WE are grateful to Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Dr Christopher Tufton for his detailed and seemingly candid commentary on the coffee industry in yesterday’s Sunday Observer.

For decades, Jamaicans — buoyed by the grand international reputation of Jamaican coffee, particularly the Blue Mountain brand — have largely taken the industry for granted.

But without many of us paying attention, the industry has been changing with growing rapidity over recent years and, for the most part, not for the better.

Coffee, or ‘cawfi’ as it is labelled in the traditional folk language, has an embedded role in Jamaican culture. Those close to middle age or older will recall when the ‘cawfi piece’, involving a patch of well groomed coffee trees, was a must at every home in deep rural upland Jamaica.

Such informal plantations — no matter how small — ensured that many rural Jamaicans were self-sufficient in home-grown coffee grains. And there was plenty left over for community markets and for annual sales to the ‘Cawfi Board’.

That informal sub-sector ran parallel to that of larger, more formal, coffee enterprises that mostly targeted the lucrative export trade.

Today, all over Jamaica, the ‘cawfi piece’ is rapidly disappearing — victim of the falling farm-gate price for coffee and the resulting negligence of young farmers with far greater interest in “cash crops” of one form or another. The situation is very similar to that being manifested in other traditional farming sectors such as cocoa, ginger, pimento and even sugar.

We are now being told by Dr Tufton that at the level of the export industry, coffee is at a “crossroad”. The worldwide recession has hit Jamaican coffee exports hard, just as it has hit other commodities. Japan, we are told, takes 90 per cent of Jamaica’s Blue Mountain brand, but demand is falling for the product as competition from “premium coffees that are less expensive” heightens.

The long and short of it as outlined by Dr Tufton is that supply is far exceeding demand to the extent that the current Blue Mountain crop is “projected to produce at least 1,100 tonnes” but there is only “confirmed demand for 600 tonnes”.

The minister points to a real risk of “collapse of the industry, damage to the brand, loss of international markets, and a loss of foreign exchange earnings for the country”. It should be noted that the value of coffee exports in 2009 was a-not-to-be-scorned US$35.7 million, according to the Economic and Social Survey.

We note the Government’s initiatives to try and save the industry in the short term. But it seems to us that the longer term solution — as it should be for all our primary commodities that are now increasingly uncompetitive on the world market — must be the exploitation in Jamaica, by Jamaicans, of our own production for its ‘value added’.

The onus is on bright, young entrepreneurial minds in the private, productive sector with the assistance of the scientific community to help Jamaica break out of the centuries-old tradition which dictates that the real value and profits of our primary products are exploited and earned by others. To change that situation, the private sector will need “innovative, proactive, and cutting-edge solutions”, to quote Dr Tufton.

If that ever happens, Jamaica’s coffee industry will not only be saved, but we may well see a revival of the ‘cawfi piece’, suitably upgraded and modernised.