Coffee, Community, and a Year of Silence

There’s probably no more common a word in the coffee industry than “community”. It adorns websites, marketing materials, event itineraries, and mission statements. Seemingly every coffee company or organisation’s goal is to “bring the community together” or “make coffee better for our community”. 

Coffee is many things to many people, and it is often steeped in community. It is a morning ritual with family, an afternoon pick-me-up with friends; an ideal choice for a first date and something to hold in your hand during difficult conversations. Coffee shops can be ideal community-building locations, connecting disparate people in a place that encourages conversation. Coffee connects people all around the world, either as a beverage or a means of employment.

However, coffee is also a global commodity, one that’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Whatever community coffee has is therefore international and highly disparate, encompassing everyone from smallholder farmers in Uganda and barista trainers in Sweden to executives in Canada and cafe owners in Yemen.

Despite this vastness and complexity, many within the industry prefer to promote a simplified, sanitised idea of coffee’s community—one that refuses to engage with anything beyond their field of vision, and avoids connecting the dots between coffee’s position in the world and its responsibilities.

Over the past year, the coffee industry as a whole has remained silent during an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Individuals have spoken up—and risked their livelihoods for doing so—but those in power have essentially refused to engage. I wrote about this in November 2023, and not much has changed in the year since. Even when the conflict spilled over into the Red Sea in early 2024 and cargo shipping was impacted, the industry’s focus rested on delays, rerouting, and rising costs—not the human toll at its heart.

It’s true that coffee communities can be positive and impactful, whether locally or as part of international groups. But over the past year, it has become abundantly clear that many in the industry would prefer an empty, corporatised version of community—one without meaningful solidarity, and which doesn’t require taking a stand.

Speaking Out, Staying Silent

Last year, I compared the coffee industry’s response to the Israeli offensive in Gaza to its earlier reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

After Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, coffee’s condemnation was immediate and uncompromising. The Specialty Coffee Association posted a solidarity statement, and suspended Russia’s participation in the World Coffee Championships. Companies like Nestlé also posted statements in support of Ukraine, while multinationals from Starbucks to Keurig Dr Pepper shut down their operations or stopped selling products in Russia.

In comparison, the industry’s response to Israeli airstrikes and ground invasions in Gaza has been near-total silence. There were no similar statements from the SCA, nor from Nestlé, which in 2014 boasted that it was the “only multinational food and beverages company with direct operations in the West Bank and Gaza”. Starbucks even sued its union over a social media post expressing solidarity with Palestine (although it did later make donations to support food aid in Gaza). Those who spoke out were primarily individuals or small companies, rather than influencers with huge audiences or large brands with political clout.

Why were coffee organisations so quick to speak out over Ukraine but mostly silent when it came to the assault on Gaza? There are coffee companies in Ukraine that have been impacted by the war—much of the outpouring of support involved fundraising to support those businesses—but the same is true in Gaza. It’s possible that individuals were worried about losing their jobs, as has happened in other industries. Companies, meanwhile, are inherently conflict-averse, and expressing solidarity with Ukraine could be seen as “safe” while speaking out in support of Palestine often leads to backlash or accusations of anti-Semitism.

Many multinational coffee companies also have close ties to Israel—Nestlé, for example, is on the Boycott, Divest, Sanction list over its ownership of an Israeli food company. And finally, there’s the issue of plain racism: To Western eyes, Ukrainian suffering is deemed worthy while Palestinian suffering is ignored or downplayed. As the law professor and human rights activist Matiangai Sirleaf wrote in a 2024 paper, “The gross disparity in the response to what is happening to Ukrainians and the comparative silence regarding Palestinians by actors in the Global North is exposing the anti-Palestinian racism undergirding the ‘rules-based order’”.

Meanwhile, while coffee’s main players have refused to engage, historians, experts, and the country of South Africa have all accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The Israeli historian Raz Segal called it a “textbook case of genocide” in 2023, and told Vox last month that he stood by that assertion a year later. “We’re still actually seeing, nearly a year into this genocidal assault, explicit and unashamed statements of intent to destroy”, Segal said. “The way that intent is expressed here is absolutely unprecedented.”

Today, the official death toll in Gaza stands at more than 43,000 people, with another 100,000 injured and tens of thousands missing. Women and children have made up 70% of those killed, according to a recent United Nations report. In July, researchers estimated that the death toll is in fact far higher than the official number, closer to 186,000 people since October 2023. Millions more face starvation and forced displacement, both of which are war crimes under international law.

Meanwhile, the conflict has continued to spread: first to Yemen, as Houthi militants targeted shipping in the Red Sea in an attempt to pressure Israel and the U.S. into a ceasefire, and more recently to Lebanon, where thousands more have been killed and nearly a quarter of the population has been displaced. And still, the coffee industry has remained largely silent.

‘A More Compassionate and Informed Coffee Community’

Rana Hassanieh, co-founder of Edda Arabica in Beirut, Lebanon, relocated to Saudi Arabia with her family when the invasion began. “I consider myself very privileged to be able to have just packed and left”, Hassanieh tells me. Edda Arabica is still open and some of her team is still working, although the number of customers has fallen and Hassanieh has dipped into her savings to keep the shop solvent.

The question of what “community” means has been on Hassanieh’s mind in the wake of her displacement. “The situations in Gaza and Lebanon have definitely made me reconsider how global issues like conflict and displacement intersect with the coffee community”, Hassanieh says. “Even though these regions aren’t coffee producers [or] equipment manufacturers, their struggles still impact the broader systems in ways we often overlook”.

Although her background is in fine arts, Hassanieh has been in the coffee industry since 2016, and co-founded Edda Arabica in 2022. A certified Q grader, she has also worked as a consultant and trainer, and says that everything she has done within the Lebanese coffee industry has been based around building community. “Specialty coffee in Lebanon is still super raw, so I really wanted to share the thread of specialty,” she says. “Being transparent, communicating, sharing knowledge. It comes back to community, how can you translate the world [of specialty] and spread it across the community”.

What more could the coffee industry as a whole be doing in the face of the ongoing conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza? Hassanieh is circumspect. “There are limits to what [the industry] can realistically achieve”, she says. “They can’t stop the conflicts, but they can engage based on community principles. Advocating for those who are suffering, sharing their stories, and supporting organisations that provide relief is essential. While we’re all part of the same community, we each have unique perspectives. By voicing these concerns, we can create a more compassionate and informed coffee community, even as we navigate our own struggles”.

‘A Simple, Clear Issue’

For Mohammed and Tahani Awad, both Palestinian-Americans, the coffee industry’s lack of response to the Gaza genocide is also personal. The couple run Tabeeb Roasters in Chicago, Illinois, and their Palestinian heritage has shaped their approach to coffee, “grounding us in the importance of community, resilience, and the power of shared experiences”, as Mohammed Awad tells me.

The past year has shifted their perspective of the industry as they launched their company and learned more about coffee’s supply chain. While they have been encouraged by the support they’ve received from their local community, the silence from the wider coffee industry has been less heartening.

Awad gives the example of Yemen, and the way the industry responded to the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea. “While the coffee industry has been quick to react to the slowdown in supply and the rising costs, the broader conversation rarely addresses the root cause of these disruptions, the ongoing war and the political context that has put Yemen in direct opposition to the Israeli regime”, Awad says. “It’s a painful reminder of how the industry tends to focus more on the economic side of things, such as cost and availability, rather than the human cost and the political context that led to these disruptions in the first place”.

This reinforces another point that Awad makes: The coffee industry’s silence isn’t particularly surprising. In many sectors, individuals have spoken out while corporations and those with power stay quiet “to protect their bottom line, business relationships, and contracts”. However, Awad says that, like other industries, coffee could be doing more—even the bare minimum, “which is to recognize the atrocities happening and call them what they are, a genocide. This is a simple, clear issue that shouldn’t be shied away from. At the very least, companies should be standing up for the oppressed and showing solidarity with those suffering”.

Everything Is Connected

The coffee companies that have refused to engage with the Gaza genocide may be operating under the misapprehension that the issue is somehow isolated—that beyond shipping delays or supply issues, it’s not relevant to them or to the communities they claim to support. But, assuming you care about equity within the coffee industry, that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

There’s a long history of seemingly disparate revolutionary endeavours intersecting. For instance, both scholars and Black Panther members have linked the Palestinian struggle to the Black liberation movement. “There will be no justice in the world for anybody until Palestine is free”, former party captain Aaron Dixon told Jesse Hagopian in The Progressive Magazine. “As long as the U.S. has the power to support the oppression of Palestinians, it will have the power to oppress Black people at home”.

More recently, activists have connected what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank to the climate justice campaign. One study showed that the first two months of the assault on Gaza contributed more planet-heating emissions than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in a year. The U.S. military, which sent warships to the region and carried out airstrikes on Houthi positions in Yemen, has the largest carbon footprint of any single institution on earth.

“Our liberation struggle is interconnected with global movements advocating for Indigenous rights, land rights, the fight against the fossil fuel industry and climate colonialism”, activists Rasha Abu Dayyeh and Abeer Butmeh said in an interview with International Friends of the Earth. “This is part and parcel of the collective struggle for a world where everyone has the right to live with dignity, free from oppression”.

These intersecting movements couldn’t be more relevant to today’s coffee industry. Modern coffee is a commodity that was built on the backs of the poor, the marginalised, and the oppressed. The centuries-old industry was once controlled by colonial governments, and is now dominated by multinational corporations. Today the majority of coffee producers live in poverty, while Indigenous workers, many stripped of their land, are among the most exploited in the industry. 

The coffee industry loves to talk about community and solidarity, supporting farmers and addressing the climate crisis, while all too often failing to connect the dots to the worldwide struggle. But Awad hopes this is beginning to change. 

“We believe that taking a stand against this injustice can help create a shift in the moral compass of the industry”, he tells me. “By speaking out, companies have the power to inspire change and show that doing what’s right matters more than profits or maintaining problematic partnerships. This shift could eventually extend into changing the current problematic practices within the coffee industry, encouraging more ethical sourcing, fair treatment of workers, and a greater focus on the welfare of coffee-producing communities”.

Hassanieh, meanwhile, has hope that the coffee community can come through for those facing oppression and hardship. “Coffee has always been a symbol of community and connection, but it also highlights global inequalities”, she says. “The coffee industry is tied to social and political issues, and the ongoing crises in the Middle East challenge us to reflect on what we value in our coffee consumption—beyond just taste”.