The Future of Specialty Coffee Depends on Who Stays at Origin

One young farmer’s story shows why the future of coffee depends on creating opportunities at origin.

BY LUIS MOJICA PEREZ
BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE

Photos courtesy of Project to Decolonize Coffee

What to know:

• Coffee can create meaningful alternatives for at-risk youth: Through Project to Decolonize Coffee’s Coca to Coffee program, Jhon Arley Gomez transitioned from working in the coca economy to becoming a coffee professional and community leader
• The future of coffee depends on investing in the next generation: With coffee producers aging across Latin America, the industry’s long-term sustainability relies on creating viable career paths for young people through training, education, and stable economic opportunities
• Industry efforts need broader policy support: While direct trade, certifications, and producer programs make a difference, they cannot solve systemic challenges alone

The first time I met Jhon Arley Gomez, I was standing at a meeting point on the road to a coffee farm in Tierralta, Córdoba, Colombia, on my first trip to the country as CEO of Project to Decolonize Coffee (PDC). It was the spot we had agreed on with the farmer, where the mototaxis go no further. Jhon was waiting there with the farmer and the mules. He shook my hand, and then, because I had never in my life climbed onto a mule, the first thing Jhon ever did for me was help me up onto one.

I have thought about that moment many times since. The young man half his town had written off was the one steadying the visiting CEO. It should have told me everything.

At the time, Jhon was a farm worker and coffee picker at the first farm ever to produce coffee in Tierralta, the farm we were riding to that day. What I did not know yet was everything he had done to get there.

Before that farm, Jhon’s working life had belonged entirely to coca. He planted it. He fumigated it. He scraped the leaves at harvest. Not because he wanted to, but because no one would give him any other job. Jhon was born with a physical condition, and in his community that had been enough to close every door. Employers would not take a chance on him. Neighbors ridiculed him. The one economy that would accept his labor at every stage, no questions asked, was the illicit one. So Jhon, a young man in his twenties with more determination than anyone I have ever met, spent years working the full cycle of the cocaine trade’s raw material. Not out of ambition or allegiance, but because it was the only work on offer.

I want you to hold onto that detail, because it is the whole story of youth at origin, compressed into one life: The problem was never Jhon’s capacity. The problem was that nobody had built him an alternative.

A coffee industry being born

Tierralta is not a place most green buyers could find on a map. It has never been a coffee town. It has been many other things: a corridor of armed conflict, a zone of coca cultivation, a place young people leave. But a few years ago, one farm became the first in Tierralta to produce coffee, and Project to Decolonize Coffee invested heavily in it from the start. The farm hired workers and pickers, and one of them was Jhon. In the local labor market, he had known his whole life, that hire was itself a small revolution.

What happened next is the reason I’m writing this piece. Jhon showed extraordinary promise and an appetite to learn everything about coffee. When we launched our pilot program for new coffee pickers, the first cohort of what became our Coca to Coffee program, Jhon and his godmother were the first to sign up. We brought him to Manizales, in the heart of Colombia’s coffee axis, where he trained in picking, processing, and the technical foundations of coffee production. The plan was never for him to stay in Manizales. The plan was for him to go home and become a leader of an industry his town had never had.

That is exactly what he did. Jhon went back to Tierralta. He returned to school to finish his high school studies. He became a leader in his community, the same community that had once dismissed him, and today he works full-time with PDC, helping other young people walk the road he opened.

“Before coffee, nobody in Tierralta believed I could be anything,” says Jhon, who now works full-time with PDC. “Coffee gave me a way to work with dignity, to finish school, and to show the young people here that we don’t have to leave, or go back to coca, to have a future.”

Most stories about coffee and origin start with an aging farm and end with a lament. I want to tell you a different one: In Tierralta, coffee is not fading. It is being born. And its founders are young people the world had written off.

The generational question every roaster owns

Zoom out from Jhon, and the numbers are stark. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, n.d.), roughly one in four people across Latin America and the Caribbean is between the ages of 15 and 29. That is more than 160 million young people, the largest youth generation in the region’s history. At the same time, the producer base of our industry is aging, and in coffee community after coffee community, the succession question has no good answer. The young people who should be the next generation at origin are looking at their options, and in too many places, the options look like they did for Jhon before that first farm: the illicit economy, a dangerous migration route north, or leaving agriculture altogether.

If you roast, import, or buy green coffee, this is not someone else’s problem. Every contract you sign runs through the question of whether a young person somewhere has decided that coffee was worth staying for. The quality revolution of the last twenty years was built by producers who chose this crop and this craft. The next twenty years depend on whether their children and neighbors make the same choice, and right now, the deck is stacked against it.

Why our industry’s tools can’t fix this alone

Specialty coffee has real tools, and I do not want to diminish them. Direct-trade relationships, quality premiums, certifications, and producer-support programs have changed lives, including in the communities where PDC works. But be honest about their scale: They operate farm by farm, buyer by buyer, relationship by relationship. They cannot, on their own, shift the structural conditions that determine whether an entire generation stays in agriculture. Those conditions include security, rural infrastructure, access to credit, entry points into the digital economy, and the gravitational pull of an illicit economy that will employ a young person at every stage, from planting to fumigating to harvesting, in cash, today, with no questions about a disability.

This is not an argument against what our industry does. It is an argument that our industry’s efforts need policy infrastructure behind them: institutions whose actual job is youth economic opportunity, working at the scale of the hemisphere.

“What we see every day is that young people here don’t need convincing. They need a door,” says Wilfred Valencia, PDC’s Country Manager in Colombia. “When there is a real, legal way to earn a living in coffee, they take it. The challenge has never been their will. It has been the absence of opportunity.”

Which is how a coffee organization ended up in the corridors of the Organization of American States.

A special envoy on youth for the Americas

PDC’s model in Colombia is simple to state: Keep economic value inside rural, conflict-affected communities through legal coffee livelihoods, and young people will choose those livelihoods over the alternatives. Jhon proved it. His cohort proved it. But scaling it exposed a gap that surprised me: the Americas, among the most youthful regions on earth, has no high-level institution whose mandate is young people’s economic future. The United Nations has a Youth Office led by an Assistant Secretary-General. The African Union has had a Special Envoy on Youth since 2018. The inter-American system has committed programs and dedicated people, but no single, authoritative voice.

So, we are advancing a proposal to change that: a Special Envoy on Youth for the Americas, appointed within the OAS, focused squarely on youth economic opportunity. That means entrepreneurship, skills and technical training, the digital economy, and pathways into formal work, with particular attention to alternatives to illicit economies and irregular migration. The design is deliberately practical: The Secretary General can appoint an envoy under his existing authority, and the mandate would be financed through voluntary contributions rather than member-state budgets. No new bureaucracy, no new taxes on the system. One dedicated advocate for 160 million young people.

Rural livelihoods like coffee are precisely the kind of opportunity-based model such an envoy would exist to champion and scale. What PDC has done on a handful of farms in Córdoba, a hemispheric mandate could help make possible in thousands of communities across the coffee lands of the Americas.

What you can do from the buying side

You do not need diplomatic credentials to be part of this. If you’re a roaster, importer, café owner, or barista, here is where you have leverage: Seek out and invest in relationships with young producers, and be patient with communities that are new to coffee rather than only rewarding legacy origins. Tell origin-youth stories in your marketing with the dignity they deserve. Raise the generational question inside your trade associations, which have voices that carry in policy conversations. And watch for this proposal’s progress, because when a hemispheric youth mandate exists, the specialty coffee industry should be first in line as its partner.

The last time I saw Jhon, he was not picking anyone else’s harvest. He was teaching. The young man who once steadied me on a mule at the edge of Tierralta is now the person that community’s young people look to when they want to know whether there’s a future in coffee. There is, but only if we build it on purpose, at every level, from the farm gate to the halls of the OAS.

That’s the work. Come join it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luis Mojica Perez is the founder and CEO of Project to Decolonize Coffee (PDC), an organization working with conflict-affected rural youth communities in Colombia’s coffee regions to build legal agricultural livelihoods as alternatives to illicit economies. A 2026 ECOSOC Youth Forum panelist, he is currently leading a civil-society campaign to establish a Special Envoy on Youth for the Americas at the Organization of American States. He can be reached at lmojica@decolonizecoffee.org.

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