bodies were on a crop neither could measure.

Two later numbers are in circulation and should be handled with care. In March 2023 a broadcaster, in a report that quotes the director of the producers' confederation, said production had fallen from 1.8 million sacks in the 1980s to barely 600,000. The report does not say what a sack weighs, and the 2017 attaché report counts Venezuelan coffee in quintals of 46 kilograms, so the figure cannot be set beside the USDA's 60-kilogram bags. In August 2023 a news agency report said production was equivalent to only 383,000 sacks of 60 kilograms in 2022, and that it had fallen by more than 60 per cent in twenty years according to the same confederation. It does not say whose figure the 383,000 is, and the sentence that carries it gives Brazil a smaller arabica crop than Colombia, so it is repeated here as a report and not relied on. Neither number is the USDA's 500,000.

Species and varieties

Every supply table in the four attaché reports puts all of Venezuela's production under arabica and prints zero for robusta. None of the reports names a variety. The one variety name CoffeeHQ found comes from a 2023 news agency report: Monte Claro, an arabica credited to the national agricultural research institute's breeding work in Táchira, registered with the national seed commission in 2013 and described by the agronomist who led that programme as tolerant of leaf rust. That is his account in a news report, not a catalogue entry or a trial result, and the report gives no figure for how widely it is planted.

Rust in 2014, and no fungicide in 2020

The attaché's 2015 report describes an outbreak of leaf rust that affected more than 70 per cent of the planted area in 2014/15. It expected the crop to fall by as much as 30 per cent; its own table, 700,000 bags to 460,000, is a fall of about a third, to what its text calls the lowest level in over twenty years and its summary the lowest in at least fifteen. It says the fall came almost entirely from lower yields and not from trees being removed, and blames the spread on the absence of any disease-control programme for over a year. The 2017 report dates a severe outbreak to 2016 and says bearing trees fell by at least 15 per cent in that year; the two editions may be describing one prolonged outbreak or two, and CoffeeHQ cannot tell which.

By 2020 the problem the report describes is different in kind. Fertiliser, herbicide and fungicide were not available at all; the government, the report says, no longer had the money to import them. The report says older trees had proved more resistant to rust and that young plantings, left untreated, were being damaged or killed, and it forecast a fall of a third in the number of trees not yet bearing. Fuel was the other shortage: growers' associations told the attaché they could not get enough to harvest and carry the crop to market.

Harvest

No present-day document CoffeeHQ read names harvest months. The attaché's tables run on a marketing year from October to September. The only months found are a century old: the 1922 trade history says the crop in Venezuela was gathered from November through March. It is recorded as a statement of 1922.

How the coffee is processed

The 1922 history says Venezuela used both the dry and the wet method, that the dry, unwashed coffees were called trillado and made up the bulk of the country's output, and that a large part of the coffee was cleaned in the trading centres of the coffee districts. It adds that planters who washed their coffee differed over whether to ferment it under water or without. The only later evidence is indirect: the price list in the attaché's 2015 report has one washed grade and two natural grades, which shows both kinds were still traded, and says nothing of their proportions. A 2023 news report quotes the producers' confederation as saying that growers pick half the fruit ripe and half green to make a margin.

Maracaibo, Caracas, Puerto Cabello: trade names that were ports

A reader who meets Maracaibo in an old blend recipe is reading the name of a port, not a farm district. The 1922 trade history says Venezuelan coffees were grouped under Caracas, Puerto Cabello and Maracaibo, which it calls the names of the ports they were exported through (elsewhere it names the port for Caracas as La Guaira), and only then by district: Mérida, Táchira, Trujillo, Tovar and Boconó among the Maracaibo grades, with Mérida and Táchira valued highest by the trade of the day.

The grouping crossed a border. Coffee from Cúcuta, grown in Colombia, was shipped down the Catatumbo river and across Lake Maracaibo and was classed as a Maracaibo coffee; the history adds that Táchira coffee had long been sold as Cúcuta and was only then beginning to be marked with its own name. It describes how the bulk of Venezuela's own coffee travelled: by pack mule to the railhead, by rail to the Catatumbo, by small steamer down the river and across the lake. The traffic across that border has since reversed, as the section on the state as buyer describes.

How it is graded and sold

Under the price controls the attaché describes in 2015, the government set the price of green coffee by grade, and the three grades it lists are Good Washed A, Good Natural and Normal Natural. The reports name the buyers and the rules, which changed from edition to edition and are set out below. Exports hardly figure in the reports. The 2015 report says no official export had been registered since 2004, and that the quantities in its tables are estimates of coffee crossing the border to Colombia unofficially. That date does not match two tables CoffeeHQ opened. The USDA's own database carries bean exports of 70,000 to 225,000 bags a year for 2005/06 to 2008/09, and the International Coffee Organization's table of exports shows 18,000 to 125,000 bags a year from 2005 to 2010, nothing in 2011 and 6,000 bags or fewer in each year to 2017. The 2015 report itself says elsewhere that Venezuela was a net exporter until 2009/10. On the Organization's table, exports had all but ended by 2011. The 2020 report forecast 2,000 bags of exports for 2020/21 and named three firms as the country's major buyers of coffee. The Organization's table shows exports again in 2018 and 2019, of 72,000 and 53,000 bags. A 2023 news agency report says growers were exporting again in small lots after controls were relaxed from 2019, and cites a chamber of commerce and a customs-data firm for the United States and Turkey as the largest foreign buyers in 2022.

From exporter to importer, with the state as the only buyer

The attaché's reports describe a market run by decree. Prices for coffee were controlled from 2003. From 2009/10 the government imported green coffee in quantity to make up for a falling crop, and it was the only importer; in 2014/15 about 685,000 bags came in, mainly from Nicaragua and other Central American countries, much of it under agreements that exchanged Venezuelan oil for food. From 2014/15 to 2018/19 the reports' tables show more coffee imported than grown.

At the start of 2015 a presidential decree made the state corporation the sole buyer of the national crop. In December 2014 another decree had banned the transport of coffee to three states on the Colombian border, Apure, Táchira and Zulia, in what the report calls an attempt to end smuggling: it says higher prices and a favourable exchange rate fuelled the trade; the 2015 report puts that unofficial trade at about 30,000 bags a year. The later reports record the rules loosening: the 2017 report says growers had to sell 30 per cent of their crop to the corporation, in the same sentence in which it still calls the government the only buyer and importer; the 2020 report recalls a requirement of 20 per cent and says it seemed no longer to be enforced. The 2017 report already describes some coffee selling far above the regulated price, and the 2018 report says pricing appeared to be following the market, which it calls a welcome change for growers after fifteen years of regulated prices. Price controls returned on paper in April 2020, when coffee was placed on a list of 27 controlled products.

These reports are written by a United States government office and are openly critical of the Venezuelan government's policies. The decrees, dates and quantities are given here as the reports state them; their judgements on policy are not adopted. CoffeeHQ read no Venezuelan government document and no account from the corporation itself.

2020: a kilogram of coffee for three months of the minimum wage

The 2020 report records the moment the imports stopped. The USDA's official tables still showed 600,000 bags of green coffee arriving in 2019/20; the attaché, working from actual shipments, put the figure at 400 bags. With the state, on the report's account, spending what it had on staple foods and not on coffee, the attaché's estimate of consumption fell by more than half in a year.

The report gives two prices. A kilogram of coffee retailed for about eight US dollars, and the monthly minimum wage was about two and a half. It concludes that only the wealthiest few per cent of Venezuelans could buy coffee, and that cheaper products, often roasted coffee mixed with maize, were taking its place. The ratio of roughly three months' minimum wage to the kilogram is CoffeeHQ's arithmetic on those two figures, both of which the report gives as approximate.

How coffee is drunk in Venezuela

From 2014/15 to 2018/19 Venezuela drank more than twice as much coffee as it grew. The USDA attaché's tables put domestic use between 1.15 and 1.26 million bags a year from 2013/14 to 2017/18, against crops of 460,000 to 700,000 bags, with the difference imported by the state. In 2019/20 that stopped: the attaché cut its estimate of consumption from 1,197,000 bags to 553,000 when green coffee imports all but ceased, and reported that a kilogram of coffee cost about three times the monthly minimum wage and that many people were drinking a mixture of roasted coffee and maize instead. The 2017 and 2018 reports describe two kinds of buyer, one concerned with availability and one, which they put at about 40 per cent, willing to pay the market price for quality. A 2023 news report describes a boom in coffee shops in Caracas, and quotes the producers' confederation as saying that such coffee is not representative of what the country's farms produce.

Consumption figures are the USDA attaché's estimates in green-bean equivalent for marketing years beginning in October. The last was made in May 2020. Nothing later than a 2023 news report was read. The USDA's database has shown consumption of exactly 500,000 bags, equal to production, in every year from 2021/22; the entry treats that as a placeholder and not as a measurement.

History

The sources disagree on the beginning. The 1922 trade history says coffee was introduced in 1784, with seed from Martinique, by a priest named José Antonio Mohedano who planted near Caracas, and that the first shipment abroad, 233 bags, followed five years later. The country study says Jesuits introduced it in the 1740s. Neither names its evidence, and CoffeeHQ gives both. On what followed they agree. The war of independence ruined the cocoa economy, and the new republic turned to coffee, whose price was rising in the countries it could now trade with. The trade history's figures show production of about 25 million pounds in 1830-31 and nearly 84 million twenty years later, after which growth slowed; by its account twentieth-century production averaged over 100 million pounds, though it had no statistics beyond export figures. The country study records corn overtaking coffee as the leading crop in the 1960s and, for 1988, 273,200 hectares producing 71,000 tons, which it calls one of the lowest yields in the world. For the thirty years after that the only figures CoffeeHQ opened are a row in the International Coffee Organization's table of exporting countries' production, which names no source for it: 1.1 million bags in crop year 1990/91, a highest value of 1.6 million in 1998/99, more than 1.2 million in every year from then to 2007/08, then 932,000 in 2008/09 and, after six uneven years, 500,000 in 2015/16. Nothing CoffeeHQ read explains the fall.

The coffee century, and the oil that ended it

The country study treats coffee as the thread of nineteenth-century Venezuelan politics. The boom of the 1830s gave the first republican governments the money to build with; when prices fell in the 1840s the ruling group split into two factions, which called themselves Conservatives and Liberals; and a later expansion of coffee production and foreign loans gave a president it calls Guzmán the means to keep his supporters, and nearly two decades of peace. It says a small class of plantation owners, growing cocoa and coffee, controlled the economy.

The trade history of 1922 describes the people who did the work. It calls the plantation labour force largely people of indigenous and African descent, joined at harvest by workers who crossed from Colombia and went home afterwards, and says the resident workers lived in small settlements on the estates, supplied by company stores, under what it calls a sort of peonage, tacitly recognised by both sides. It adds that no law of peonage or slavery had ever existed in Venezuela. The country study records the abolition of slavery in Venezuela in 1854, so that sentence cannot stand as written; the description of settlements and company stores is one author's, in one sentence of a trade handbook that names no source for it. The country study, writing of 1988, describes coffee as mainly a peasant crop on small farms; nothing CoffeeHQ read says how much of the crop came from estates of the kind the handbook describes, or when. CoffeeHQ looked for a modern history of labour on these estates and could open none.

The end came from outside the sector. The country study dates the first commercial drilling for oil to 1917 and says the oil boom of the 1920s closed the coffee era; by the 1930s oil was over 90 per cent of exports. The trade history, written as that change began, shows coffee already weakened by the war: German firms had been prominent in the trade, shipping to Europe stopped, coffee piled up in the ports, and its release produced an export of 179 million pounds in 1919 followed by 74 million in 1920.

Pressures on the sector

• A break in the rains. The attaché's 2020 report attributes part of that season's smaller crop to twenty days without rain at what it calls a pivotal time for the plants, and says many trees lost their leaves to water and disease stress.
• Leaf rust. The 2015 report says an outbreak affected more than 70 per cent of the planted area in 2014/15; the 2020 report says rust remained troublesome across the country and that fungicide was not to be had.
• Inputs. The 2020 report says fertiliser, herbicide and fungicide were unobtainable, and that the country had once made most of its own.
• Fuel. Growers' associations told the attaché in 2020 that they could not get enough to harvest the crop and take it to market.
• Prices set by decree for fifteen years, which the 2018 report says left growers little incentive to invest in planting.
• Old and low-yielding trees. The country study called the 1988 yield one of the lowest in the world and said low profits kept farmers from replanting.
• A lack of figures. The attaché says in 2015 that no reliable official numbers exist for the planted area, no report later than 2020 was found, and the USDA's database has repeated one set of figures since 2021/22.

These are the attaché's statements about two seasons. No climate study of Venezuelan coffee was read, and nothing here is a statement about a trend.

Institutions worth knowing

• Corporación Venezolana del Café (CVA-Café) — the state corporation that a 2015 decree made the sole buyer of the national crop, and to which growers were later required to sell a fixed share
• Fedeagro — the confederation of agricultural producers whose coffee division the attaché credits for several of its figures, and whose officials news reports quote on the size of the crop
• Agropatria — the state company that, on the attaché's 2018 account, supplied about 90 per cent of farm inputs
• Sunagro (Superintendencia Nacional de Gestión Agroalimentaria) — the agency whose permission was needed to move coffee, on the attaché's 2020 account, which adds that the rule seemed to have fallen into disuse
• Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (INIA) — the national agricultural research institute to which a 2023 news report credits the variety Monte Claro

Explore Venezuela'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 1ColombiaThe neighbour whose Cúcuta coffee once left through Maracaibo, and towards which Venezuelan coffee later travelled unofficially.
2. Step 2NicaraguaThe main supplier of the green coffee Venezuela's government imported, on the attaché's account, in exchange for oil.
3. Step 3Coffee pests and diseasesWhat leaf rust is, and why an outbreak that goes untreated for a year costs a country several harvests.
4. Step 4Coffee economics and price formationHow coffee is priced where the market sets it, as background to fifteen years in which a government set it instead.
5. Step 5BrazilThe producer that led the 1922 export table in which Venezuela stood third, and the other border the attaché expected coffee to cross.
6. Step 6Colonial-era cultivation and global spreadHow coffee reached the Caribbean islands from which, on one account, the first seed came to Caracas.