India may still be a tea-loving nation, but coffee has firmly won over its younger consumers. The country now drinks 91,000 to 120,000 tonnes of coffee every year. Yet, despite this domestic rise, India remains an export-first coffee economy. As the world’s seventh-largest producer, it ships out 70–80% of its beans, with the EU alone buying 60% of all Indian green coffee—coffee that must now meet some of the strictest sustainability and traceability rules in the world.
This dependence on exports makes India uniquely vulnerable. Global demand for sustainably produced commodities is rising, and the EU Green Deal (EGD) will harden these requirements further. If India does not adapt quickly, it risks losing access to its most important market.
Exports matter for a simple economic reason: they stabilise farmgate prices. When such a large share of India’s coffee relies on foreign buyers, a rejection from the EU—the world’s largest coffee consumer—won’t stay a European problem. Standards travel. One major rejection can cascade into others, push excess supply into the domestic market, pull down prices, and force thousands of growers to rethink whether coffee is worth cultivating at all.
Chemical problems in Indian coffee
For years now, India has grappled with Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) failures. Shipments have been turned back over Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) violations and food-safety breaches. In some cases, Ochratoxin A (OTA) contamination in raw beans has been found at 46.40 μg/kg, far beyond the EU’s limit of 3.0 μg/kg for roasted coffee. These lapses reflect deeper issues, like poor drying, inconsistent moisture control, and weak sanitation in coffee cultivation, and problems rooted in a supply chain where the overwhelming majority of growers are smallholders.
The EGD raises the stakes. Regulations such as the EUDR and CBAM, along with mandatory sustainability declarations, now require levels of traceability, environmental compliance, and documentation that India has never had to produce at scale. For a sector where 98% of growers operate on small parcels of land with limited resources, the gap between what is required and what is possible is widening.
Unique problems of processes in the Indian coffee plantation
This gap is visible at every stage of the coffee cycle. India once had an ecological advantage: its coffee grew under layered forest canopies rich in biodiversity. But economic pressure has pushed growers to replace native shade trees with Silver Oak, valued for timber at around US$700 per m³. The shift to monoculture shade weakens biodiversity and places Indian estates in direct conflict with emerging EU deforestation rules.
Input level
At the input level, rejections for illegal pesticide residues underscore the cracks in enforcing Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs). Many growers either lack awareness of EU/US residue limits or simply cannot access safer alternatives. What appears as “non-compliance” at the border is often a reflection of policy inattention at the farm.
Harvest level
The problems continue during harvest. Selective picking, long considered the gold standard, is being replaced by strip picking to cut labour costs. Mixing ripe and unripe cherries may save money in the short term but creates conditions ideal for fungal growth. In India’s humid climate, that quickly leads to OTA contamination, long before beans reach a processing unit.
Processing unit level
Coffee processing introduces further complexity. Whether washed, natural, or honey-processed, each method requires strict control to prevent fungal development. The Natural (dry) process is especially vulnerable in humid zones. Slow drying allows mold growth, and studies repeatedly detect Aspergillus ochraceus, a known OTA producer, in Indian coffee. With EU limits tightening, tolerance for such lapses is shrinking rapidly.
Post-harvest level
Post-harvest, moisture becomes the decisive factor. The ICO recommends a moisture content of 8%–12.5% in green beans, but Indian coffee beans typically have a moisture content above 12%, because the unique process for Indian Monsooned coffee involves exposing beans to high humidity during the monsoon season to change their color and flavor. While intentional, this process inherently raises the moisture content significantly above 12.5% and must be carefully managed to prevent excessive mycotoxin production. Because at high moisture levels, storage fungi like Aspergillus and Penicillium flourish. Given that the EU now caps OTA at 3.0 μg/kg for roasted coffee and 5.0 μg/kg for instant, the mismatch between Indian reality and international expectations is stark.
If all this was not enough, water adds yet another layer of risk. India’s washed-processing method, used for high-grade Arabica and speciality Robusta, consumes 85,000–93,000 litres per tonne of parchment coffee. When pulping effluent is discharged untreated, it contaminates streams, harms aquatic life, and threatens local communities. Under EGD-aligned sustainability rules, wastewater mismanagement is not negotiable; it constitutes grounds for rejection.
But the vulnerabilities in India’s coffee supply chain do not end there. In several cases, plantations and exporters have relied on ethylene oxide (EtO) as a post-harvest fumigant or sterilising agent, or have faced contamination during storage and transport. EtO is classified as a Group 1 human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and is completely banned in the EU. As a result, Indian coffee shipments have increasingly faced rejection for exceeding permissible EtO residue limits. This is not an isolated problem; Indian spices have already been rejected in large numbers on the same grounds. The pattern is clear: unsafe post-harvest practices, once tolerated domestically, are now colliding head-on with global food-safety norms.
Indian coffee landscape has more than plantation processes to deal with
While solutions exist, from anaerobic-aerobic treatment to water recycling, their adoption is largely limited to estates with capital to spare. Smallholders, who grow most of India’s coffee, cannot absorb such costs or implement these technologies without structured support.
Yet instead of building that support system, the industry has seen another trend: the rise of sustainability consultancies. Marketed as transition partners, many of them offer certifications and “sustainable” labels that do not match EU requirements. Estate owners, eager for premium pricing, often enrol without understanding the extent of compliance required by international markets. The result is a dangerous illusion of paper certificates that will collapse when real enforcement begins.
Even if large estates eventually upgrade fully, installing wastewater systems, improving shade management, and implementing traceability, the future of smallholders remains uncertain. Domestic ecology suffers when sustainability rules are ignored, whether or not the beans are exported. Water bodies, forest patches, and rural biodiversity do not get exemptions because a farm supplies the Indian market instead of Europe.
Expecting smallholders to make this transition is unrealistic
Indian smallholders work with thin margins, face volatile global prices, and struggle with limited access to credit and training. This is where the Coffee Board and government must step in with funds, policy clarity, training programmes, and systems that make compliance easier, not more burdensome.
Track-and-trace pilots are a start, but not a solution. They highlight the potential for value but cannot substitute for structural reform. The real challenge lies in closing the knowledge gap, bringing domestic standards in line with international ones, training growers, enforcing GAPs consistently, and ensuring that India does not fall out of step with markets that keep this industry afloat.
India’s coffee sector has long relied on natural advantages and traditional practices. But the world around it is shifting faster than ever. If the industry remains satisfied with surface-level fixes and cosmetic certifications, the fall will be steep and irreparable.
India must act before the EU shuts its doors, not after.
