Puer City, Yunnan Province has become the most widely planted area in China.

Pu'er City, Yunnan Province, which gets its name from tea, has become the most widely planted and most productive coffee producing area in China in recent years.

In March, when you come to the famous tea village of Pu'er City, you will see that the tea garden in the farmland has pulled out the tender flower stars, the spring tea is about to be on the market, and the precocious wheat is rolling with golden waves of wheat, showing signs of a bumper harvest. But the local farmers told me that since growing tea and crops is not as profitable as growing coffee, they have planned to grow coffee after the wheat harvest.

Pu'er City, Yunnan Province, which gets its name from tea, has become the most widely planted and most productive coffee producing area in China in recent years. According to the Pu'er municipal government, the coffee planting area of the city reached 439000 mu in 2011, compared with 218000 mu in 2009. By contrast, the city has about 3.25 million mu of tea gardens, about the same number as it was three years ago. At present, the output of coffee in Pu'er City is 28000 tons. Both output and acreage account for half of the country and more than 90% of Yunnan province. The city government's plan is to double the annual output of coffee to 9 to 100000 tons in five years.

In 2008, the bubble of Pu'er tea, which was fried in circulation, burst, which not only led to the bankruptcy of many speculators and small tea factories, but also sharply reduced the income of tea farmers. Villagers in Manwait Township of Pu'er City recalled that in 2007, their family had four mu of tea garden, and every time new tea was put on the market, the tea produced could be sold for more than 5000 yuan. But in the autumn of 2008, the tea produced could only be sold for more than 1500 yuan. He still remembers clearly that at that time, the purchase price of fresh leaf tea in the village was only 2 yuan per kilogram, while that of Mao tea was about 10 yuan per kilogram. This price was not even enough to pay for picking by people, and many villagers threw their tea leaves on tea trees and did not pick them.

Also since 2009, many tea farmers in Pu'er began to make money after seeing coffee farmers grow coffee for several years, turning mud-tile houses into red brick houses, so they followed suit. For example, the tea farmer mentioned above said that he initially planted only 3 mu of coffee, while the remaining more than 10 mu of land were planted with tea, sugar cane and grain. As the economic value of coffee increased year by year, he not only changed his family's corn field and sugar cane field to grow coffee, but also rented the land of many other villagers to grow it. Because the income of growing coffee beans is twice as high as that of growing tea and 3-5 times higher than that of growing corn and rice. Now he has 30 mu of coffee field and 3 mu of tea garden, and the whole family's gross income is more than one hundred thousand yuan a year. In addition to economic value considerations, he gave up growing rice and corn because "they consume too much water". As we all know, Yunnan has had a severe drought for three consecutive years. And coffee is an one-time investment, years of income, basically planted, as long as three times a year fertilizer, pesticides are not hit, weeding, fertilization, management is very simple.

At the most famous Manzhongtian Coffee Plantation in Pu'er City, coffee farmers employed by the local company Aiyi Group, Starbucks' only partner in China, told reporters that they emigrated here from Dashan, Zhaotong, Yunnan Province. seedlings, fertilizer and land are all provided by enterprises. each of them is responsible for planting 20 mu of coffee fields and charges a project management fee of 14 yuan per mu per month. You can buy 1 ton of coffee per mu every year. After deducting the above miscellaneous fees, the purchase price is 2 yuan / kg, and the income can be nearly 40,000 yuan after selling the coffee beans. Usually raising chickens, ducks and pigs in the mountains is much better than life in the depths of the mountains.

Pu'er City, Yunnan Province, which gets its name from tea, has become the most widely planted and most productive coffee producing area in China in recent years.

Liu Minghui, chairman of Aiyi Group, said that there are two ways to source their raw materials, one is to buy from proprietary farmers, and the price is set according to the daily price of international futures. In the past three years, the average selling price of coffee beans in Pu'er City has risen from 15.9 yuan / kg to 34.5 yuan / kg. Many self-employed farmers have become rich and use their own trucks to transport goods to the purchasing station every month. The other is to hire coffee farmers to grow at a fixed fee every month, provide free seedlings, land and fertilizers according to market prices, and then purchase coffee from coffee farmers after deducting miscellaneous fees. This cost will be relatively low. The natural conditions in Yunnan are suitable for planting high-quality small-grain coffee, and the planting cost is relatively low compared with established coffee producing areas such as Brazil. According to statistics, the production cost of the main international coffee producing countries is 1213.5 yuan / kg. At present, the average cost in Yunnan is less than 10 yuan / kg, and the cost of self-cultivation by farmers is about 8 yuan / kg.

Pu'er farmers from tea farmers to coffee farmers, there are reasons behind the government to vigorously promote the coffee industry, but the bigger push is the international coffee giants. As early as 1992, Nestl é launched an agricultural technical assistance service project in Yunnan to encourage and support local coffee cultivation. Nestl é currently buys about 8, 000 tons of coffee beans a year from Pu'er, all of which are supplied to Nestl é's factories in China. In 2011, Nestl é collected 1/5 of the coffee beans in Yunnan. Dehong in Yunnan is currently the largest producer of instant coffee powder in China.

Since 2007, Starbucks' coffee purchases in Yunnan have increased about 20 times. In 2012, Starbucks formed a joint venture with its supplier Aiyi Group to grow and cultivate new coffee directly locally, rather than just purchasing locally or globally.

However, we can see in the local area that the severe drought in southwest China may be restricting the further development of Yunnan coffee industry. As the landform of Yunnan is mainly low hills and gentle slopes, and there is not much flat land, many farmers' tea gardens and coffee gardens are planted on the mountains, forming beautiful terraces. Because coffee gardens are mostly built on mountains, although the temperature is cooler and foggy than the hillsides and foothills, it is not easy to irrigate in severe drought weather. Moreover, local farmers continue to use the traditional method of reclamation, cutting down all the trees and grass on the mountain and then ridging the neat terraces. This single planting method at the cost of destroying the ecology makes it difficult for the plantation to conserve soil and water, and can only wait for rain and rely on the sky for food. Although it is spring, the withered and yellow grasslands can already be seen on the hillsides of some alpine coffee plantations. If the drought continues, these coffee gardens will be very passive. And it is not easy to treat a large area of frost in winter.

According to the data of Yunnan Provincial Water Resources Department, by the end of 2009, more than half of the 5514 reservoirs in Yunnan Province were sick and dangerous reservoirs, which not only did not play their due role in drought resistance, but also posed a threat to the lives and property of people downstream. Although Yunnan expects to invest 100 billion yuan to build small water cellars, pools, pumping stations, dams and canals to solve the drought in mountainous areas by 2015. However, the newly built Gaoshan Reservoir is rarely seen in Pu'er. Many of the small reservoirs in use were built in the 1950s and 1960s because there was no spillway and did not dare to store water during the rainy peak. Although in the past two years, due to the high forest coverage of Pu'er and the consolidation of some sick and dangerous reservoirs, the drought here is not as obvious as that in other parts of Yunnan. However, from mid-January to the end of February this year, there was no rain in Pu'er for more than a month, but there was only a little light rain in early March, and spring drought also began to occur in Pu'er. For example, according to the statistics of Pu'er Flood Control and drought Relief headquarters, by the end of February, there were 240900 mu of light drought, 42300 mu of severe drought, and 4700 mu of dry land. Kunming, the provincial capital, has limited water supply for the first time in sub-areas after three years of severe drought.

Pu'er City, Yunnan Province, which gets its name from tea, has become the most widely planted and most productive coffee producing area in China in recent years.

Yunnan, with the third largest amount of water resources and four times the national average per capita, has suffered from years of drought, from agriculture to industry, from rural to urban areas, although it has famous river systems such as the Jinsha River, the Lancang River, and the Nujiang River. After three years of severe drought, we are "baking" how Yunnan's economic development will go hand in hand with ecological protection and disaster prevention in the future.