The average coffee farmer is 60 years old globally and fewer than 5% of Ethiopian and 10% of Vietnamese farm landowners are under 35, with no viable generational succession pipeline

Across major coffee-producing countries, the average farmer age is approaching 60 (Africa average: 60, Colombia: 56), and the next generation is actively leaving. In Ethiopia, fewer than 5% of coffee farm landowners are under 35; in Vietnam, despite a national median age of 33.1, fewer than 10% of farmers are under 35. The International Coffee Organization estimates that 5 million of 12.5 million coffee farmers live below the poverty line. Why it matters: as current farmers age out over the next 10-15 years, there is no trained replacement generation, so farms are either abandoned, sold for development, or converted to other crops, so productive coffee acreage contracts in the very regions that produce the world's most distinctive coffees (Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, Colombian Huila), so genetic diversity on heirloom farms is lost permanently when land use changes, so the specialty coffee segment loses its raw material base, so consumer prices for quality coffee escalate while quality homogenizes toward large-plantation monocultures. The structural root cause is that coffee farming offers returns below the opportunity cost of a young person's labor -- a barista in Bogota earns more than a coffee farmer in Huila -- and land tenure systems in many producing countries prevent young people from inheriting or purchasing farmland until the current owner dies, creating a decades-long bottleneck.