Today, coffee occupies a place of pride among plantation crops grown in India. The area under coffee is around 4.15 lakh ha of which Arabica accounts for 2.06 lack ha and Robusta accounts for the rest (2.09 lakh ha). The annual average production is around 3,10,000 t and above 75% of this is exported. Coffee had contributed nearly Rs.4600 crores of foreign exchange to the national exchequer annually. The coffee area is distributed in a total of 2,91,000 holdings of which only 2,658 belongs to large grower sector (above 10 ha). (Database on coffee, May-June, 2014,Coffee Board of India)
As an agro-based rural enterprise primarily, this industry is a souce of employment for over one million people in cultivation, processing and trade sectors. Coffee cultivation is also instrumental in preserving the precious forest ecosystem in traditional areas while in non-traditional areas coffee was introduced to check podu or shift cultivation and thus to control denudation of forest and also soil erosion.
Coffee cultivation is confined mostly to hilly tracts of Western and Eastern ghats as a well distributed annual rainfall is preferable. The ghats in Karnataka and Kerala and the North-Eastern region of the country receive rain from the South-West monsoon while coffee areas in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha get rain from the North-East mansoon. The South-West monsoon is normally active from June to September with heavy showers during July-August. The North-East monsoon is received in spells usually caused by low pressure depressions in the Bay of Bengal during October-December.
December to March are normally dry months. Summer showers are important for flowering in coffee and are received during March-April. Certain areas in Tamil Nadu where the North-East monsoon is prevalent, blossom occurs more than once.