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In recent weeks, the current U.S. presidential administration announced sweeping federal layoffs that could impact Hawaii’s coffee industry.
Many challenges have hindered coffee production in Hawaii for years, including disease, pests, and climate change. The federal government provides grants and personnel to combat these threats. However, as Savannah Harriman-Pote reports for Hawaii Public Radio, funding freezes and staff cuts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture put that assistance in jeopardy.
Federal funding has been vital over the past two decades in fighting the coffee berry borer beetle, which arrived in Hawaii in 2010 and caused millions of dollars in losses, and combatting coffee leaf rust. The USDA has invested millions in projects to fight both—most recently, the USDA gave $6 million to the Synergistic Hawaii Agriculture Council (SHAC) in 2021 for research on coffee leaf rust.
Suzanne Shriner, a Kona-based coffee farmer and administrator for the SHAC, told Harriman-Pote that the remaining $2.8 million of the grant was frozen without explanation. Although a temporary court injunction unfroze the money, Shriner worries about what will happen once that injunction expires in mid-March. “If that funding was lost, our scientists wouldn’t be able to continue working on it the way that they are,” Shriner said. “They’re working for the long-term solutions.”
The impact of USDA cuts has gone further than just funding freezes—across the country, the Trump administration has laid off scientists and researchers who were working on key agricultural programs. As part of the cuts, six employees at the USDA agricultural office in Hilo, Hawaii, were fired, a source told Harriman-Pote.
Two employees, an entomologist and a geneticist, were also let go but had their positions reinstated—an about-face that mirrors similar reversals across USDA offices. Shriner is pleased the two employees were brought back, although she says the uncertainty of future projects and funding “instills a culture of fear that is really hard to watch from the outside.”
It’s not just Hawaii—the federal funding freeze will impact coffee production across the globe. For years, USDA grants have helped farmers in Puerto Rico regenerate the island’s coffee industry. The current administration also announced plans to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which impacts dozens of coffee-related projects around the world.
For Shriner, the future of coffee production in Kona is at risk. “We are facing an existential moment, and I’m not sure we can properly document in this moment what Kona is going to look like in 10 years, because there’s so much change happening within our crop and within the larger world,” she said.
Read the full story from Hawaii Public Radio here.
