The world’s top coffee traders and roasters are uniformly failing to meet upcoming EU living wage requirements, according to a new report by coffee sector NGOs.

The latest Coffee Barometer, a biennial report produced by non-governmental organisations closely linked to the coffee sector, concludes that none of the top 15 coffee roasters and traders disclose pricing structures or contract terms, and none are on track to meet living wage requirements set out by the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

The CSDDD establishes a legal obligation for large companies operating in the EU to identify and address human rights and environmental violations within their supply chain. This includes ensuring smallholder farmers and other workers are paid a living wage.

Failure to comply with the CSDDD by 2029 will result in fines of up to three per cent of global turnover.

United Nations Global Compact defines a living wage as “the wage level that is necessary to afford a decent standard of living for workers and their families, taking into account the country circumstances and calculated for the work performed during normal hours”.

Most of the world’s coffee is produced by 12.5 million farming households, the report found, with 95 per cent of these cultivating less than five hectares of land. Data from 2019 to 2024 shows 80 per cent of these smallholder farmers do not meet the threshold of a living wage, the report found.

The authors of the report claim that consumer concerns over affordability, expressed as “the cost of a daily espresso,” shift focus away from structural problems that continue to put the coffee supply chain under strain.

“The past two decades have exposed a fundamental contradiction within the coffee economy: sustainability cannot be built on permanently cheap coffee,” the report states.

“If the crisis of 2002 revealed the consequences of collapsing prices, 2026 shows the consequences of an inadequate response in the years that followed. Awareness of producer vulnerability has yet to translate into structural reform.”

The Coffee Barometer is produced by Conservation International, Solidaridad, Voice of Organizations in Coffee Alliance (VOCAL), and Ethos Agriculture, all of whom work with producers on the ground and stakeholders in the wider coffee supply chain to promote sustainable practices.

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