Record coffee harvests defy climate alarm, prices still surge

Brazil’s 2025/26 coffee harvest was expected to fall, with arabica output down 13% from 2024/25, even as Colombia posted its best coffee harvest in decades. Indonesia and Vietnam were also heading higher, a split screen that shows climate stress in coffee without pointing to collapse.

The broader numbers back that up. The International Coffee Organization said world coffee production rose 0.1% to 168.2 million bags in coffee year 2022/23, even after Asia & Oceania production fell 4.7% and Africa production fell 7.2% because adverse weather hit key growers. Its World Coffee Statistics Database stretches back to October 1963, and the long view shows an industry that has always moved in cycles of weather, yield and recovery.

Prices, though, have not been kind to buyers. The Food and Agriculture Organization said adverse climatic conditions drove coffee prices to the highest level in years, and world coffee prices rose 38.8% in 2024 versus the previous year’s average. Reuters reported coffee futures above $3.60 per pound on Jan. 29, 2025, after a 47-year high tied to Brazil crop concerns in late November 2024. Reuters also said on March 14, 2025 that price shocks take about a year to reach consumers, which helps explain why the sting at the retail shelf lingers after the futures market moves.

What has changed on the ground is less apocalyptic than the headlines suggest and more practical than the rhetoric around “coffee under threat.” Reuters reported in May that Brazil’s 2025 arabica crop was smaller but produced better beans, while Vietnam’s 2025/26 output was forecast at 31 million bags of green bean equivalent after high prices pushed farmers to spend more on crop management and inputs. Indonesia’s robusta crop was forecast to rise to 11.0 million bags, up 1.7 million, helped by favorable weather and higher labor utilization. Colombia’s strong harvest, paired with a warning of a lower 2025/26 crop, shows how quickly a region can swing from a high to a pullback.

That is the real shape of the market readers are buying into now. The average U.S. price for a pound of coffee reached $9.457 in June 2026, but the beans behind that number are coming from a supply chain that is adapting, unevenly and origin by origin, rather than vanishing.