How To Save Coffee: Lessons From the Degrowth Movement

It has become crystal clear over the past several years that coffee is approaching an inflection point. Business as usual is clearly not working, and the warning signs, blinking for decades, are beginning to strobe.

The issues are both numerous and vast. To begin, coffee is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is based on neocolonial principles of extraction and exploitation, and built on the backs of the working poor. Workers at both ends of the supply chain, but especially on the production side, are routinely underpaid and exploited. Meanwhile, the largest corporations accumulate profit while handwringing over the difficulties of structural change.

Coffee is also exceptionally vulnerable to climate change. Coffee trees need a very specific set of climatic circumstances to thrive, and are difficult to cultivate at the best of times. But now, rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall, in addition to the increase in pests and diseases that follow, all make growing coffee an increasingly risky profession.

The past few years have shown exactly how susceptible coffee is to climate shocks, with droughts and floods hitting many major producing countries. Rural coffee communities, often lacking effective infrastructure, are most at risk. Just in the last month, flooding in Southeast Asia killed hundreds and left coffee communities stranded or underwater. Vietnam alone—the world’s second-largest coffee producer—was hit by 14 major storms in 2025.

Still, the coffee industry remains obsessed with growth. Sales must rise year-on-year or the CEO goes. Production must increase, even if it means cutting down forests to do so. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides force ever-larger harvests out of exhausted land, while corporations do little more than fund token, piecemeal sustainability projects. At the same time, coffee consumption is at an all-time high, and demand is forecast to continue growing.

Something has to give, and right now it is unclear what that will be. So what do we do? In this newsletter, I often focus on what’s wrong with the coffee industry. But I also want to explore possibilities and offer alternatives. Believe it or not, there are different ways to organise both the global economy and the coffee sector within it. Let’s talk about degrowth.

‘The Prime Directive of Capital’

For almost a century, capitalist world economies have focused on growth in general, and on increasing gross domestic product specifically. GDP is the monetary value of all the goods and services produced by a country in a given time period, and is often used to measure economic output. “It has become widely used as a reference point for the health of national and global economies”, as the International Monetary Fund puts it in an explainer. An article in Vox is even more explicit, calling GDP “the only number that really matters”.

But GDP also has its critics—the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz among them—because it only takes into account economic success. GDP doesn’t include important elements of a functioning economy, such as the health and welfare of its citizens or impact on the environment.

“Growth is the prime directive of capital”, writes anthropologist and professor Jason Hickel in his book “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World”. “Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point”.

In coffee, too, growth is a major focus and barometer of success. Did consumption grow last year? Did sales and stock prices rise? If so, then companies and the wider industry are considered in good health. Any of these variables declining is often seen as a failure, or at the very least a worrisome indicator. In response, companies often tighten their purse strings by laying off workers.

Proponents of degrowth argue that there’s another way. The radical economic philosophy has increased in popularity since it was first introduced in Europe in the early 2000s, motivated by the unignorable damage that a growth-at-all-costs approach has on the environment and society.

The overarching goal of degrowth is to rebalance the world economy through a decolonial lens, emphasising social justice and sustainability for all. “[Degrowth] is the managed, democratic reduction of production and consumption in the Global North, specifically to redistribute wealth and allow the Global South space to chart its own development trajectory,” says Coileán, who asked to be referred to by his first name, the former chair and co-founder of Caracol DSA (the Degrowth Ecosocialist Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America).

Coffee is an industry that has long been predicated on extracting value from producing countries in the Global South to benefit corporations in the Global North—all while leaving those countries to shoulder the bulk of the social and environmental costs. Therefore, the industry seems a particularly apt candidate for a degrowth intervention. But what does that mean in practice?

Setting Limits, Shifting Power

“Degrowth is about recognising that we live on a finite planet, and that we can thrive within the boundaries of that finite planet”, says Coileán. “But in order to thrive, it makes sense for us to set limits for our own production and consumption that enshrine sufficiency and not extraction and exploitation”.

When it comes to agri-food systems, degrowth scholars focus on a holistic, sustainable approach to farming. A 2022 paper in the journal “Nature Sustainability” categorised several principles of a growth-focused agri-food system, and laid out post-growth alternatives. Transforming the global agri-food system, the authors wrote, requires centring “food practices and lifestyles that strive for sufficiency over efficiency, regeneration over extraction, distribution over accumulation, commons over private ownership and care over control”.

In coffee, Coileán says, this means that power within the industry needs to shift from consuming to producing countries. Democratically controlled and organised producer groups should be the ones deciding how much coffee to grow and sell, he says. 

“In my view, a truly degrown coffee industry would mean that 90 or more percent of coffee enterprises are worker-owned and-managed for worker benefit”, he says. “And those enterprises in their respective regions could democratically decide, ‘Okay, this is how much we’re going to produce’. The producers themselves should be able to control the amount of production based on the ecological status of their own agroecosystems”.

This would mean restructuring trade laws and changing intergovernmental policies—in truth, a daunting task. But degrowth is nothing if not ambitious. 

“In this socialist movement, we say there are no shortcuts”, Coileán says. “What we mean by that is there are no shortcuts to organising political power. So in my view, if currently political power is captured by the few in the form of corporations, capitalists, and so forth, the antidote to that is to organise labour, to organise social movements, to make us strong enough to build class consciousness—to build working-class power such that we can actually wage political class war and defeat our opponents”.

I Demand Another Coffee

Degrowth has received its fair share of criticism from those who find its ideas confusing or challenging to execute. Critics point to the fact that economic slowdowns or recessions lead to austerity, and that purposefully contracting the economy would result in widespread job losses as businesses close and production decreases.

But there are other ways to approach any potential contractions, Coileán suggests. “Even if you lose your job, there’s a just transition programme so that you can get work in another area”, he says. And of course, job cuts happen all the time under a capitalist system, and are often seen as a positive. Nestlé, for example, recently announced plans to lay off 16,000 workers over the next two years to cut costs, despite better-than-expected quarterly sales. Its stock price jumped at the news.

The fear that degrowth will inherently immiserate those in the Global North comes into focus when discussing demand. If the goal is to reduce consumption across wealthy economies, companies will have to close and workers will lose their jobs. But more importantly, will this mean we have to drink less coffee? How is that fair?

Coileán explains that degrowth doesn’t call for all coffee consumption to be abolished—just better managed. Currently, demand controls most aspects of the coffee industry. Growing demand means companies expand. Farmers, meanwhile, must produce more; if they can’t and there’s a supply deficit, prices go up. High prices anger consumers and reduce demand, which then leads to the price falling and hurting producers. This cycle also doesn’t take into account environmental destruction, and the chemical inputs needed to meet ever-growing demand. 

“I don’t think we should eliminate coffee consumption, but it needs to be calibrated in such a way that it balances the urgent need of climate mitigation with social justice and economic justice for the producers themselves, as well as demand in the North”, Coileán says.

Other tenets of the degrowth movement could also impact demand. Workers in the Global North, especially in the United States, are incredibly stressed and work long hours to make ends meet—caffeine consumption helps them get through the day. Degrowth advocates for a four-day workweek as standard, which would reduce stress and, in theory, reduce demand for caffeine. Instead of needing three cheap coffees to make it through the day, for example, you could take the time to enjoy one high-quality cup instead. 

This represents a new way of thinking about coffee’s role in our lives, and it will take a lot of effort to educate and convince those for whom coffee is essential. Some in the industry are already trying. Earlier this year, I interviewed Catherine Franks of Steampunk Coffee Roasters; she says she wants her customers to consume “carefully and intentionally”, even if that means her company loses sales.

As I wrote in that piece, even if we feel hesitant about these ideas now, eventually we will have to confront limitations in coffee’s supply. It remains to be seen whether we as a society actively embrace degrowth or not; with the current political climate, my guess is not for the foreseeable future.

And yet, the existential truth remains: If we do not make major structural changes to the coffee industry, we risk losing it forever.

‘Okay, But What Can We Do About It?’

Efforts towards degrowth in coffee are already happening, albeit on a small scale. Labour organising in the industry has grown steadily over the past decade, and those unions are working to build solidarity across borders. There has also been a rise in worker-owned cooperatives, and new focuses on alternative methods of business funding to move away from the avarices of private equity.

There are initiatives to help diversify farmer income so that they aren’t solely reliant on coffee production. Others address food insecurity and promote localised food systems. More radically, solidarity movements between Zapatista cooperatives in Mexico and coffee roasters in the U.S. showcase an approach to trade that exists outside traditional capitalist models.

Degrowth is an inspiring concept, and it is also exceedingly ambitious. But even if it doesn’t come to fruition on a global scale, there remains the possibility of implementing some aspects within coffee. We could: push to rewrite unfair trade policies and ensure that they centre the voices and needs of producers; ramp up agroecological farming practices, while being aware that regenerative agriculture itself risks becoming yet another corporate coffee buzzword; further build worker power along the supply chain; and fix the way that profit flows—or doesn’t flow—from consuming to producing countries.

Although they aren’t easy, all these things are possible. If we are truly serious about tackling the issue of climate change and the inequalities of the coffee industry, we will need to escalate our efforts, and soon. The concepts within and around the degrowth movement offer a pathway to do just that.

Header image by World Resources Institute, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0