The Moral Cost of Dubai’s Coffee Boom

The coffee industry in the Arabian Peninsula has seen unprecedented growth over the past two decades. In turn, cities such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh have been covered extensively by the coffee media in recent years.

According to recent articles, Saudi Arabia’s coffee scene is “booming”; the U.A.E. “aims to be a global leader” in both coffee and tea; Dubai is a coffee “gateway” or “hub” for the wider region, whose coffee market is “flourishing” and experiencing an “unrelenting rise”.

Dubai’s particular status as a luxury coffee hub was cemented in August, when the just-opened Julith Coffee & Roastery paid a world-record $604,080 for 20 kilos of washed gesha coffee at the 2025 Best of Panama auction. That eye-watering price was more than triple the previous record, set just a year earlier.

These countries are hugely wealthy, and the wider coffee industry is rushing to take advantage of their burgeoning interest. Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Tim Hortons and other big chains have increased their presence in the region, while Chinese startup Cotti Coffee recently launched in Dubai. The Specialty Coffee Association has followed suit, hosting the annual World of Coffee Dubai trade show since 2022. The event is billed as “where the global specialty coffee community connects”.

But there’s a dark side to the coffee industry’s embrace of the U.A.E. All seven emirates are absolute monarchies; all have massive levels of inequality, and all severely repress the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals and imprison activists. They control huge oil reserves that, as of late 2025, they are looking to “rapidly expand”. Dubai, a gleaming city of high-rises and general opulence, has also been called a “gangster’s paradise” because of its popularity with money launderers and other criminals.

More recently, the U.A.E. has been accused of supplying weapons and other support to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary organisation, which has itself been accused of committing genocide in the ongoing Sudanese civil war. Since 2023, the war has killed as many as 400,000 and displaced more than 11 million people, many of whom have fled into neighbouring Ethiopia, Uganda, and South Sudan. 

Coffee is complicated, and there is nuance involved in this story. But as Dubai prepares to host another edition of the SCA’s World of Coffee in January—produced in partnership with a government-owned events company—it’s worth thinking about the ramifications. Specialty coffee is an ostensibly progressive industry that prides itself on inclusion, so what does it mean for its trade association to be working so closely with what Amnesty International has described as “a deeply repressive state”?

A Symbol of Generosity

Coffee trade began in the Islamic world in the 15th century—the word coffee itself is derived from the Arabic word qahwa—and the drink has played an enormously important role in the region’s traditional approach to hospitality. Arabic coffee is enshrined on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, where it is described as “a symbol of generosity”.

While coffee has been consumed in the region for centuries, globalisation and the specialty coffee movement have boosted interest in a more Westernised coffee culture in recent years. The big chains were early to the party. Costa Coffee opened its first store in Dubai in 1999. Starbucks launched the next year, and Tim Hortons followed in 2011. Caribou Coffee opened in Dubai in 2006, and three years later one of its store managers, Vikram Kashyap, won the inaugural U.A.E. Barista Championship.

A 2022 piece by Mazhar Farooqui in the Khaleej Times dates specialty coffee’s beginnings in Dubai to 2007, when two New Zealanders, Kim Thomson and Matt Toogood, founded Raw Coffee Company. “The concept was an instant hit”, Farooqui writes. According to data from the International Coffee Organization, the U.A.E.’s coffee imports jumped 249% between 2008 and 2019. Today, its coffee market is predicted to keep growing, between 8.5% and 10.6% by 2030, depending on who you ask.

In that Khaleej Times piece, Farooqui interviewed Ahmed Bin Sulayem, executive chairman and CEO of the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre. The DMCC is a commodities exchange and free-trade zone that, in 2019, opened the DMCC Coffee Centre, a gigantic, temperature-controlled facility that offers warehousing, logistics, roasting services, and an SCA-certified training space.

The coffee centre “support[s] the entire coffee industry from crop to cup”, Bin Sulayem said. “By using our facilities and expertise, over 20 speciality coffee concepts across the country are able to offer a unique product to their customers”.

Free Trade and Business Opportunities

The coffee centre is the driving force behind the U.A.E.’s push to become a major coffee hub, putting Dubai “firmly at the heart of the global coffee trade”, as Bin Sulayem said in a press release at the time. Its position within the DMCC free trade zone gives it a significant advantage in attracting business, given that such zones offer foreign companies full ownership, generous tax incentives, and no import or export duties.

The DMCC actively encourages foreign companies to take advantage of these perks. “If South Africa, Angola, and other African countries send us their green beans to have them processed, roasted, blended, packaged, and redistributed from Dubai, for example, it will cost a whole lot less compared to doing it inland”, Bin Sulayem told Global Coffee Report in 2021.

Free trade zones more generally are controversial, and have been criticised by NGOs and other international watchdog organisations. Countries can lose out on tax revenue as companies migrate to the zones, while their claimed employment boost is marginal. According to a 2010 report from the Financial Action Task Force, free-trade zones are “highly attractive for illicit actors who take advantage of this relaxed oversight to launder the proceeds of crime and finance terrorism”. The right-wing U.S. thinktank the American Enterprise Institute has even questioned whether they “undermine capitalism”.

The DMCC and many of Dubai’s 25 other free-trade zones—and, by extension, its coffee industry—are closely linked to the emirate’s government and ruling family. The DMCC was established in 2002 by royal decree from then-Crown Prince (now Sheikh) Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and the centre’s parent company, as of 2020, is the Investment Corporation of Dubai, the government-owned sovereign wealth fund.

“Although the proliferation of [free-trade zones] in Dubai suggests a diversified private sector, most [free-trade zones] are entirely or partially-owned by state-run investment vehicles and government conglomerates”, the economist Robert Mogielnicki wrote in a 2019 paper.

Another free-trade zone, the Dubai World Trade Centre, has hosted World of Coffee Dubai since 2022 through a partnership between the SCA and its subsidiary, the event management company DXB Live. DWTC—and, by extension, DXB Live—is also owned by the emirate’s sovereign wealth fund. The SCA had previously put on several coffee competitions in association with GulfHost, another DWTC trade show.

In 2022, for reasons that we will come to, the SCA made it clear that DXB Live was running the event, not the association itself. However, for subsequent shows, the partnership was made more explicit: The two organisations signed an agreement for five further years after 2022. “It is our pleasure to partner with DXB LIVE, to set up this international exhibition, specialized in the coffee industry worldwide”, SCA CEO Yannis Apostolopoulos said in a press release before the 2023 edition. “The exhibition will create tremendous business opportunities and support the coffee trade in all countries of the region, which enjoy safety and economic stability”.

Glamour, Control, and Neocolonialism

On social media and in advertisements, the U.A.E., and Dubai in particular, is portrayed as a fun place for a luxury holiday, or even as a potential relocation destination. Dubai was the world’s third-most-popular city for tourists in 2023, according to Euromonitor International, with nearly 17 million visitors. This year, according to a report by Savills, it was the number one relocation destination for high net worth individuals “due to favourable tax regimes, complemented by the lifestyle on offer”.

The glamorous image of happy holidaymakers and wealthy expats, of high-rises and sandy beaches, hides a much less savoury reality. An estimated 88% of the U.A.E.’s population is foreign-born, and while some are wealthy sun-seekers, the majority are low-wage workers from South Asian countries like India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Like other countries in the region, the U.A.E. operates a Kafala system, in which migrant workers are “sponsored” by their employers. Oftentimes, as groups like Human Rights Watch have documented, this arrangement is characterised by “wage exploitation, indebtedness to unscrupulous recruiters, and working conditions that are hazardous to the point of being deadly”. While the emirate’s government has implemented reforms to address some of the worst aspects of the system, HRW noted “severe enforcement gaps” as of 2023.

Dissent in the Emirates is not tolerated. Hundreds of activists, protestors, and other dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured, many within the last few years. Just last month, a political prisoner named Ali Abdullah Fath Ali al-Khaja died after more than a decade of internment “marked by enforced disappearance, torture, denial of medical care, [and] prolonged solitary confinement”, according to HRW.

As one political opponent, Dr Mohammed al-Mansoori, explained in 2009, all of this is hidden from visitors. “Westerners come here and see the malls and the tall buildings and they think that means we are free”, he told Johann Hari of The Independent. “But these businesses, these buildings – who are they for? This is a dictatorship. The royal family think they own the country, and the people are their servants. There is no freedom here”. In 2012, al-Mansoori was arrested and eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison as part of the “UAE 94” mass trial.

Then there is the issue of the U.A.E.’s foreign policy. According to an Associated Press article by Lee Keath and Michelle Price, since 2011 the U.A.E. “has used hard and soft power to counter Islamist groups across the region, which it views as a threat”. Although it denies backing the RSF paramilitary in Sudan, and has called for a ceasefire, U.S. intelligence reports have linked the U.A.E. to arms sales, which a panel of U.N. experts found “credible”.

Sudan isn’t the only regional conflict in which the U.A.E. stands accused of meddling. According to the writer Husam Mahjoub, it is just one part of a wider, neocolonialist endeavour. “The UAE’s role in Sudan is not an anomaly”, Mahjoub wrote in an August piece for Spectre Journal. “It is part of a coherent, well-financed, and regionally expansive project: a subimperialist agenda that combines economic extraction, authoritarian alliance-building, and counterrevolutionary politics under the cover of diplomatic sophistication and global partnerships”.

Just to take one example: From 2020 to 2022, Ethiopian and Eritrean troops fought a brutal war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. All sides committed war crimes, and the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces were accused of crimes against humanity and genocide in a conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions more displaced. According to The New York Times, the U.A.E. “quietly” supplied armed drones to the Ethiopian government, trained soldiers, and “provided crucial military support” during the war.

There is a link to coffee here as well. Although Sudan no longer produces much coffee itself, in 2022 it was the biggest buyer of Ugandan coffee in Africa. And while Tigray is not as significant to Ethiopia’s overall coffee production as regions like Sidama and Oromia, coffee remains an important source of income for its farmers. 

A (Short-Lived) Backlash

In 2017, the SCA received extensive criticism from across the coffee industry for its decision to host several World Coffee Championship events in Dubai. 

Sprudge published a long article detailing the U.A.E.’s dire human rights record and anti-homosexuality laws, pointing out that the SCA’s code of conduct for events explicitly states that it has a zero-tolerance policy regarding harassment on the basis of, among other things, gender, creed, race, or sexual orientation. Therefore, Sprudge wrote, “the SCA’s decision to award these events to Dubai violates its own code of conduct … As a gay-owned publication and long-serving media partner of World Coffee Events and the Specialty Coffee Association, we are very fucking concerned”.

The fallout was swift, although ultimately short-lived. Sprudge resigned as an SCA media partner. The Canadian chapter of the SCA as well as the Barista Guild of America said they would withdraw from the competitions being hosted in Dubai. Blue Bottle Coffee withdrew from the association. The SCA responded by creating a “review panel” to consider its options, and a month later announced a “deferred candidacy” policy, which would allow competitors to postpone their involvement if they didn’t feel comfortable travelling to Dubai.

Six months later, in May 2018, the SCA announced that it had decided to move the competitions in question due to the backlash. At the same time, it announced the launch of World of Coffee Dubai. 

In the end, business continued as usual. Sprudge returned as an SCA media partner. The first few World of Coffee Dubai events took place without competitions, and didn’t receive any protests that I could find. And now, the upcoming show in January will host the 2026 Cezve/Ibrik Championship, one of the seven core competitions of the World Coffee Championship.

Coffee Is Political

Of course, the people of a country are not their governments—just look at the current administrations in both the U.S. and U.K., which have amassed their own civil rights violations while continuing to support genocidal conflicts in Gaza and elsewhere. As the SCA has pointed out in its many press releases, there are lots of passionate coffee professionals living and working in the Emirates. However, the Dubai government and ruling family are connected to the organisations helping to put on the World of Coffee Dubai events—something that isn’t true of, for example, the SCA’s Expo in the U.S.

What’s more, the Dubai government financially and reputationally benefits from hosting the World of Coffee trade shows. The 2025 event saw more than 17,000 attendees and hundreds of exhibitors; the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, visited the 2024 event; and the show’s Instagram account recently posted to celebrate the anniversary of the unification of the U.A.E.

From what I can gather, the 2017 controversy focused on the decision to hold coffee competitions in Dubai, and the impact that the location could have on LGBTQ+ competitors. (The SCA faced similar backlash for its decision to host its Expo event in Houston earlier this year, due to Texas’ regressive policies towards trans people.)

In 2018, once the SCA moved the competitions, the industry seemed to move on. Until now, World Coffee Championship competitions have not been held at any of the events in Dubai. However, the SCA has continued to partner with organisations—including the DWTC and DXB Live—which are connected to a regime that disappears dissidents and has allegedly been complicit in funding genocidal wars.

If you want to visit Dubai, or attend World of Coffee there next month, go right ahead. Its coffee scene is booming, and there are plenty of people living in Dubai for whom the event will be hugely beneficial, personally and professionally. Coffee is global, and on some level it’s good that the SCA is branching out with its choices of event locations. Hosting trade shows in Panama, or Indonesia, or Thailand, is a positive step for an organisation that has often come across as too focused on the Global North. 

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that Dubai is more than just a tourist magnet with a booming coffee scene. The reality is that—brace for this newsletter’s unofficial tagline—coffee is political.

At best, choosing to hold major coffee events in the emirate, and to partner with quasi-governmental organisations, is a dismissive signal to industry members who risk being impacted by its repressive policies. And at worst, the SCA risks helping the authoritarian U.A.E. government further launder its reputation.

Header image by Aleksandar Pasaric via Pexels