Coffee’s Soft Power Shift

Coffee has always been political. As one of the world’s most traded and consumed commodities, it has long been a barometer for shifting economic and sociopolitical conditions—and has been wielded by empires as a tool of domination for centuries.

From the very beginning, those who controlled the coffee trade knew its power. The Ottoman Turks, who oversaw the nascent Yemeni industry in the 16th century, allowed coffee’s export only in roasted form, lest an escaped seed ruin their monopoly. Over the centuries, armies have marched on coffee, state-backed colonisers have enslaved millions to work their plantations, and dictators have risen to power on the back of their vast coffee holdings.

In more modern times, political powers have harnessed coffee’s influence more subtly to help sway world events. The United States is a prime example: The superpower has invested heavily in coffee-producing countries—mostly through foreign aid and development agencies—as a way to encourage its preferred economic and political policies.

This soft power—what the Harvard political science professor Joseph Nye defined as “the ability to obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than coercion or payment”—helped make the United States the dominant global influence in the 20th century.

Now, however, that may be changing. Rapidly shifting U.S. policy and funding priorities, spearheaded by a gleefully sadistic executive branch, have left foreign aid effectively dissolved, and the door open for other nations to step in.

For decades, China has been building its own soft power base in the Global South through political, economic, and social means. Global infrastructure projects, education exchange programs, and investments have given it expanding influence in key coffee-producing countries, at the same time that China’s growing domestic coffee demand has spawned the need for more imports.

As the U.S. withdraws from the global stage, can China fill the gap? And what do these shifting geopolitical tides mean for the coffee industry’s future?

Fighting Communism, Saving Lives

Nye is credited with popularising the phrase “soft power” in the late 1980s as a way to contrast cultural and economic influence with “harder” power like military strength. As Nye wrote in his 2004 book, “Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics”, “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries—admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness—want to follow it … This soft power—getting others to want the outcomes that you want—coopts people rather than coerces them”.

Many countries use soft power to varying extents, but the United States remains the most visible proponent. Classic examples of U.S. soft power include popular media, like pop music and Hollywood movies. Even the modern-day specialty coffee shop—that homogenous, minimalist, vaguely-hipster-coded space full of clean lines and industrial lighting fixtures—has served as a soft power export, spreading from the U.S. to cities around the world.

Soft power can also take the form of foreign aid and investment initiatives. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a good example. Founded in 1961 as an explicit counterbalance to Soviet influence in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, USAID provided drinking water, disaster assistance, and medical care to tens of millions of people over the next 60 years.

While the agency has always served as an arm of U.S. imperialism, its impact on the ground is undeniable: The Center for Global Development think tank estimates that USAID programs prevented more than three million deaths per year across the globe, while a recent study published in The Lancet calculated that the agency’s work saved 91 million lives between 2001 and 2021 alone. 

The agency was also active in coffee. For decades, USAID funded coffee development projects around the world, from investing in Rwanda’s coffee infrastructure in the early 2000s to helping combat the scourge of coffee leaf rust in dozens of countries. Michael Sheridan, CEO of the Coffee Quality Institute, wrote in a blog post that the agency had helped build “a coffee sector that creates opportunities for the most vulnerable people in the supply stream”.

Now, USAID is essentially gone, gutted by Elon Musk and his malign, nihilistic—and likely unconstitutional—“Department of Government Efficiency”. The rationale for wrecking this small agency was vague and unconvincing: Musk called USAID “a criminal organization” while Trump criticised its “appalling waste”, despite its relatively tiny budget and strict oversight.

(Their actual motivations may be more self-serving. An investigation by The Lever showed that, around the time of the agency’s dismantling, USAID was investigating Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink’s foreign partnerships.)

Sheridan called the destruction of USAID “an immeasurable loss for coffee”, while Nick Brown in Daily Coffee News described it as “an abject disaster” for the industry. Who will now fund the fight against coffee leaf rust? Who will underwrite the next Cup of Excellence competition? 

Perhaps most importantly, USAID provided funding for or spearheaded countless sustainability-related coffee projects around the world, at a time when the industry faces the existential threat of climate breakdown and a multi-million-dollar funding gap for the research needed to help coffee survive. 

Mountain Harvest, a social enterprise coffee exporter in Uganda, had partnered with USAID on a number of initiatives in its community. It had recently received funding for a new infrastructure project, but that funding disappeared when the cuts began. “As a company who was working with USAID, we were heartbroken to see a project go unfunded very abruptly”, Nico Herr, Mountain Harvest’s COO, tells me. “However, I cannot imagine the implications for those [that were] part of healthcare projects”.  

The human toll could be astronomical, with projections estimating 14 million deaths by the end of the decade as a result of the cuts. USAID’s demise has already resulted in more than 300,000 preventable deaths, according to Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, the majority of them children. “These are 100 per cent preventable deaths”, Nichols told The Times. “They all happened because of the abrupt halt in funding”.

No Strings Attached

Alongside USAID, Trump has moved to defund various other international development and outreach agencies, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the U.S. African Development Foundation. With these moves, as Jared O. Bell wrote in International Policy Digest, “The United States is undermining its own capacity to lead through influence, values, and partnership—precisely the attributes that once defined its global role”.

This would seem like an ideal opportunity for one of the U.S.’ rivals to boost its own soft power outreach. Due to its size and history of foreign diplomacy, China seems poised to fill that gap, particularly in Africa. “The changes in U.S. trade policy toward African countries and the loss of USAID to Africa opens an opportunity for Beijing to extend its soft power overtures toward African states”, says Richard Aidoo, professor of political science at Coastal Carolina University.

For the past two decades, China has established Confucius Institutes—government-funded educational and cultural centres—across Africa, as well as offered scholarships for African students to study in China. This “people-to-people diplomacy”, Aidoo explains, helps China “distinguish itself and [its] policies from that of the West”.

Although on a smaller scale than USAID, China has also invested in foreign aid and development. It spent nearly $8 billion on foreign aid in 2022, in the form of grants and interest-free or subsidised loans. The country funds technical training, disaster relief and prevention, and infrastructure projects.

While Chinese funding of coffee-specific projects may not yet have ramped up, as Herr notes, it may just be a matter of time. When funding from one source disappears, “if there is space for another to get in and show support, receiving countries are typically willing to take it”, she says.

Importantly, China’s aid strategy is very different from the United States’ approach. As Ron Matthews, Xiaojuan Ping, and Li Ling wrote in The Diplomat in 2016, China’s foreign aid comes with “no strings attached”, which “contrasts starkly with the West’s paternalistic embrace of the ‘Washington Consensus,’ whereby aid is contingent on recipient nations agreeing to capitalist free market principles and democratic reforms”.

Meeting Demand With Deals

This expanded approach to foreign aid and development comes at a pertinent time for China’s coffee industry. Domestic coffee consumption has grown almost 150% over the past 10 years, led by a host of buzzy, startup chains like Luckin Coffee and Cotti Coffee. Those businesses, combined with an influx of international brands, have prompted increased competition among coffee companies—China now boasts the largest number of branded coffee shops in the world, and Luckin has more locations in the country than Starbucks.

To meet this demand, in 2024 China imported 5.5 million 60kg bags of green coffee, three times as much as a decade ago, and that number will presumably continue growing alongside demand. Coffee imports from Ethiopia have increased 27% annually over the past three years, while imports from Uganda, Rwanda, and Colombia have also risen. 

To secure the necessary supplies, Chinese brands and government officials have begun making deals directly with coffee-producing countries. In 2024, Luckin committed to buying $2.5 billion worth of coffee from Brazil over four years, and Cotti did a similar deal with Rwanda this month. Last year, the Chinese government signed a memorandum of understanding with Papua New Guinea to provide market access for coffee and cocoa farmers.

Another big change, and one that contrasts sharply with the Trump administration’s tariff roulette, was the recent announcement that China will remove all import tariffs on goods from 53 African nations with which it has diplomatic ties. This move “will surely impact rural coffee and tea farmers across Africa with a potential increase in Chinese demand for their commodities”, Aidoo says.

Herr notes that, in her experience, Chinese coffee buyers have taken a different approach from those in Western countries. U.S. buyers focus mostly on quality, she explains, while those from the E.U. are often looking for coffees with certifications that meet their regulatory needs. Chinese buyers, meanwhile, are generally “still very commodity-focused”, with less priority for specialty or high-quality coffee. These different preferences and requirements can allow producers to target new markets: “No matter who you are, a healthy business is a diversified one”, she says.

Farmers and exporters will also have to navigate new, sometimes challenging sales channels. For Ethiopian exporters, sales to China go through a central bank, explains coffee consultant Christoper Feran, which means payments are often slow, and buyers have very specific paperwork requirements. At least at the moment, he says, “China isn’t a preferred market” for Ethiopian exporters. That could of course change in the future, and in the meantime, “China wants a lot of coffee and buys a lot of coffee. Sheer demand moves volume there”.

Some Ethiopian sellers have seemingly cracked the Chinese market, however. In 2022, the Addis Ababa-based Arada Coffee sold more than 11,000 bags of roasted coffee in five seconds on the Chinese e-commerce platform Tmall Global, in a showcase backed by the Ethiopian government and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

It’s not just Africa that is benefiting from increased ties to China. Colombia recently joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a giant infrastructure development project launched in 2013 that involves building railways, roads, energy pipelines, and ports in countries around the world.

At the same time, coffee exports from Colombia to China increased by 224% between 2022 and 2024, and Colombia is now China’s second-largest coffee supplier. The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia has an office in China, and has been pushing for increased trade by hosting coffee tastings.

Losing Their Edge

Today, the U.S. remains the biggest coffee market in the world, and is still attractive by dint of its sheer buying power. But as the country withdraws from international aid projects and erects barriers to trade, why wouldn’t enterprising coffee farmers or exporters look for alternative markets? Meanwhile, China is ramping up imports to meet demand as it works to build soft power, something the U.S. seems keen to discard.

Only time will tell whether these changes manage to shift the axis of the international coffee industry. For now, the United States and the Global North still dominate, but these power dynamics are just that—dynamic. 

The Trump administration’s border crackdown has already impacted U.S.-based coffee trade shows, for instance, with the U.S. increasingly hostile to foreign visitors. The success of Luckin’s business model, and amidst Starbucks’ struggles, means it’s also not hard to envisage Chinese brands becoming the new lodestar that other chains seek to emulate.

This moment of shifting norms and global realignments could even herald a further explosion in coffee roasted at origin, as Arada’s success with Chinese ecommerce shows. And in the end, China’s attempts to ingratiate itself with coffee-growing countries, while not selfless, should bring more investment to communities that need it.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to predict the longer-term ramifications of the collapse of USAID, the U.S.’ disastrous tariff policies, and its wider soft power withdrawal. But it’s clear that these changes are likely to have a profound impact on the global coffee industry’s future.