FAO data (via OWID) for “Coffee, green production” (top 30 sovereign and dependent territory rows by most recent year). Values in thousand tonnes (two decimals). Aggregates excluded.
Chart ready. Press play to start.
How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “Coffee Production by Country (Time Series)” reformats data published by Our World in Data (mostly re-published World Bank / UN public statistics) (OWID Grapher slug “coffee-bean-production”). Values are expressed in thousand tonnes.
What to watch. The one move that redrew the coffee map is Vietnam’s climb through the 1990s, powered by mass-produced robusta, to a solid second place behind Brazil. Also look for the dent in Brazil’s bar after the 2021 frost that sent world prices soaring.
Caveats. Figures are green-bean equivalents, and coffee’s biennial bearing cycle makes Brazil’s totals swing between on- and off-years. The split between arabica and robusta is invisible here, so the chart says nothing about quality or price trends.
Trends in the data
Vietnam’s growth has no comparison in this table. It went from 4.1 thousand tonnes in 1961 to 2,015.29 thousand in 2024, a 491.53× increase that took it from 26th to 2nd. As late as 1982 it was still at 5.3 thousand tonnes, in the bottom group. In little over forty years it became the second-largest producer after Brazil. Laos also climbed from 29th to 13th, China from 28th to 15th, the Central African Republic from 23rd to 9th and Honduras from 21st to 10th.
Brazil’s line swings violently. From 2,228.70 thousand tonnes in 1961 it fell to 957.93 thousand in 1982, recovered to 1,987.07 in 2003, and reached an all-time high of 3,387.72 thousand tonnes in 2024. Coffee trees alternate between heavy and light crops, so values for major producers move sharply from year to year. The 1.52× growth over 63 years looks placid as a single number, but there was a stretch in which output more than halved.
Some countries have shrunk outright. Côte d’Ivoire fell from 185.5 thousand tonnes in 1961 to 72.13 thousand in 2024, a factor of 0.39, dropping from 3rd to 17th. El Salvador fell from 122.5 to 28.49, 0.23×, from 5th to 26th; Cameroon 0.67×, from 13th to 25th; and the Dominican Republic 0.69×, from 16th to 28th. Major growing regions of the 1960s now sit near the bottom of the table.
Across the 30 countries, the low point is an average of 103.34 thousand tonnes in 1976 and the high an average of 378.07 thousand in 2024. World coffee production keeps rising, but its composition has been substantially rearranged. The top five in 2024 — Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia — account for roughly 70% of the 30-country total. That concentration is what allows bad weather in a growing region to feed straight through to world prices.
Trivia quiz
Which country is regarded as the birthplace of Arabica coffee?
Ethiopia. Arabica originates in its southwestern highlands, and legend credits a 9th-century goatherd named Kaldi with noticing the berries' effect on his goats (though the tale was first written down only in 1671). (Source)
From which Arabic word—said to have originally meant wine—does the word "coffee" derive?
Qahwa. It passed into Ottoman Turkish as "kahve" and Dutch as "koffie" before entering English as "coffee" around 1582. (Source)
What is the name of the equatorial band where most of the world's coffee is grown?
The coffee belt (or bean belt). Lying between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, its stable tropical climate and rainfall are why the world's main coffee-growing countries are concentrated there. (Source)
Which coffee species, widely used in instant coffee and value blends, is produced mainly in Vietnam?
Robusta (Coffea canephora). More tolerant of heat, low altitude and disease than Arabica but more bitter, it makes up about 95% of Vietnam's output. (Source)