The man who taught the ABC of coffee to small planters

Chikkamagaluru: In difficult times when there is no silver lining on the horizon, a messiah appears and that was V.G. Siddhartha who helped coffee planters achieve an amazing turnaround at a time when they were reeling under financial loss owing to poor price fixation in the 1990s.

Siddhartha who was then into the share market took the initiative to bring coffee into the open market which turned into a boon for planters. Hailing from a planter's family, the CCD founder, a post-graduate in economics, led a delegation in 1992 to then PM P.V. Narasimha Rao along with noted writer Poornachandra Tejaswi, Chikkamagaluru MP D.K. Taradevi and planters such as B.A. Jagannath and impressed upon the PM the need to trade coffee in the open market. Until then, small planters had no voice and earned very little from their produce.

Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading (ABC) in Chikkamagaluru and planters started to get international prices fixed in the New York market for their produce. It is estimated that domestic coffee consu mption is currently about 1 lakh 20,000 tonnes a year while it was a mere 30,000 tonnes earlier.