Historic harvests and sky-high prices – so why can’t Colombia’s coffee-growers hire pickers?

Historic harvests and sky-high prices – so why can’t Colombia’s coffee-growers hire pickers? Though coffee is one of the world’s most important commodities, little of the profit trickles down to the farmers, while workers are abandoning the countryside in search of more lucrative jobs in the city M ary Luz Pérez Arrubla and her brother, Rodrigo, are fourth-generation farmers cultivating coffee on steep Andean slopes near the town of Líbano, in the rich agricultural region of Tolima. Along with the rest of Colombia , the family has enjoyed a historic harvest amid surging global coffee prices, which hit record highs for the second year in a row in 2025. Severe US tariffs imposed on Brazil and Vietnam , – the world’s two largest coffee producers – as well as poor harvests there, helped drive the surge. Both countries were hurt by the El Niño phenomenon , a cyclical weather pattern characterised by dry spells and aggravated by the climate crisis. Those same conditions favoured many of Colombia’s high-altitude coffee-growing regions. It should have been a boom year. Yet some of the crop was left to rot on the ground, signalling that Colombia’s coffee industry – recognised by Unesco for its symbolic cultural significance – is at a crossroads, facing increasingly erratic seasons, labour shortages and rural abandonment. Colombian coffee is not immune to the climate crisis. Average mountain temperatures have risen by about 1.2C since the 1980s, and the hours of sunlight have decreased by roughly 19% . Farmers connect these changes to increased droughts, heavier rains, and more pests and diseases . Studies suggest that from 2041 to 2060, yields may decline by about 8% in lower-altitude areas but rise by about 16% at higher elevations, prompting farmers to move coffee cultivation further up slopes and adjust land use. And though the country’s producers, most of them smallholders , are trying to adapt to an increasingly unstable climate and market, innovation remains out of rea...