October is National Coffee Month. What is our national coffee anyway?

Is it the famous Barako or Liberica which people think is all coffee from Batangas? It is not from Batangas alone but is now grown in Cavite, Bataan, even in Sultan Kudarat, I am sure.

Is our national coffee anything brewed and not instant? Do we even grow enough coffee for instant coffee manufacturers, when we import a lot of coffee from Vietnam and Indonesia?

Is our national coffee the best coffee you have taken? Where was your last cup from? Was it grown locally or did it come from Brazil, which is so faraway but still produces the biggest volume of coffee globally?

Maybe our national coffee is your favorite cup sourced from the Cordillera or Mount Apo. Whatever and wherever is the source or provenance, we are just so glad Philippine coffee now has legions of fans and patrons, unlike 20 years ago when what we had to do was to first make people aware that we grow coffee in the Philippines. We have come a long way! Today, we even pay higher prices for local coffee than imported ones. For added information, if coffee paid the right duties, Ethiopia and Brazil should be paying 40 percent import duties. But alas, even coffee is smuggled, to the detriment of the Filipino coffee farmers. Know where your coffee comes from, please!

In 2002 when we set up the National Coffee Development Board (NCDB) which became Philippine Coffee Board Inc. (www.philcoffeeboard.com), all we wanted was to make people aware we can grow more coffee as we were producing a dismal 25,000 metric tons to our growing consumption of 100,000 MT back then. Today, production has risen a bit as we battle conversion of coffee lands into industrial zones (e.g., Cavite and Batangas), and we have kept it at an even keel of 30,000-35,000 MT for the last 10 years. But work is needed to plant more trees. As we consume more coffee, many are also cut down for development and not replaced fast enough to even the demand and supply.

Our soft target is to plant a million trees in the next three years and a million trees every year thereafter. It takes nine months for sown seeds to sprout and another nine to see it growing.

This is why in October it will be a good showcase at the Asia Pacific Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction to serve our coffee, if only to remind our ministers that we need to plant more coffee to avert disasters from floods caused by deforestation. It is truly related to Disaster Risk Reduction when we talk about planting trees, specifically coffee. How apropos that we are asked to serve Philippine coffee to all 4,000 delegates to the conference.

We thank the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for thinking of allocating some public lands for coffee planting. DENR Secretary Ma. Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga has announced 1.2 million hectares being mapped for coffee planting and we hope this happens soon before more disasters strike, eroding our mountains and causing the deluge or floods in the lower areas.

Another milestone for coffee month is our project with GCash/GForest where more than 200,000 trees have already been committed to be planted by the Philippine Coffee Board for ordinary app users like yourselves. Already we have planted many of these coffee and shade trees which we can locate by GPS, as farmers get subsidies to plant more in areas from Benguet to Sulu.

Basilan’s Isabela City has committed to plant over 50,000 trees and may increase this as they convert rubber farms to coffee plantations among shade trees. KAPESABELA is a project we started with Mayor Djalia “Dadah” Turabin Hataman last 2022 and we will see more coffee coming from Basilan soon.

Sulu’s People’s Alliance for Progress cooperative headed by Princess Kumala Sug-Elardo will also be planting 50,000 trees as Sulu’s Robusta has been rated as “fine robusta” by coffee experts from around the world.

In Iloilo, many towns are now waking up to coffee and planting more of the crop as farmgate prices have risen, commensurate to farmers’ efforts. This has made Iloilo one of the more progressive areas in coffee production. Through initiatives like Kape Iloilo, farmers now take pride in labelling the provenance of their coffees like Leon, Igbaras and Janiuay –places we never used to hear about.

The Philippine Coconut Authority in Region IV-A (Calabarzon) has ordered the planting of coffee as intercrop with coconut in all coconut areas totaling about a million hectares. That is surely a big addition to our target to plant two million trees.

So today, as we start to celebrate Coffee Month, we have to celebrate the great strides we have made in increasing awareness about Philippine coffee. And increasing interest in planting more trees to satisfy our increasing demand for the brew. Despite challenges like climate change, rising land prices and lack of agricultural workers, we will carry on with innovative ideas like intercropping with coconut, using coffee to reforest our denuded forests and overall make a move to choose coffee instead of the usual species like mahogany or gmelina. Coffee trees encourage biodiversity as well as provide fruits that will then become our coffee brew. Won’t you agree to plant more of it?

Just as we have our national flower, animal, and tree, we should have a national coffee. And that is all good coffee – Robusta, Excelsa, Arabica and Liberica – that comes from all over the country. Even if there are detractors who have a thousand reasons to say Philippine coffee is inconsistent, dirty, not uniform, we carry on with teaching and training producers to produce better coffee. While others snootily drink their cup from Brazil or Ethiopia, we do our best to address the challenges of Philippine coffee production.

Next time you order coffee at a café, ask them where it came from. Hopefully, they will proudly say it comes from the Philippines.