Odisha Plans to Extend Coffee Cultivation to 6 Districts

The state government has planned to expand coffee beans cultivation by 10 times in the coming next five years after the heartening news of the success of Koraput Coffee.

In the state budget announced recently as a part of the ‘Coffee Mission’, the agriculture department has planned to expand coffee cultivation in a few districts like Gajapati, Kalahandi, Rayagada, Keonjhar, and Kandhamal under the new program called the ‘Coffee Plantation for Sustainable Livelihoods’. Currently, coffee is grown majorly in the Koraput district only.

The department has scheduled to expand it to the year 2030 while the program will be executed in the mission mode from the present financial year till 2028. Agriculture and Farmers Empowerment Secretary Arabinda K Padhee declared that it has been scheduled to expand coffee beans cultivation in the state to near about 40,000 hectares and coffee production to 20,800 metric tonnes (MT) by the year 2030. The scheme will require about Rs 1,406 crores whereas the government has built a budgetary allocation of Rs 126 crores for this Coffee Mission Scheme.

Odisha is a non-traditional coffee-growing region in the coffee map of India. According to the Coffee Board of India Statistics, coffee is presently sowed on over 4,339 hectares of land in the state of which 4,135 hectares are coffee-bearing areas.

The Odisha state of India produced 600 MT and 610 MT of arabica coffee in the years 2021-22 and 2020-21 respectively which is comparatively lesser than Andhra Pradesh and the northeastern states which are the other non-traditional coffee-producing regions of India.

Under the coffee cultivation area, Andhra Pradesh has 94,956 hectares of the area while the northeast states make up about 4,695 hectares of the area. Thus, these three non-traditional areas make up about 21 percent of the total area in the country under coffee cultivation. Nevertheless, Andhra Pradesh and northeast states have few areas under robusta cultivation whereas Odisha grows only arabica coffee.

The agriculture secretary said, “Under the new scheme, we will grow robusta coffee in 20 to 25 percent of areas where the land elevation is slightly lower”. He added that the main emphasis will be on tribal farmers and women’s self-help groups (SHGs) along with personal collaboration as far as production, cultivation, and value addition is concerned. Around 150 kg of coffee beans per hectare is being produced in the state approximately and sources said that processing approximately 6 kg of ripe coffee cherries bears 1 kg of parchment coffee.

One of the prominent coffee-producing areas Koraput district grows arabica coffee on over 2,894 hectares in the Nandapur, Koraput, Semiliguda, Dasmanthpur, Pottangi, Laxmipur, and Lamtapur blocks. While, on the other hand, 1,700 hectares of the land under coffee cultivation is owned by the government and dispensed to tribals with the average landholding size per farmer varying from 1.5 to 2 acres, and the rest of which belongs to the private coffee owners. The coffee which is grown in the district is organic in nature.