Maggy Nyamumbo's Therapy Is Solving The Coffee Price Crisis [091]

Boss Barista

If you work in the coffee industry, you might have heard of the coffee price crisis. To put it simply, we are not paying farmers enough money to grow coffee. And it’s not a little bit of money—we’re not even paying enough for farmers to cover their costs to produce coffee. It’s not just that farmers aren’t making money, but actively losing it by continuing to grow and produce coffee. This is a problem of dignity—who do we respect, whose labor is valued, where is value created—but this is also a logistical problem that threatens the entire future of coffee.

So what’s the answer? We talk about this issue ALL THE TIME, but I know, for me, it feels like we’re not getting concrete answers. Folks like Starbucks just announced an initiative to pledge $20 million dollars to farmers, which to some sounds like a good start, but to others, sounds like lip service, especially when you consider that Starbucks is a multi-billion dollar company—that’s right, BILLION, and not just a couple billion: try $22 billion.

And what this story—the one about Starbucks donating money to farmers—attempts to obscure, is that multinational corporations, like Starbucks, actually have a lot of say in how the market acts and how prices are figured out. And that’s something Maggy Nyamumbo is incredibly quick to point out. And this point—that there are market actors that we don’t talk about, or illuminate just how influential they are—is really what Maggy wants to talk about.

Maggy is the founder of Kahawa 1893, a social enterprise aimed at connecting farmers directly to consumers in an attempt to get more money back to farmers. Maggy is a trained economist—she graduated from Smith College in 2011, went to the London School of Economics, got her MBA at Harvard, worked for the World Bank and on Wall Street—and she’s able to see beyond the problem. Yes, we know that coffee prices are at an all time low, but what happens next? How do we actually begin to solve this problem? For someone like Maggy, that means truly understanding how we got here. And that means being upfront about coffee’s colonial history, its reliance on free labor in the form of slavery, and what she calls “big coffee” and their reluctance to stabilize the market.

Maggy called this conversation her therapy, which seems like such an incredible privilege for me, and hopefully for you, because this conversation was easily the most informative conversation I’ve ever had about how the coffee market works. I’ve been in coffee for almost ten years—and finally, FINALLY, by talking to Maggy, I get it. This is the best hour of information I’ve ever recorded—so listen to this. Again and again. She talks about how sustainability is often a buzzword to get farmers to overproduce coffee, how influential multinational corporations are on global legislature, and even how American politics could affect the future of specialty coffee.