The newly released 2026 Coffee Barometer exposes systemic flaws in the global coffee industry over the past 20 years. Despite coffee prices recently reaching historic highs, the report reveals that the sector treats the symptoms of poverty and climate vulnerability rather than their root causes. This 20-year edition of the Coffee Barometer challenges the industry to confront the commercial interests and power structures that determine how value is captured across the supply chain.
High prices hide persistent vulnerability
Contrasting today’s situation with the devastating price collapse of 2001-2003, the Barometer argues that historic price lows and current highs are not separate crises, but two phases of the same story. While coffee prices are far above levels seen in recent decades, the structural conditions that undermine producers’ livelihoods —thin margins, rising input costs, and climate vulnerability— remain unresolved by a price spike. The supply chain remains under immense strain of higher costs. Sjoerd Panhuysen from Ethos Agriculture, the lead author of the Coffee Barometer, comments: “In 20 years the language has shifted: worrying less about hunger in the coffee lands, and more about the cost of a daily espresso.”
This century, voluntary sustainability programmes have improved some conditions at the farm level, but failed at the scale or depth needed to shift market fundamentals. The global coffee trade remains defined by short-term transactions, volatile prices, and risk concentrated at origin. Lead-author Ethos Agriculture, and the civil society organizations behind the report — Conservation International, Solidaridad and VOCAL — argue that sustainability cannot be built on permanently cheap coffee.
The sector treats symptoms, not causes
The value distribution of a kilo pack of branded ground coffee in the German market. The figure illustrates that 10% of the coffee’s value depends on unpaid family labour by coffee-farming households. (Basic, 2024)
Ten percent of the retail cost of a pack of coffee is effectively subsidized by farmers’ families through unpaid labor. Yet as the sector generates hundreds of billions of dollars annually at the consumption end of the chain, value consistently fails to flow back to the people and producing countries on which the industry depends. Instead, the growing profits in the global coffee economy reach many stakeholders apart from producers: wealth accumulates through format premiums on items like capsules and specialty branding, through shareholder distributions that far exceed sustainability budgets, and through tax structures that route profits through low-tax jurisdictions. As a result, coffee remains underpriced, failing to reflect the real costs of living and climate adaptation.
The reason is structural. Companies fund farmer programmes and publish sustainability commitments, while core commercial operations continue to rely on low-cost commodity purchasing and opaque trading structures. Challenging the power structures and commercial interests is out of scope. Until purchasing practices structurally change how value and risk are shared with producers, sustainability investments work around the problem rather than on it.
Regulation needs transparency
Market-wide regulation might create the level-playing field needed to change behaviour across the sector by addressing the commercial incentives that shape it. The coffee industry is undergoing a massive shift from voluntary aspirations to mandatory obligations, driven by legislation like the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). This legislative wave, which is also brewing in markets outside Europe, requires companies to verify and disclose their sourcing impacts and sustainability efforts. However, the report stresses that market-wide regulation can only succeed if transparency and accountability keep pace.
Instead, the Barometer identifies a troubling trend of “greenhushing” the practice of quietly reducing public reporting to avoid scrutiny. Companies are substituting outcome data with process descriptions. Of fifteen major companies assessed, not a single one discloses its pricing structures, contract durations, or premiums paid above the commodity price.
Without meaningful public disclosure, there is no credible way to verify if corporate investments are genuinely improving conditions in producing communities. Furthermore, the transition to traceable, deforestation-free supply chains requires capital that smallholders cannot provide, and income security they do not have. Enabling this transition is a buyer’s responsibility, not a farmer’s one.
A call for market reform
The 2026 Coffee Barometer concludes that the era of treating market failures with farm-level interventions alone must end. The choice is not between sustainability and profitability; these goals are interdependent. Lasting transformation in the coffee sector will only be possible through a fundamental redesign of business and sourcing models across the industry. The urgency is reinforced by climate change and nature loss, which are reshaping where coffee can be grown and increasing the risks and costs of sourcing. A resilient supply chain, and the sector’s long-term licence to operate, depends on covering the full economic, social and environmental costs of production. Responsible procurement must be core to business strategy rather than a voluntary or discretionary investment.
The Coffee Barometer 2026 calls on major roasters and traders to commit to fundamental principles of responsible procurement, such as relationship integrity, value sharing and risk sharing. It is conditional to ensuring prosperity and dignity of producers and includes living incomes and wages, and a healthy and thriving environment. It also urges policymakers to align public finance with structural market reform, enact market-wide regulation that creates a level playing field, and require verifiable disclosure to ensure accountability across the coffee sector.
About the Coffee Barometer 2026
The Coffee Barometer (full report available on coffeebarometer.org) is produced as a joint effort by Conservation International, Ethos Agriculture, Solidaridad, and VOCAL.
Find the large graphics from the report and some photos in this folder. They are free to publish. Please credit the maker – see the exif data.
For twenty years, the Coffee Barometer has sought to make sense of a sector in constant motion. Across seven earlier editions, we chronicled the sector’s sustainability efforts. Starting with the first edition in 2006, we have charted the wave of ambitious sustainability pledges that swept through the sector in the early 2000s and the subsequent rise of voluntary certification standards as the preferred instrument of change. We have documented the rise of multi-stakeholder initiatives and questioned whether pre-competitive sustainability collaboration across the value chain could achieve what market forces alone had failed to deliver. We have tracked the volatile swings in coffee prices that repeatedly devastated producer incomes and urged the sector to confront a climate crisis that was already reshaping growing conditions long before it became a boardroom priority. We also noted, with some unease, the unprecedented consolidation taking place at both ends of the chain: among roasters and traders in consuming countries, and among a shrinking number of dominant producing countries. Throughout, we have attempted to hold the industry to its own commitments, and to distinguish genuine frontrunners from those for whom sustainability remained largely a matter of ‘greenwashing’.