Peru Cajamarca

This coffee crop comes from the region of Cajamarca. Cajamarca is a semi-dry, semi-cold, tropical highland of Peru with very fertile soil at high Andean mountain elevations. Smallholder producers farm on 2-3 hectares of land, many of which practice organic farming. Most farmers in the area work independently, but the recent increase in cooperatives has been effective in increasing the quality of coffees produced in the area.

Though coffee arrived in Peru relatively early—in the middle of the 1700s—it wasn’t cultivated for commercial export until nearly the 20th century as demand from Europe rose due to a significant decrease in coffee production in Indonesia. British presence and influence in the country helped increase and drive exports. In the early 1900s, the British government took ownership of roughly 2 million hectares of land from the Peruvian government as payment on a defaulted loan, and much of that land became British-owned coffee plantations.

As of the 2010s, Peru is one of the top producers of Arabica coffee, often ranked fifth in world production and export of Arabica. The remoteness of the coffee farms and the incredibly small size of the average farm have prevented much of the single-farm differentiation that has allowed for microlot development and marketing in other growing regions, but as with everything else in specialty coffee, this is changing quickly as well. The country’s lush highlands and good heirloom varieties offer the potential for growers to beat the obstacles of limited infrastructure and market access, and as production increases, we are more likely to see those types of advancements.