Zambia

Lusaka hums in the afternoon heat. Dust rises from the city’s outer avenues, where rural outskirts drift gradually into a kaleidoscope of market stalls overflowing with maize and tobacco. Street vendors call out; children weave between parked trucks; motorcycles, bicycles, and battered cars jostle past one another. Under the southern African sun, life spills onto the streets; conversations stretch across doorways, radios croak from shopfronts, and the air vibrates with the energy of a city growing faster than it can pave its roads.

Yet slip a few blocks north of the bustling centre and Lusaka softens. The roads narrow, the noise thins, and a quiet street leads you toward an unlikely sanctuary: Peaberry Coffee, Zambia’s first specialty coffee shop. After weeks of traveling across African coffee origins for Standart, entering Peaberry feels like a slow exhale. I feel my shoulders relax as the scent of freshly ground beans fills the air and admire the local art on the walls. Conversations unfold softly over cups brewed from Zambian-grown coffee.

Peaberry isn’t just a cafe for weary travellers; it is a declaration that Zambia is an origin worth knowing, where coffee is grown and celebrated. Often it’s here that Zambians taste their own coffee for the first time.

The cafe’s founder, Teija Lublinkhof, is Finnish by birth but deeply rooted- in Zambia. Over decades, she has worked in nearly every stage of the coffee chain, from farm management to roasting and quality control to serving as a judge at the World Barista Championship. Peaberry is the culmination of those experiences. Lublinkhof aimed to create a place of belonging, a refuge from the city’s frenetic rhythms, and a space for Zambia’s coffee culture to take shape. That meant one thing above all: serve Zambian coffee.

It was a practical decision (imported coffee is difficult and costly to bring into a landlocked country with a small domestic market) but also a philosophical one. In a country shaped by extractive industries, where resources are often shipped abroad with little benefit to local communities, providing a space for Zambians to drink and value their own coffee is a form of gentle resistance. Peaberry is a small laboratory of possibility: a place where baristas, students, professionals, and curious newcomers encounter specialty coffee that is global in its craft yet unmistakably local in its roots.

How coffee took root in Zambia

When I visited Joseph Taguma, General Manager of the Zambia Coffee Growers Association, I anticipated an interview. What I experienced felt more like a chapter from a novel. His office sits in the slightly dusty yet lovingly maintained single-story headquarters of the Association, inside of which a small staff served us hot coffee despite the Lusaka heat pressing with ominous insistence against the windows. Here, hospitality outranks meteorology.

Taguma radiates a serene, grandfatherly confidence. He speaks carefully, almost musically, weighing each statement before delivering it. Stacks of agricultural reports teetered behind him like geological formations, and he touched them with the casual familiarity of someone who has spent a lifetime in patient work. When he talks about coffee, he never sounds bossy, only assured, as though he’s describing the personality of an old friend.

‘Coffee has technically been grown here since the 1500s,’ he told me, raising his eyebrows to emphasize the significance of that timeline. ‘Though not commercially. It was only in the 1980s that Zambia really began to take it seriously.’

Until the 1980s, coffee barely registered in Zambia’s agricultural landscape. The economy revolves almost entirely around copper mining: it is the largest exporter of raw copper in the world. In the 1970s, nearly 95 per cent of Zambia’s export earnings were tied to copper, and the industry still accounts for over 70 per cent of Zambia’s exports today. Agriculture, aside from staple commodities like maize, was (and remains) secondary. Coffee existed in pockets, occasionally cultivated on family farms, but never in significant commercial quantities.

Then came the copper crisis.

Global copper prices collapsed in the late 1970s and early 1980s (falling 45% over a decade), hollowing out Zambia’s finances. The government, under President Kenneth Kaunda, turned to the IMF and World Bank for support and adopted sweeping reforms promoted by these institutions aimed at diversifying the economy. Coffee emerged as a promising candidate: a high-value crop well suited to Zambia’s high-altitude regions, capable of generating export income beyond copper, as there was a seemingly insatiable market abroad for the drink.

Two consecutive World Bank-funded coffee projects launched in 1979 as part of a national effort to establish and formalize commercial coffee cultivation, with substantial investment directed towards building estates in the Northern and Copperbelt provinces. Smallholder farmers received seedlings from government support workers, along with training and extension support, as well as irrigation infrastructure. Soon after, in 1984, Zambia exported its first modern shipment of coffee—just 12 tonnes—to South Africa. By 1985, exports surged to over 300 tonnes. Momentum began to gather. By the mid-1990s, Zambia had several thousand hectares of coffee under cultivation, and more than 70 private farmers were involved. Coffee had become, briefly, a symbol of what diversification might look like.

But history, especially coffee history, loves dramatic reversals. The global price collapse of the early 2000s, followed by drought, hit Zambia hard and pushed farmers toward quicker, cheaper crops like wheat and soybeans. Taguma leaned back at this point, folding his hands with the resignation of a man who has explained this too many times. ‘Farmers could grow wheat twice a year with the same water inputs,’ Taguma notes. ‘Economically, it made sense.’

Financing, too, became a choke point. Coffee requires long-term investment, with trees taking at least three years to mature and produce saleable fruit, but Zambia lacks a comprehensive system of accessible, affordable agricultural credit. ‘If you want to do coffee well,’ Taguma says, ‘you need short-term financing to cover the gap between harvest and payment. But bank loans are 15 per cent interest in dollars. It’s just too expensive.’ Coffee, with its slow returns and high upfront costs, simply isn’t financially attractive for farmers or politically appealing for officeholders. ‘Governments prefer maize,’ he explains. ‘You fund it, and six months later you have results that translate into votes.’ Coffee, by contrast, demands generational thinking in a world addicted to short-term election cycles. Taken together, all this means that from a high of over 7,000 metric tons in 2004, Zambia’s coffee production plummeted to under 300 in 2020.

A narrow origin

Today, nearly 97 per cent of Zambian coffees come from a single estate: Northern Coffee Corporation Limited (NCCL) in the Northern Province. Acquired by Olam International in 2012, NCCL spans almost 6,000 hectares, complete with wet and dry mills, irrigation infrastructure, nurseries, and large-scale replanting programs. It is Zambia’s coffee powerhouse and, in many ways, the country’s coffee ambassador abroad. Its beans travel through Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) or, increasingly, via Walvis Bay (Namibia) to roasters across the globe, though the largest purchasers are in Northern Europe.

Outside of NCCL, only about eight family-owned farms remain active in the entire country. Many of these estates are working to rejuvenate old plantings or transition from commodity-grade output toward specialty production to hopefully receive better remuneration for their end product. While the numbers might be small, the quality is not.

A turn to quality has been aided by the fact that ‘from the start, Zambia focused on washed arabica,’ Taguma says, so much of the infrastructure was left in place from the earlier periods of coffee investment and available to be reinvigorated by those new farmers willing to take on the challenge. Those who do are rewarded with coffees that tend to have medium to sharp acidity and clean profiles.

Climate change, however, threatens these new gains. Rainfall has become erratic. ‘We used to expect rains from October to April,’ Taguma says. ‘Now rainfall might only arrive in December and disappear by February.’ The impact of such unpredictable rains leads to less reliable harvests and variability in maturation levels within a given harvest, as well as increased vulnerability to disease for the already stressed plants. Meanwhile, deforestation—much of it driven by charcoal production—erodes soil health and disrupts local microclimates. ‘Trees that generate income aren’t cut down,’ Taguma points out. ‘If we promoted crops like coffee more widely, we could help protect our environment.’ The future of Zambian coffee relies on a complex interplay of trees, water, political will, and a clear vision for the kind of agriculture the nation wants to cultivate.

From extractive past to possible future: Coffee in a mining nation

It is difficult to discuss anything in Zambia without mention of copper mining. Mining has shaped the country for a century, anchoring its economy and fluctuating with global prices. Zambia’s Copperbelt—once the pride of African industrialization—has also been a site of volatility, layoffs, political tension, and environmental degradation. Copper gives, but copper also takes. This context of extractive copper mining makes Zambia’s newer coffee projects noteworthy. They are not replacing mining, but they point towards a more diversified future. One example is Mount Sunzu Coffee, a Swiss-backed estate near the country’s highest peak of the same name. Historically, the region has been associated with mining and charcoal production, where forests were often valued solely for their extractable resources. Mount Sunzu has adopted a more sustainable approach: out of its 780 hectares, over 600 are preserved as conserved or reforested Miombo woodland, while coffee is cultivated on the remaining land at higher elevations.

Solar-powered irrigation, precision agriculture, careful varietal selection, and controlled processing all indicate a specialty-minded model. The goal is not volume—it would take centuries of work for Zambia to compete with places like Ethiopia or Brazil on volume—but rather quality, traceability, ecological stewardship, and establishing a new pattern for production in Zambia.

I attempted to visit Mount Sunzu and failed spectacularly. The trip required either 24-plus hours by bus by bus from Lusaka (on a good week, if the road didn’t wash out) or a once-weekly flight that still left me nowhere near the estate. With reporting deadlines and assignments waiting in Malawi and Zimbabwe, I had to admit defeat. If I couldn’t reach Mount Sunzu, I kept thinking, imagine the journey their coffee must undertake just to leave the country.

Mount Sunzu isn’t alone in this push for quality. Just outside Lusaka (and fortunately infinitely more accessible to the exhausted coffee journalist), lies Balmoral Farms, originally founded by independence hero Simon Zukas. His life reads like a moral epic: a Jewish-Lithuanian refugee who became a key figure in Zambia’s liberation movements, endured exile, returned as a parliamentarian, and maintained a lifelong dedication to justice—and quiet farming in the soils of his adopted homeland.

His grandson, Ben Zukas, now runs the farm and carries that family ethos into coffee: quietly shifting Balmoral toward experimental lots and higher-quality production, as if extending Simon’s instinct for nation-building into the agricultural realm. These farms are producing exceptional coffees while also investing energy in exploratory efforts that reflect a broader shift in thinking around coffee. The turn to specialty coffee, with its emphasis on flavour, transparency, and environmental care, offers Zambia a different kind of economic logic, one less tied to extraction and more grounded in regeneration.

A future written in trees

What distinguishes Zambian coffee at this moment is not the scale but the intention. Zambia does not chase volume because it cannot—at least, not yet. Instead, the focus is necessarily on care. Here is coffee grown with patience, not urgency.

Still, quality and care alone do not guarantee viability. Zambia’s presence on the global specialty stage has wavered, in part because severe production declines have made promotion difficult. Origins, like crops themselves, depend on some sense of continuity and their place in our imagination: they must appear year after year in conversations, competitions, menus, and shipments that arrive on time, as well as in relationships abroad, each consistently speaking of place. Zambia’s re-entry has been slow because rebuilding that presence requires not only good coffee but also trust—from buyers, financiers, and all of us who are willing to invest in long-term agricultural futures rather than quick wins. Zambia may never be a giant in global production. But origins are not measured only in volume; they are also measured in character, resilience, and the cast of passionate individuals and communities who fight for their crop’s and country’s future.

Back at Peaberry, these questions feel less abstract. At the cafe and roastery, Zambian beans serve as a reminder that origin begins at home. Peaberry does not solve the structural challenges facing Zambia’s coffee sector, but it offers something equally essential: a space where coffee is not merely exported but is culturally, economically, and imaginatively owned by Zambians. In a country long shaped by extractive industries, that claim matters.