The coffee country that buys its coffee
The harvest fell to a tenth while imports multiplied by 34
The two lines crossed a long time ago and kept moving apart.
In 1990 Puerto Rico harvested 280,000 quintals of coffee and imported 9,378. In 2020 it harvested 28,943 and imported 324,944. The two figures swapped places almost exactly, and the estimate for 2024 drops to around 20,000 quintals.
The island consumes roughly 300,000 quintals a year. What is picked in the mountains covers a little over a tenth of it.
That shift turned expensive at exactly the wrong moment. Coffee on the world market touched 4.41 dollars a pound in February 2025, which is 441 dollars a quintal, and the programme that buys imported coffee at a fixed price closed with 8.3 million in losses in fiscal year 2024-25 and 8.8 in 2025-26. They are the first two deficits after five straight years of profit.
It is a clean example of an uncomfortable rule: replacing local production with imports costs nothing while the outside price is low, and presents the whole bill the year it stops being low.