An Election Protest is Brewing in India’s Arabica Coffee Capital

Araku Valley, India – Gemmala Sita is proud of the coffee beans she grows on one of the largest organic and fair trade plantations in the world. Their Arabica beans end up as steaming cups of coffee in the chic cafés of Paris and Dubai, Stockholm and Rome.

But the 29-year-old’s life is a fight for what’s important. She has to bathe in a makeshift bamboo washroom covered with used household towels.

Sita and her 45-year-old husband G. Raja Rao are among 450 members of a tribal community living in the village of Gondivalasa in the Araku Valley in India’s eastern highlands overlooking the Bay of Bengal. The region in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is dotted with coffee fields known for its Arabica beans, which are grown as a cover crop along with black pepper. When leaders of the G20 countries visited New Delhi last September for the annual G20 summit, the Indian government gave them this coffee as a gift.

But a protest is brewing in the Araku Valley.

In the 2019 Indian national election, the coffee hub made headlines after more voters chose None of the Above (NOTA) from a long list of candidate options than the country’s two largest parties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party , together (BJP) and the opposition Congress party received in the constituency.

Only one other constituency across India recorded more NOTA votes than Araku with 47,977 votes – a direct message from voters that they have not found a candidate worth supporting. In 2014 too, Araku secured the highest NOTA score of all constituencies in Andhra Pradesh with 16,352 votes.

And since then, disillusionment among voters like Sita has only grown – as India’s ongoing national elections focus on the Araku Valley, where voting is scheduled to take place on May 13. In October 2019, Modi declared that India was open to freedom from defecation. Sita knows that this is not true.

“It would have been better if there had been toilets in the houses, but we have to go outside every morning to relieve ourselves,” she said. “We have no other choice.”

A sip of desperation

A British official, NS Brodie, introduced coffee to Andhra Pradesh in 1898. Two decades later, in 1920, British tax officials, along with Maharaja of Jeypore – a now-abolished kingdom in the present-day state of Odisha – introduced coffee into Araku using seeds brought from the Nilgiris, a mountain range in southern India.

Since then, the region’s coffee has developed into an independent brand. Samala Ramesh, deputy director at the Indian Coffee Association’s local office, says the valley’s elevation – 3,000 feet above sea level – provides a rare combination of hot days and cool nights in a tropical region. This and the medium acidity of the region’s iron-rich soil are ingredients that give Araku coffee a unique taste, he said.

The valley itself has 156 villages with a total population of 56,674 people, of which an estimated 20,000 people work in the coffee industry. The district to which it belongs has a total of 230,000 coffee farmers. Most people who grow coffee come from tribal communities.

The annual production of unroasted coffee beans across the district was around 15,000 tonnes in 2023-24. According to the Trade Promotion Council of India, about 90 percent of Araku’s coffee is exported to Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Switzerland and other countries. In Paris it is sold as gourmet coffee.

The government buys about 10 percent of coffee from Araku farmers, while private companies buy the rest and process it primarily for export. The district’s coffee exports bring in annual revenue of 4 billion rupees ($48 million), Ramesh said. Overall, India is the third largest coffee producer in Asia.

But while audiences around the world sip Araku coffee, 33-year-old coffee farmer Buridi Samba said the region’s villagers don’t even have access to clean drinking water. They rely on natural sources.

The men in Gondivalasa bathe in a manhole they built. There is no drainage system. Although the administration has built some public toilets, it has not provided water connections or septic tanks for human waste. The result: the toilets remain unused.

About 96 villages in the valley rely on a primary health center (PHC) where there is a severe shortage of medical staff. “We only have a general doctor here and no specialist,” said Majji Bhadrayya, who runs the PHC.

While the health center can perform normal deliveries, it does not have the resources to perform cesarean sections. Patients often have to walk up to 10 km (6 miles) to get to the clinic. Villagers carry those who cannot walk on makeshift stretchers made of clothing tied to sticks. The health center refers more serious cases to a larger hospital 7 km away, Bhadrayya said. But this hospital, too, said a doctor there on condition of anonymity, lacks specialists in key areas as well as MRI and CT scanning facilities.

In some villages there are no proper roads connecting them to the clinic and hospital. In other cases, the roads are riddled with potholes. Many parts of the region have no street lights, making traveling after dark even more dangerous. And there is only one college in the valley that offers degrees.

Tummidi Abhishek, deputy executive engineer in the state government’s Tribal Welfare Department, admitted that these shortages are “severe” in parts of the valley. He, however, insisted that the state government under the regional YSR Congress party “take steps to improve conditions in the valley and also in interior areas which were previously inaccessible”.

Those steps include building so-called “multi-purpose centers” that will serve as both venues for community events and basic medical facilities — with labs for medical testing, midwives to assist with deliveries and a room where doctors can examine patients. Abhishek said the government is also committed to building roads connecting remote villages to these facilities.

But the farmers of Araku have heard similar promises before. And it’s not just the government they’re bitter towards.

Earn a pittance

Since 1999, the Small and Marginal Tribal Farmers Mutually Aided Cooperative Society (SAMTFMACS), a cooperative of 100,000 coffee farming families in 2,000 villages in the region, has sought to help the community produce better – and more sustainable – coffee. It is supported by the nonprofit Naandi Foundation. The cooperative provides farmers with bio-inoculants to regenerate soil and new varieties of seedlings, and trains farmers in what is called “terroir classification” – essentially GPS mapping of each plot to understand what the soil type is, shade, elevation, etc Other factors contribute to the unique taste of the coffee produced.

The cooperative also operates a modern processing plant in Araku, said Tamarba Chittibabu, the cooperative’s president. Chittibabu said the cooperative usually sells the coffee to Araku Originals Private Limited (AOPL), a private company that exports roasted beans to Belgium, France and China, among others.

But there is a big gap between what exporters produce and what farmers earn.

Chittibabu said the cooperative buys coffee berries for 50 rupees ($0.60) per kilogram – which he said is fair and based on the current world market price for coffee.

Ram Kumar Varma, the founder of Native Araku Coffee, a company based in the city of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, said his company tries to pay farmers a little more – 70 rupees ($0.80) per kilogram. Many other coffee exporters buy berries from middlemen who pay farmers even less than $0.60 per kilogram for their products. Varma and Chittibabu blamed middlemen for suppressing farmers’ income. “The middlemen need to be eliminated,” Varma said.

But Nava Roja, a 24-year-old coffee farmer, told Al Jazeera that even what SAMTFMACS or Native Araku pays producers is a pittance. It has about one hectare of land on which about 300 kg (660 pounds) of berries are grown. That earns her 15,000 rupees ($180) in a year, she said, at $0.60 per kilogram.

“With inflation rising, it is very difficult to survive on such a small sum. We want at least 150 rupees [a little less than $2] per kilogram as the roasted beans are sold at a very high price in the international market.”

In fact, Varma confirmed that Araku’s coffee fetches between 2,500 and 6,000 rupees ($30 to $72) per kilogram in the international market.

Ballot or ball

This sense of government neglect and sense of exploitation by the coffee industry have made Araku fertile ground for India’s Maoist rebels – who lead a far-left, multi-state armed movement seeking to overthrow the Indian state.

In 2018, Maoists shot dead two politicians from the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), a regional political party in the state. In the past, Maoist militants have also called on people in the Valley to boycott elections, said Vundrakonda Haribabu, a political scientist at Andhra University.

Yet Araku’s coffee farmers have defied the Maoists to vote – tens of thousands of them instead opted for NOTA in 2019 to express their protest.

And five years later, many are convinced that this is still the best chance to be heard.

“We have every right to push for NOTA because it gives a clear signal to political parties that they have failed,” said 30-year-old Gemmela Vasu, a villager in Gondivalasa. “It is better to opt for NOTA than to boycott the elections.”

The farmers insist they are not asking for much – better prices for their coffee berries, roads and medical facilities – and toilets. On May 13, Sita, the farmer who has to defecate outdoors, said she would again line up at a polling booth to vote. She still hopes that democratic India wakes up and smells the coffee.