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an economy that is ready for a new growing challenge, and an obsessive buyer that is the United States: North

American cafes are ready to receive Peru’s single-origin coffee with open arms.

PERUVIAN PROMISE

Within the world’s “bean belt”, Peru stands out as the top ten in biodiversity and extraordinary variety

in climate, which is perfect for those high-quality arabica beans (“Fact’s About Peru”, n.d.).

Peru suffered off and on with rust outbreaks (Hemileia vastatrix), but once they recovered by

relocating and using fertilizers to kill the fungus, production is currently steadily rising: 8% up from last year.

Within Peru, consumption has doubled in the past five years, but their coffee exports from 2016 still rose 8%.

The country itself almost exclusively produces Arabica coffee, is generally hand-picked and sun-dried, and

the majority of producers are small farms (Notle, 2017). These details about farming is important to note –

this type of story behind coffee is important to the consumer from the United States; and Peru is full of them.

Export and production on the rise,

Peru has also recently received praise from

several angles that will appeal to

consumers. One of which is the issue of

climate change. Highly renowned journals

such as The Ecologist have looked into the

issue of climate change and the effects on

small coffee farmers in Peru (coffee farmer

Figure 5. Peruvian Coffee Farmer (Lee, 2012) Edelmira Fucando pictured in Figure 5.)

“Coffee growing is a central part of life for the 6,600 smallholder coffee farmers…But Mother Nature can be

unforgiving,” Matilda Lee writes in an article for The Ecologist. She describes a three-year program to assist

Peruvian coffee farmers (“Adaption to Climate Change for Smallholder Growers” or AdapCC) that entered

the scene in 2006. The project admitted that when it came to quantity, Brazil far outpaced Peru, but Peru’s

quality was impeccable (Lee, 2012).

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