Karnataka’s coffee cultivation area remains stagnant: KPA chairman

Mini Tejaswi

While Karnataka remains India's undisputed coffee heartland, accounting for over 70% of national production, the State's cultivation area has completely stagnated due to various reasons, including "rigid land conversion laws," according to M. Salman Baseer, Chairman of the Karnataka Planters Association (KPA).

The State produces between 2.5 lakh and 2.8 lakh metric tonnes of coffee a year on about 2.46 lakh hectares of land, an area that has remained stagnant for the last 15 to 20 years.

Mr. Baseer said coffee planters were struggling as they are unable to carry out expansion activities due to a lack of State-sponsored credit, underfunded subsidies, high interest rates and the unavailability of climate-resilient and high-yielding varieties.

"While global competitors like Vietnam and Brazil rapidly expand, India's cultivation area remains choked by rigid land conversion laws, underfunded replantation subsidies, and high-cost institutional capital, among others. To protect our global competitiveness, we should have a policy with a focus on yield intensification through climate-resilient, high-density planting and aggressive branding of our shade-grown gourmet coffees," Mr. Baseer told The Hindu.

"Karnataka farms coffee under the canopy of the Western Ghats, protecting a precious ecological hotspot. That is our pride, but it also means our path to growth cannot be through reckless horizontal land expansion like some of our esteemed global peers," he said.