Karnataka’s coffee growing area remains stagnant: KPA chairman

While Karnataka remains India’s undisputed coffee hub, accounting for more than 70% of national production, the cultivation area in the state is completely stagnant due to various reasons, including “strict land conversion laws”, says M. Salman Baseer, president of the Karnataka Planters Association (KPA).

The state produces 2.5 to 2.8 million tons of coffee annually on about 2.46 million hectares of land, an area that has been stagnant for the past 15 to 20 years.

Mr. Baseer, who is also a coffee farmer from Sakleshpur, said coffee farmers are struggling because they are unable to carry out expansion activities due to lack of government-sponsored credit, underfunded subsidies, high interest rates and non-availability of climate-resistant and high-yielding varieties.

“While global competitors like Vietnam and Brazil are rapidly expanding, India’s growing area remains stifled by, among other things, strict land conversion laws, underfunded replanting subsidies and high institutional capital. To protect our global competitiveness, we should have a policy of yield intensification through climate-resilient high-density planting and aggressive labeling of our shade-grown coffee,” The Base told The Base Gourmet.

“Karnataka grows coffee under the canopy of the Western Ghats and protects a rare ecological hotspot. This is our pride, but it also means that our path to growth cannot lead through reckless horizontal land expansion like some of our esteemed global peers,” he said.

According to Mr Baseer, matching the scale and yield efficiency of global competitors requires incorporating coffee into robust weather-based insurance schemes, accelerating legislative modernization and facilitating long-term capital for cyclical replanting. “The ministry and the Coffee Board have been supportive, but we need to move with more agility,” he added.

Aggressive marketing

Mr. Baseer said India lacks dedicated, centralized export hubs with state-of-the-art warehousing and value-added processing clusters to reduce logistics costs. “We need to aggressively market our hand-picked shade-grown Arabicas and Robustas as premium, sustainably produced gourmet commodities to drive higher realizations, rather than competing purely on volume.”

If the industry is to protect and increase its export competitiveness, the plan is clear: “We must aggressively reorient from exporting basic green coffee to high-margin, soluble, value-added products, leverage our unique identity as a sustainable, shade-grown origin, and support our growers with modern, future-ready policy support,” suggested Mr. Baseer.

Under PMFBY

The KPA has repeatedly requested the Union government to bring coffee, tea and rubber under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), especially as the crops face devastating cycles of severe drought and incessant, unseasonal rain.

“Government hesitation stems primarily from bureaucratic forces. Plantation crops fall under the Ministry of Commerce rather than Agriculture, creating an unfair political exclusion,” he argued. Recurring weather anomalies are decimating yields and driving small farmers into deep debt, he said.

Over 2,000 coffee farmers across Karnataka are facing immense financial distress, saddled with outstanding loans of ₹400-500 crore and many are facing enforcement action by banks under the Securitization and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interests (SARFAESI) Act, Mr Baseer said.

“We urge the banking sector and the Union government to introduce a comprehensive moratorium on loan repayments, a complete halt to foreclosure of organic farm assets and flexible one-time settlement (OTS) packages,” Mr Baseer said.

“KPA will continue to urge the government to address the ambiguities under Section 31(i) of the SARFAESI Act to specifically protect coffee plantation land from distress auctions, mirroring the protection afforded to traditional agribusinesses,” he said.

Published – 11 Oct 2026 14:26 IST