The Lived Realities of Smallholder Filipino Coffee Communities
Specialty coffee has gone through many challenges and culture shifts throughout the decades, so much so that it’s long been comparable to wine and other craft beverage industries. The industry continues to reshape itself, to where the majority of consumers–especially in non-growing regions—hold a strong value for standardized quality, education, and traceability. Curiosity and discovery remain central to progress, yet this momentum is also shaped by self-interest, particularly when technology and diluted storytelling can displace truth and reality for many smallholder coffee communites.
Much of this has to do with the values we’ve shaped through a Western lens, especially with this continuous comparison to wine; we set the standards for what excellence looks like in specialty coffee–much of which rewards quality, innovation, and exclusivity to some degree of bias–whether that’s in the cup, or a formed hierarchy of regions. It’s common ground for coffee enthusiasts and professionals to hold such high expectations. But even when it’s rooted in good intentions, that kind authority we hold in the global north can create the assumption that support and advocacy comes standard with systems of hypervisibility and simplified narratives at origin.
Over time, this narrows how value and care are understood, and when specialty coffee becomes mistakenly analogous to wine–a substantially larger multi-billion dollar industry–we start to lose sight of the larger issues at stake for smallholder producers and farmers. Decision-making and representation tends to remain at the forefront of the industry, while smallholder producers and farmers sit far from those decisions, influencing who gains access to markets and how worth is assigned. Climate instability and market volatility will continue to impact coffee everywhere, and these pressures are only intensified for Philippine smallholder livelihoods, where oligarch agribusiness and exploitative systems maintain dominance.
This inquiry leads me to an email conversation with Tere Domine, Country Director of Kalsada. Drawing from her direct work with farming communities across the Philippines, she speaks to how decisions are made within these constraints and what it takes to maintain long-term partnerships in practice. Her perspective grounds this discussion in lived experience, offering a view of Philippine specialty coffee shaped by the daily realities of production, coordination, and care at origin.
![]()
CQ: Kalsada began as a roastery in Manila while also operating as a US importer in Seattle. What prompted the decision to eventually base the company in the Philippines, and how did that shift change the way you operate?
TD: The original structure positioned the Philippine company as the production arm and the U.S. company as the importer to the United States. The initial plan was to export green coffee exclusively.
However, we encountered bureaucratic challenges in securing our export permit, which led us to roast the green coffee that had been sitting in storage while we awaited approval. Since quality degrades over time, we felt it was important to make the most of the coffee we had, so we began selling roasted coffee to a small number of cafés and through limited retail channels. This took place in 2015.
By 2021, we realized that in order to meaningfully increase the volume of coffee shared with consumers, our focus needed to return to production. As a result, we decided to pause our roasting operations and redirect our resources toward growing more coffee and expanding our partnerships with coffee communities across the Philippines.
CQ: Kalsada gained local and international recognition over the years—appearing in several publications like Purveyr, Standart, and most recently through collaborating on Blue Bottle’s Horizon Series. What opportunities and limitations became clearer for you, your partners, and farmers as Philippine specialty coffee entered Western-led markets in the US and EU?
TD: With the opportunity to establish Philippine coffee as a source of high-quality coffee comes the pressure of production. While our coffees can compete in terms of quality, it is difficult for us to compete on cost.
Compared to other producing countries, we have smaller farms, little to no mechanization, limited access to proper mills and efficient processing facilities, and logistics that are both expensive and challenging. Production volumes are low and costs are high, and this remains our primary limitation.
CQ: How do you think about visibility and storytelling when power, audience, and economic benefit aren’t evenly shared?
TD: Romanticizing hardship in coffee production has often been used as a primary way to sell coffee. Narratives that frame producers as struggling beneficiaries and brands or buyers as their saviors have proven effective in moving products around the world. However, these stories tend to simplify complex realities and place power over representation in the hands of those farthest from production.
What we hope to change at origin is the ability to tell our own realities with dignity and consent. This means sharing stories that reflect the full context of our work, including both the challenges and the agency of farmers and communities, without reducing them to symbols of hardship.
We believe that good storytelling should do more than educate. It should also create real economic value for producers and contribute directly to more equitable outcomes along the value chain.
CQ: In your experience, what challenges are most often misunderstood by buyers, roasters, and consumers looking in from the outside?
TD: Pricing is usually determined by supply and demand. Coffee prices are set on a global scale, which often does not reflect the actual cost of production in a country like the Philippines.
Production costs are high due to structural factors that make it difficult for farmers to reduce expenses. Most farmers lack access to mechanized equipment, keeping labor costs high, while access to affordable funding for essential agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides is very limited. When credit is available, it is often exploitative rather than supportive, further trapping farmers in low productivity cycles.
Logistics are also inefficient and expensive, increasing costs from farm to market. Despite multiple government roadmaps intended to support the sector, limited funding and weak implementation have prevented these initiatives from delivering meaningful results.
Because the system is stacked against smallholder farmers, coffee produced in the Philippines naturally comes at a higher price compared to other countries.
CQ: In many coffee-producing countries, specialty-grade coffee has long been grown primarily for export. How is the Philippine specialty market responding to this, and what can long-term partnerships—especially in the West—do to mitigate the imbalances embedded in global coffee trade?
TD: The Philippines is unique in that it is both a coffee-producing and coffee-consuming country, yet it remains a net importer of coffee. The majority of the coffee consumed locally—across both specialty and commercial segments—is imported from other origins.
At Kalsada, we make a conscious effort to keep our best coffees in the country, because we want to be able to walk into a café in our own neighborhood and enjoy a truly good cup of local coffee. Since the West cannot grow coffee, it represents an important market for us. However, there has long been an assumption that products grown in developing countries should be inexpensive, often based on the idea that labor is cheap.
There needs to be a shift in perspective, where a premium is placed on goods that cannot be produced in the West—much in the same way that we in the Philippines pay higher prices for products that cannot be produced locally and must be sourced from Western countries.
CQ: If you could change how Philippine coffee, food, and agriculture as a whole are understood globally, what would you want people to stop assuming—and what would you want them to finally see?
TD: First, we should look at the facts and address the myths that have been circulating about the history of Philippine coffee. There is an often-repeated narrative that the Philippines was once either the sole exporter of coffee or among the top four coffee exporters in the 1980s. This never happened, and anchoring our advocacy on false historical narratives does not help our cause. Rather than focusing on recovering a status that never existed, we should instead focus on the challenges that are real, but also solvable: low productivity from aging trees, a lack of infrastructure, and a lack of support for farmers from different institutions. The history, and the current realities, of Philippine coffee are compelling enough.
Second, like many other coffee-producing countries, coffee in the Philippines was initially commercially cultivated under Spanish colonization and used as a tool of exploitation. Today, however, the reality of coffee production in the Philippines is very different. Farmers largely own their land and, in most cases, have a meaningful voice in how their coffee is priced when they sell to the specialty market. This pricing is based primarily on production cost and not on the global supply and demand, which makes it livable for them.
Third, farmers bear the greatest risk in the coffee value chain. Climate change—now one of the biggest challenges to farming—has made production increasingly difficult. In the Philippines, where crop insurance is essentially non-existent, these risks are even more heavily stacked against farmers. For coffee production to continue, consumers must share in this risk by recognizing that the price paid for a cup of coffee is also an investment in the future of the crop.
Conclusive Thoughts
According to Kalsada's insights for this year's harvest, only 49% make up from last year’s inventory. This has largely to do with a variety of reasons. Unpredictable climate conditions continue to sweep the archipaelago, ultimately affecting safeguard of processing and harvest timelines. There’s also the natural production cycle of coffee which is shaped by biodiverse environment—on top of added labor that's required to work with aging trees.
Despite these challenges, longer harvest periods can ultimately support long-term, sustainable production, especially for newly planted trees in Bukidnon. As a result, smallholder communities across Luzon and Mindanao are organizing care and planning ahead to manage this year's lower yields.
These realities highlight the challenges that many Filipino farmers face, and with Tere's insights on the ground—with production,decision-making, and structural pressures at origin—comes the responsiblity of professionals and consumers to edify those at origin.
-
Sitio San Roque Washed Catimor is now available on our website.