Karnataka’s coffee cultivation area remains stagnant: KPA chairman

Mini TejaswiWhile 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.According to Mr. Baseer, matching the scale and yield efficiencies of global competitors requires integrating coffee into robust weather-based insurance schemes, accelerating legislative modernisation and facilitating long-term capital for cyclical replanting. "The Ministry and the Coffee Board have been receptive, but we need to move with greater agility," he added.Aggressive marketingMr. Baseer said India lacks dedicated, centralised export hubs with state-of-the-art warehousing and value-added processing clusters to lower logistics costs. "We must aggressively market our shade-grown, hand-picked Arabicas and Robustas as premium, sustainably produced gourmet commodities to command higher realisations, rather than competing purely on bulk volume."If the industry wants to protect and elevate its export competitiveness, the roadmap is clear: "We must pivot aggressively from exporting baseline green coffee toward high-margin, value-added soluble products, leverage our unique identity as a sustainable, shade-grown origin, and back our growers with modern, future-ready policy support," Mr. Baseer suggested.Under PMFBYThe KPA has repeatedly requested the Union government to bring coffee, tea and rubber under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), especially as crops face devastating cycles of severe drought and incessant, unseasonal rain."The government's hesitation stems primarily from bureaucratic silos. Plantation crops fall under the Ministry of Commerce rather than Agriculture, creating an unfair policy exclusion," he argued. Recurring weather anomalies decimate yields, driving smallholders into deep debt, he said.Over 2,000 coffee growers across Karnataka are facing immense financial distress, burdened with ₹400 crore to ₹500 crore in outstanding loans, and many face coercive action from banks under the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest (SARFAESI) Act, Mr. Baseer said."We are pressing the banking sector and the Union government for a comprehensive loan repayment moratorium, a complete halt to coercive asset seizures on biological farm assets, and flexible One-Time Settlement (OTS) packages," Mr. Baseer said."The KPA will continue to urge the government to address ambiguities under Section 31(i) of the SARFAESI Act, to explicitly shield coffee plantation lands from distress auctions, mirroring protections afforded to traditional agricultural holdings," he said.