Breaking the Commodity Trap: A Conversation with Burke Campbell on Coffee, Sovereignty, and Nation Building
Dubai – Ali Alzakary
Coffee is more than a morning ritual—it’s a global industry steeped in history, power dynamics, and untapped potential. In this riveting interview, Burke Campbell, a Cree-Métis Canadian who traded the oil sands of Alberta for the coffee farms of Honduras, shares his journey of connecting the dots between resource extraction, economic sovereignty, and sustainable development. From his personal awakening to the parallels between Canada’s Indigenous communities and Honduran coffee farmers, to his groundbreaking work bridging Yemen’s ancient coffee legacy with modern markets, Burke’s story is one of resilience, vision, and a relentless pursuit of equity. Join us as we dive into this compelling conversation about redefining coffee’s future by reclaiming its past.
Growing up Cree with a father who worked in oil sands must have given you a unique perspective on resource extraction. What was that moment when you realized you needed to leave all that behind and head to Honduras to work in sustainable development?
It wasn’t a moment. It was a slow awakening that took years to understand.
Here’s what people don’t know about my father working in the oil sands: those oil sands are our family’s traditional trapline. That’s where my father was raised as a child, where our family sustained ourselves for generations. That land is ours. Except it isn’t anymore. My family ended up there after a series of forced migrations, and then my father ended up working the industry on his own ancestral land.
But here’s the deeper wound: my people weren’t even invited to participate. My father became the first Indigenous general foreman across any of the trades working there, and that was only possible through deep identity issues he carried. The cost of entry was losing pieces of himself.
My mother planted different seeds. She wasn’t Indigenous, but she was a social worker in Alberta who dedicated herself to working directly with Indian bands across Northern communities. Before I turned 12, we’d moved through so many of these communities that I witnessed firsthand what it looks like when your own land is developed without you, when you’re excluded from the systems built on top of what was yours, when the few who do manage to participate pay for it in ways that don’t show up on a paycheck.
So I grew up understanding both sides. My father showed me what it costs to participate in systems that weren’t built for you. My mother showed me what happens to communities watching wealth being pulled from their land while they’re shut out.
When I first arrived in Honduras, I was still incredibly naive. I didn’t see the connection between those Northern Alberta communities and the coffee farmers I was meeting. But as I spent more time on farms, I started recognizing parallel patterns: producers excluded from the value their own land creates, outside buyers controlling terms, the few farmers who do break through into specialty markets having to adapt to systems that weren’t designed with them in mind, wealth flowing out while communities remain marginalized.
That’s when it crystallized for me. I realized I had a deep social responsibility as a Canadian to use everything I’d been given – my voice, my access, my passport, my understanding of these systems – not to perpetuate another commodity chain where producers are excluded from value, but to fight for my new community in Honduras. To make sure that coffee wouldn’t do to these farming families what oil had done to the communities my mother served.
I’m Cree-Métis. I understand what it means when outsiders arrive promising prosperity. I grew up watching what happens when your own land generates wealth that you’re never invited to share.
Starting fresh in a new country at 34 couldn’t have been easy. What was the toughest part of those early days in Honduras, and what kept you going when things got rough?
I first arrived when I was 28. By 31, I was married with one child, stepfather to two others, and uncle to five more who basically lived with me as my own. So it wasn’t just starting fresh in a new country. It was suddenly responsible for eight children in a place I barely understood.
The reality is that the last 17 years have been framed around me splitting my time between working in Canada and living in Honduras. Coffee has never really fully sustained my life. It’s helped, but I’ve had to do whatever it takes to make it work.
My kids kept me going. Doing anything I could to insulate them from all the problems that come from living in such a place. Usually at the expense of my own personal stability. The toughest part wasn’t the language barrier or the cultural adjustment or even the economic precarity. It was knowing that every decision I made, every month I spent working in Canada, every risk I took with coffee, directly affected whether these kids would have what they needed.
Then COVID hit, and I was forced to stay in Canada for two years. I couldn’t get back to Honduras, couldn’t be with my family. That separation could have broken everything. Instead, it became the time when I discovered Yemen.
I became obsessed. Started digging through Ottoman archives, genetic studies, historical texts, anything I could find about Yemen’s coffee. And something clicked. Suddenly I could see it – the common thread connecting Canada, Honduras, and Yemen. Three places that seemed completely unrelated, but they all shared the same story: communities excluded from the wealth generated on their own land, knowledge systems dismissed by outside experts, people forced to participate in economies designed without them.
Yemen gave me the framework to understand what I’d been doing in Honduras all along. It wasn’t just about better prices for coffee. It was about reclaiming narrative, restoring agency, proving that the old ways aren’t backwards – they’re the future, especially as climate change forces the industry to finally pay attention to what farmers have known all along.
But I wouldn’t change a thing. Those children gave me a reason bigger than myself. They’re why I stayed when it would have been easier to leave. They’re why I kept pushing into coffee even when it didn’t make financial sense. They’re why Yemen mattered so much – because I needed to build something that could work for them, for their community, for their future. Yemen showed me how.
Building Trust with Farmers
Building trust with farmers is everything in this business. How did you earn that trust with Honduran coffee growers, and what’s been the moment that made it all feel worth it?
Building trust is the hardest part. I’m still working on it. And honestly, I’ve started to question whether “trust” is even the right word.
I saw firsthand how even direct trade with farmers was inadequate. Sure, we could achieve a price differential for one season, but then my company would want to be there the next season and the next season and the next. I watched how that created its own dependencies, its own power dynamics. It takes much more than better prices.
Yemen showed me that you need to build eternal relationships. Cultivation is a practice that comes from deep human history. Basically everything we consume today was the result of hundreds or even thousands of years of people taking wild grains and beans and completely transforming them into something that could sustain us. That knowledge, that practice, that relationship with land and plant – it’s generational. It’s eternal.
So when we talk about “building trust,” we’re still operating within a framework where I’m the outsider who needs to earn something from them. That framing itself reveals the power imbalance. Just saying that I need to build trust with farmers denotes that there’s forever going to be some economic inequality where I have power that they don’t.
I don’t think I’ve even begun to complete my goal. Because the goal isn’t trust. The goal is true economic sovereignty for farming communities. Trust is just a placeholder word for something much bigger – the ability for farmers to control their own narratives, their own value chains, their own futures. Until that happens, I’m still part of the problem, even if I’m trying to be a better part of it.
So no, there hasn’t been a moment where it all felt worth it. Because “worth it” would mean I’ve arrived somewhere, and I haven’t. The work continues.
Weaving Yemen and Honduras Together
Working with Mokha Story as Technical Advisor for Yemen’s auction house sounds fascinating. How are you weaving together Yemen’s incredible coffee story with what’s happening in Honduras?
I’m following Latif’s lead and his dream. Everything starts there.
Yemen is basically the template for the whole global commodity system. Yemen had this incredible ability to cultivate coffee and created a monopoly over it that made coffee one of the most sought-after luxury items in the world. But then I watched how that same commodity system is now used as a weapon of sorts against all origin countries. Getting the raw form of coffee – and now many other products – out of nations and into other nations so those other nations can benefit from the secondary processing.
That’s when I understood what all origin countries need to do in order to achieve truly sustainable economies. What they need to do to develop.
The technology of processing raw coffee hasn’t changed since Yemen developed coffee roasting. It’s incredibly simple, and yet mysteriously so hard to achieve. Why? Because the system is designed to keep origins exporting green beans.
I see Yemen’s deep problems and Honduras’s deep problems as just a different flavor of economic control from abroad. And the only way to change that is to see that each nation’s problems all have a common thread. The approach to solutions might be different, but the diagnosis is virtually the same.
All nations that find their raw products completely extracted for other economies are missing out on true development at an exponential, almost incalculable scale.
What I’m doing with the auction house for Yemen, and what I’m trying to build in Honduras, comes from the same understanding: we’re not just moving coffee. We’re trying to reopen the world’s oldest coffee market, guided by trading protocols developed over hundreds of years. This isn’t new. This is the oldest coffee market in the world, and we’re reopening it.
The world needs balance. And these nations need voices that are all calibrated to understanding this common inequity. That’s how Yemen and Honduras connect – not through some romanticized sister-city partnership, but through the shared recognition that we’re all fighting the same system, just with different accents.
Opening Saudi Market Channels
Opening up $80 million in Saudi market channels – that’s incredible! Was there a particular conversation or breakthrough moment where you knew this was really going to happen?
It was Latif showing me that the Saudi coffee market is quite closed to Honduras, and Honduras has a deep capacity to be a major player in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia imports 70,000 to 90,000 tons of coffee annually, spending over $1 billion. The market is growing at 6.5% annually and is expected to reach nearly $2.3 billion by 2028. But here’s what matters: Ethiopia dominates Saudi imports with a 77% share. Honduras, despite being the world’s seventh-largest coffee exporter, barely registers in that market.
And it all comes down to awareness, trust, and education.
I believe that Honduran coffee has a place as a pillar of supply in Saudi Arabia. Honduras produces 5.5 to 5.8 million bags annually – all Arabica, grown between 1,000 and 1,600 meters. We’ve built strong quality systems, we have 120,000+ coffee farms, and we’ve proven ourselves in demanding markets like Germany, Belgium, Italy, and increasingly South Korea since our 2020 free trade agreement.
But more importantly, I believe this relationship provides an alternative market for both Saudi Arabia and Honduras. Especially in these tumultuous times of great volatility within the coffee market.
Coffee prices hit record highs in 2025 – Arabica reached $4.41 per pound, the highest ever recorded. Climate change is devastating yields in Brazil and Vietnam, which together supply over 50% of global coffee. Droughts, frosts, erratic rainfall – these aren’t temporary disruptions anymore. FAO predicts 50% of current coffee-growing land could become unviable by 2050.
In this context, Saudi Arabia relying so heavily on Ethiopian supply is a vulnerability. Honduras represents geographic diversification, stable production, and established quality infrastructure. For Honduras, the Saudi market represents diversification away from over-reliance on the US and Europe, which together take over 60% of our exports.
When global coffee stocks hit 20-year lows and prices swing 70-90% in a single year, both producing and consuming countries need more options, more partnerships, more resilience built into the system. That’s what this is about – not just opening a market, but building the kind of relationships that can weather what’s coming.
The Most Mind-Blowing Discovery
Digging through Ottoman archives and genetic studies for coffee research – what’s the most mind-blowing thing you’ve uncovered about coffee’s real history?
It’s not one discovery. It’s how four separate revelations came together to show the same thing: that what we call “coffee history” is actually a perfectly documented catastrophe.
First, the genetics. In 2021, Christophe Montagnon’s team found that 57% of Yemen’s coffee belongs to a genetic cluster that exists nowhere else on Earth. Meanwhile, every cup of coffee outside Ethiopia and Yemen traces back to 20 to 50 individual plants taken between 1616 and 1723. The genetic bottleneck is so severe that global coffee has less diversity than most endangered species. Your morning cup is more inbred than a captive breeding program.
Second, the archives. Ottoman tax records from the 1630s documented multiple coffee varieties, different grades, elevation-specific types, processing methods tied to specific outcomes. They recorded an agricultural system so sophisticated that modern agronomists still struggle to comprehend it. This wasn’t primitive farming. This was biotechnology operating at the speed of seasons, refined over eight centuries.
Third, the legal theft. In 1612, the Dutch and Ottomans signed a capitulation agreement that made coffee trade perfectly legal. Which is the most damning part. This wasn’t piracy or smuggling or romantic adventure. It was systematic appropriation through proper channels, with contracts and receipts and official stamps. The Dutch spent ninety years learning everything they needed to know, then took just the narrow slice of genetics they could manage, leaving behind the diversity and the knowledge.
Fourth, the knowledge gap. Recent genetic research shows that what Yemeni farmers called “Udaini” or “Dawairi” weren’t stable genetic varieties in the modern sense – they were vernacular names encoding generations of cultivation knowledge tied to place, microclimate, processing methods. The names themselves were technology. When the Dutch took the plants without the knowledge, they captured seeds but not understanding. They achieved cultivation but not complexity. They produced quantity but not quality.
Here’s what’s mind-blowing: these four discoveries prove the same thing. The coffee industry was built on a genetic bottleneck created by legal extraction that documented its own crime while failing to steal the actual knowledge. We have the receipts. We have the genetic evidence. We have the archives showing what was lost. And we have an industry that’s now facing climate collapse because the diversity we needed was left behind, and the knowledge that could save us is dying in the mountains we’re bombing.
The Ottoman archives don’t just show what happened. They show that everyone knew what was happening, approved it through proper legal channels, and documented the destruction with bureaucratic precision. The catastrophe we’re facing now was built into the system from the beginning, recorded in triplicate, filed correctly.
That’s what keeps me up at night. Not that coffee’s history is theft – but that the theft was so thorough, so legal, so well-documented, that we convinced ourselves it was progress. And now the genetic poverty created by that “legal” appropriation threatens the entire industry, while the solutions sit in Yemeni farmers’ fields, encoded in knowledge systems that colonial archives carefully recorded before helping to destroy them.
We have the proof. We’ve always had the proof. We just preferred the pirate stories.
Traditional Methods as the Future
In your Yemen Coffee Book, you make a strong case that old-school farming methods are actually the future, especially with climate change breathing down our necks. What convinced you of that?
The moment I realized that Yemen had an answer for basically any sort of climate stress or disease stress. That answer might have taken a few generations to cultivate, but by the time we got to the 1600s, they were ready for anything the world threw at them. And each time it was an opportunity to utilize or develop an even better coffee. It was always about quality.
Look at what the Ottoman archives documented: varieties for high terraces where frost threatens, varieties for dry eastern slopes, varieties for valleys where heat pools. The Khawlan variety that survives on 200mm of rainfall annually – that’s less than Las Vegas gets. The Haraz cultivar that produces sweet cherries in near-desert conditions. The Bani Matar strain that resists coffee berry disease without any chemical inputs.
At any temperature, at almost any elevation, at any hint of disease – they had a variety ready. Not just to survive, but to excel. They weren’t selecting for maximum yield or ease of harvest. They were selecting for quality under stress. Which means they were accidentally breeding for exactly what we need now: resilience with excellence.
The proof isn’t just historical. It’s happening right now in competitions. The 2024 Best of Yemen auction set a world record – $1,159 per kilogram for the top lot. The average was $369 per kilo. That’s not sentimentality or storytelling premium. Those coffees scored over 90 points in blind cuppings by international judges. One scored over 90 points – that’s extraordinarily rare for any coffee, anywhere.
And here’s what’s most important: these aren’t isolated exceptional lots. The entire representation of coffees from Yemen that participate in competitions score at levels no other origin can match. You can’t describe any other coffee the way you describe Yemen – thick as jam, with complexity that sommeliers struggle to articulate. That density, that intensity, that’s what eight centuries of selection under stress produces.
Yemen grows coffee with rainfall levels that experts say make cultivation impossible – between 244 and 379 millimeters per year versus the 1,400 millimeters that’s supposedly minimum. The trees don’t just survive, they thrive. And they produce coffee that makes buyers from Saudi Arabia, Japan, Europe, the US compete in auctions, driving prices to levels that prove quality isn’t about inputs – it’s about knowledge.
When coffee leaf rust devastated Central America, resistant varieties had to be rushed from seed banks. But Yemen’s terraces? The farmers there tell stories about rust coming “like fire through the mountains” generations ago. Some trees survived. They planted from those survivors. Now their coffee “laughs at rust” – what scientists call horizontal resistance that took modern breeding programs decades to try to replicate.
Climate change is accelerating everything. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, new disease pressures – the coffee industry is spending billions trying to engineer solutions. Meanwhile, Yemen has been running these experiments for eight hundred years. Every variety they maintained was an adaptation to stress. Every generation of selection was training coffee to survive what’s now becoming universal.
The traditional methods aren’t backwards. They’re sophisticated biological science operating at the speed of seasons. What the Dutch took ninety years to approximate, what modern research stations struggle to replicate – Yemen had already perfected it by maintaining diversity, selecting under actual field conditions, and never losing sight of quality as the ultimate measure.
That’s what convinced me. Not romanticism about tradition, but data. Genetic studies showing unique adaptation. Auction results proving quality. Climate evidence showing Yemen growing coffee in conditions that will be standard as temperatures rise. The traditional methods work better than modern alternatives because they were developed to solve harder problems than modern coffee has faced – until now.
The future looks like Yemen’s past. We just need to admit it before it’s too late to learn from it.
The Yemen-Honduras Exchange Vision
Teaching Yemeni processing techniques to Honduran farmers is such a cool cultural exchange. How’s that going, and what changes are you seeing on the ground?
It’s a dream right now. But it’s the dream that drives everything I’m doing.
I have this completely idealist vision of bringing a coffee cultivator from Honduras to Yemen on a fact-finding mission. A diplomatic mission. A ceremonial mission. I want to film it, document it, and have that information deeply affect how everyone in the world cultivates coffee – to recalibrate the entire industry’s approach.
Think about what that would mean: a Honduran farmer, someone who’s been told their whole life that modern agronomic practices are “best practices,” standing on a Yemeni terrace that’s been producing coffee for 800 years with 200 millimeters of annual rainfall. Watching how varieties are selected. Learning why certain trees are kept even when they don’t produce much in good years – because they’re insurance for bad years. Understanding that what looks like chaos is actually sophisticated risk management.
The exchange wouldn’t be about transplanting techniques. You can’t just take Yemeni methods and apply them in Honduras – the contexts are different, the challenges are different. But the principles? The philosophy of cultivation? That’s what could transform everything.
Yemen developed coffee cultivation through constraint. Honduras has been taught to develop it through input – more fertilizer, more chemicals, more irrigation, more intervention. What happens when a Honduran farmer sees that the highest-quality, highest-value coffee in the world comes from the opposite approach? From less intervention, more observation, deeper understanding of what each variety needs rather than forcing all varieties to conform to one system?
I want to document a Honduran farmer learning from a Yemeni farmer whose family has been selecting coffee for thirty-seven generations. Not as some romanticized agricultural tourism, but as serious knowledge transfer between peers. The kind of exchange that should have happened 400 years ago but didn’t because colonial powers weren’t interested in learning – they were interested in taking.
This would be different. It would acknowledge that Yemen holds knowledge the rest of the world needs. That the “primitive” methods are actually advanced biotechnology. That climate change means we need to learn from people who’ve been farming in climate extremes for centuries, not from research stations trying to engineer resilience in controlled conditions.
The changes I want to see aren’t just in Honduras. I want this exchange to recalibrate how the entire coffee industry thinks about cultivation. To shift from “how do we make coffee fit our industrial systems” to “how do we work with what coffee has already learned through centuries of adaptation.”
So no, it’s not happening yet. But that’s the mission. That’s what all of this is building toward – creating the conditions where that exchange becomes possible, where it gets documented, where it changes how we think about coffee’s future by finally paying attention to its past.
The fact-finding mission I’m dreaming about isn’t just about finding facts. It’s about finding the future by learning from the people we should have learned from all along.
Five Year Vision
Fast forward five years – where do you see this Honduras-Yemen partnership, and how do you think it’ll change the way the world thinks about coffee?
This question has really crystallized for me, especially in the last year. I’ve moved beyond thinking it’s just about ensuring growers are fairly compensated. That’s each nation’s responsibility, certainly, but now I’m more focused on nation building in coffee communities all over the world.
In coffee communities everywhere, there are deep unemployment problems. And the true economic potential lies where it always does – in how they process their primary resources. How they can control and capture the wealth of roasted coffee. How they can do things their way.
In five years, I see this relationship playing out across all originations. There’s a deep exchange of knowledge, practice, understanding, and high-resolution support where we all help each other in pursuit of creating true national sovereignty and actual sustainable development.
Because relying on aid agencies whose help stops the moment nations want to industrialize this sector of their economy has proven that it will never achieve its goals. The goals of the northern sustainability complex do not align with the goals of the southern pursuit of sustainability and economic sovereignty.
What I envision is coffee-producing nations learning from each other, teaching each other their processing techniques, sharing their market development strategies, and supporting each other’s industrialization. Yemen teaching Honduras. Honduras teaching Ethiopia. Ethiopia teaching Colombia. Not waiting for permission from the North. Not accepting a model of development that keeps them permanently dependent on exporting raw materials.
This Honduras-Yemen partnership is the template. It shows what’s possible when producing nations connect directly, share knowledge horizontally, and refuse to accept the commodity trap as inevitable. In five years, I hope to see this replicated across dozens of origin countries – all building their own roasting capacity, their own brands, their own direct market access, and their own economic sovereignty.
That’s how we change the way the world thinks about coffee. Not by asking consuming nations to be more ethical in their purchasing. But by producing nations taking control of their own economic destiny.
