According to the Coffee Board,
cultivable coffee land in India, which
was around 92,000 hectares in the
1950s, had grown to around 4,00,000
hectares in 2010. Since then, there
has been little addition. Currently,
coffee is cultivated by small growers
(under 10 hectares). While cultivable
area has stagnated, productivity has
grown 10 times. “Our productiv-
ity was 100 kilograms per hectare in
- Today, we are at around 1,000
kilograms per hectare,” says Srivatsa.
However, higher production has
not been of much help to farmers, and
that’s what the Coffee Board is hop-
ing to address by using blockchain
technology. Blockchain is a distrib-
uted ledger technology which allows
members to record transactions in a
decentralised data log maintained on
a network of computers rather than a
physical ledger or a single database.
The aim is the reduce the middle-
men in the value chain. Ethiopia and
France already do this.Sahadev Balakrishna, former
Chairman of the Karnataka Plant-
ers Association, says in a commodity
business like coffee, trading margins
are low, 1-1.5 per cent for exporters
and curers. The bulk of the profit goes
to roasters and retailers. “If a grower
sells to a curer or roaster, the price
realisation is much better.” There are
a number of middlemen clogging the
coffee value chain in India. The num-
ber of middlemen could be three-six
people depending on whether the cof-August 11I 2019 I BUSINESS TODAYI 73