What It Took to Harvest Coffee in Bolivia This Year.

In June of this year, I paid 40 bolivianos for a litre of gasoline — about $4.10 per litre, or roughly $15.60 a gallon. The official price at the pump was 6.98 (roughly $0.72 a litre, or about $2.70 a gallon). But there was no gasoline at the pump — there hadn't been for days — and I had cherry sitting in sacks on a hillside above Caranavi that needed to reach our wet mill before it started fermenting in the bag. Coffee doesn't negotiate. Ripe cherry gives you hours, not days. So you pay 40, or you watch a season's work turn to vinegar.

The fuel crisis is the backbone of everything.

Bolivia's gasoline crisis started last year and was never resolved. Lines at stations stretch for kilometers, and people are still sleeping at the pumps — in their trucks, on the pavement — waiting three and four days for the fuel trucks to arrive. In our own coffee region, drivers slept in line for up to three days just to load diesel. During the worst stretches, we were lucky to find gasoline at any price. And it isn't only gasoline. This winter, in Santa Cruz, people are lining up before dawn in the cold for a garrafa of cooking gas — in a country that not long ago exported natural gas to its neighbors. Then came the price shocks. Subsidized gasoline jumped from Bs 3.74 to Bs 6.98 per litre — from about $0.39 to $0.72 at today's floating rate of roughly 9.7 bolivianos to the dollar, or from $1.45 to $2.70 a gallon — nearly double. And the expectation is another jump to Bs 14–15 (around $1.45–1.55 per litre, or $5.50–5.85 a gallon) around August as the government phases out subsidies it can no longer afford.

To understand what that means for coffee, understand what fuel does on a coffee farm. It moves pickers up the mountain in the morning and down at night. It moves cherry from the farmland to the wet mill the same day it's picked, and it powers farm equipment when it's needed most. It also moves parchment from Caranavi up to the dry mill in El Alto, and green coffee from El Alto to the border.

Every one of those trips got twice as expensive at the official price — and during the shortages, five to ten times as expensive at parallel-market prices that touched Bs 40 per litre (about $4.10 a litre, or roughly $15.60 a gallon). Put that in perspective: it's nearly triple what drivers pay in California, the most expensive fuel market in the United States. It matches Hong Kong — officially the highest pump prices on the planet, at around $4.10–4.17 per litre this year. For stretches of this harvest, coffee farmers in the Bolivian Yungas region were paying as much for gasoline as anyone anywhere in the world — when they could find it at all. And fuel doesn't stay in its lane. When diesel goes up, food goes up, transport fares go up, and the daily cost of feeding and moving a picking crew goes up as well.

Fifty-three days that cost more than Covid

From May into June, Bolivia lived through more than 53 days of road blockades — right at the start of harvest. Not the off-season. The exact weeks when cherry is coming off the trees and everything needs to move.

Trade and industry bodies estimate the damage at over three billion dollars, roughly 5% of GDP. People here say it plainly: the blockades hit the Bolivian economy harder than Covid did. Thousands of drivers spent weeks trapped between blockade points, sleeping and cooking in their cabs in sub-zero temperatures, without food, water, or medical attention.

For coffee, the blockades cut in both directions. We couldn't reliably move parchment out of the growing regions, and we couldn't bring fertilizer, fuel, or supplies in. Since Bolivia is landlocked, everything we export rides a truck to a foreign port — mostly Arica, in Chile. During the conflict, the Arica corridor shut to Bolivian cargo. Even getting an empty container positioned became a project.

The blockades ending didn't halt the problem. On July 2^nd, Chile cut the operating hours at the Pisiga–Colchane border complex from 24 hours to just 08:00–20:00 — a restriction set to last until the end of November, right through export season. Daily truck crossings collapsed from around 180–200 to about 80, a drop of roughly 60%. As I write this, 400 to 500 Bolivian trucks are stranded at the border in lines up to 12 kilometers long, their drivers sleeping in the cabs through freezing altiplano nights, waiting four and five days to cross. Experts here point out that the 1904 Treaty guarantees Bolivia free transit through Chilean territory. Nevertheless, guarantees on paper don't move containers.

Freight tells the story in one number: moving a container from Bolivia to port used to cost around $700. Today it runs over $2,000, and it's still climbing.

Every picked kilo costs more

The official numbers say twelve-month inflation stood at 9.23% in June — and that's the improvement. Bolivia closed 2025 at 20.4%, after peaking near 24%. June alone added 2.15%, driven by food and transport, which is to say: driven by the blockades.

The damage isn't confined to farms. Bolivia's restaurant and gastronomy sector — the same cafés and kitchens that anchor domestic coffee culture — was gutted. The government's own registry counted more than 97,000 gastronomy businesses harmed during the blockades, with tens of thousands of workers laid off and well over 100,000 jobs put at risk. Local businessmen I know have made real sacrifices — burning savings, taking on debt, covering payroll out of pocket — just to keep their doors open and this industry alive. When the places that serve coffee are fighting to survive, the whole chain feels it.

On a farm, inflation isn't an index. It's the price of a picker's lunch, the fare to get them to the farm, the daily wage that has to keep pace with what rice and chicken cost this week. Picking labor is the single biggest cost of harvest, and it has repriced. We pay substantially more per day than we did two years ago, and we cover more of our workers' food and transport, because if we don't, they'll leave.

Many already have. Workers are migrating abroad or into other sectors. And in the Yungas region, coffee has a competitor growing on the next hillside: coca. Coca prices are high right now, and coca is a seductive crop — it harvests several times a year, pays fast, and needs no containers, no port, no buyer in another hemisphere. When coca pays this well, nobody plants new coffee. That's not a moral judgment. It's arithmetic, and it shapes what Bolivian coffee supply looks like five years from now.

The float, the dollar, and the fertilizer that never arrived

After years of dollar scarcity, the boliviano now floats — around 9.7 to the dollar. For an exporter, this cuts both ways. Our dollar revenue is worth more in bolivianos, which helps. But every imported input — fertilizer, agrochemicals, GrainPro bags, spare parts for the mills — is priced in dollars, and those prices repriced overnight. The input inflation arrived long before any export benefit did.

The result: many farms around us skipped or cut fertilization this cycle. Either the product was unaffordable, or it physically couldn't get through the blockades. You pay for that twice — first in this year's cherry, then in next year's flowering. The 2026 crisis has already taken a bite out of the 2027 harvest.

The mountain won't save us from the weather

There's a comfortable myth that high-altitude coffee is insulated from climate risk. It isn't. Forecasters expect El Niño to peak between December 2026 and February 2027, and even at 1,600 meters and above, heat and irregular rain disrupt ripening and flowering.

Meanwhile, leaf rust pressure is rising. Stressed, under-fertilized trees are exactly the trees roya attacks, and humid conditions have favored it. Add the labor shortage and expensive fuel, and selective picking — going back through the same trees for only the ripe cherry — becomes a luxury many farms can't sustain. Cherry ripeness at collection is the foundation of everything we do in the mill. When picking gets rushed, quality lots don't just get more expensive. They stop existing.

What this means if you buy coffee

Here's the irony. On July 6, New York arabica futures posted their biggest single-day gain this century — up 16.2% — on fears about Brazil's harvest. The whole world is suddenly worried about coffee supply. And here in Bolivia, one of the smallest and most distinctive origins on earth, we're struggling to get cherry off the mountain, let alone to a port.

So let me say clearly what this year looks like from where I stand:

The volume of Bolivian coffee will be limited. The share of that volume reaching top quality will be smaller still. Costs at every step — picking, milling, trucking, shipping — are structurally higher, and differentials will reflect that. This isn't opportunism. It's a fuel bill, a wage bill, and a freight invoice.

If you want Bolivian coffee this year, commit early. Talk to your exporters now, not in October. Fix your positions on the lots you care about, because the best coffees will be spoken for fast, and there won't be a second wave behind them.

It's worth it. The

coffees that do come off these mountains this year will have survived a gauntlet — and the producers behind them will have earned every cent of the premium. Bolivia has been through harder years than this and kept growing extraordinary coffee. We'll do it again. But this year, more than most, the people who get the best of it will be the ones who showed up early and understood why it cost what it cost.

— Nick Valverde,Valverde Aramayo Group