Coffee Arabica evolved in a mild climate. We’ll never know for sure whether an Ethiopian goat-herder really brewed the first cup of Joe after he saw his flock behave strangely while munching on coffee seeds, but no similar mystery clings to the origin of Arabica coffee itself. The climatic band that characterizes the high foothills of East Africa is a picture of mild constancy. There is relatively little rain, and the temperature fluctuates between the mid sixties to high seventies Fahrenheit with little or no variation. Arabica has since migrated to other parts of the world with similarly mild climates, all of them situated within the tropics or subtropics. At the heart of this crop profile is a clear and naked vulnerability to the greenhouse effect.
There is now more greenhouse gas concentrated in the atmosphere than at any point in the last fifteen to twenty million years. Historically, when methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor have clogged the atmosphere, preventing the heat of the sun from escaping back into space after it hits the earth, average temperatures have risen across the globe. In many cases, the rise has been rapid and dramatic.
It’s not yet clear how severe global warming is going to become. There is a chance that world governments are going to agree to make laws that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent radical climatic disruption. But scientists are warning with increasing urgency that the world is on track to induce thirteen degrees of warming by century’s end—a “worst-case” scenario certain to have catastrophic consequences. A former head of the CIA has written that at thirteen degrees, “It will be difficult for countries to look after anything other than their own salvation.”
If nothing is done to reign in greenhouse gas emissions, or if not enough is done before the climate reaches what scientists call a “tipping point,” coffee production will change in ways that are difficult to envision and harder to plan for. British researchers have produced a climate model projecting that the Amazon will become a desert if the earth warms by thirteen degrees, which demonstrates why planning for the worst-case scenario is impractical. Coffee will no longer be grown in coffee growing countries if such a change occurs.
What the worst-case scenario can conceal, however, are the risks posed by the “best-case” scenarios, which are serious and far more immediate than is commonly recognized. Because there is a twelve-year lag-time between when carbon is emitted into the atmosphere and when it becomes a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, there is already a substantial amount of global warming baked into the climate. Although the likely effects of a warming world on coffee production have not been widely researched, climate models show that it is very likely that in coming decades microclimates in equatorial countries are going be scrambled and reconfigured.
Because Arabica coffee is not a particularly hardy crop, having evolved in mild climes, and because it is a perennial plant that cannot be easily re-situated, the effect of climate shifts – including variation in temperature and precipitation – are likely to be deeply disruptive to global coffee production. So much so, in fact, that earlier this year the Specialty Coffee Association of America asserted, “It is not too far-fetched to begin questioning the very existence of specialty coffee.”
Warming is occurring particularly rapidly at the earth’s poles and at its center, which means that climate change is going to hit coffee-lands in the tropics and subtropics early and hard. Projecting exactly how the greenhouse effect is going to change the climate of a particular coffee growing region is not possible, but climate change is going to apply with particular acuity to coffee lands because they hug the equator.
The threat moderate climate change poses to coffee can be separated into three broad categories: decreasing water supply; more severe storms occurring more frequently and at stranger times in the year; and complications created by more heat and drought. To flourish, Arabica needs a mild temperature range and well-defined seasons. Even if average temperatures rise only a few degrees in coming decades, the expected temperature fluctuations would still be catastrophic.
A few years ago researchers at the University of Sao Paolo published a study detailing the main factors responsible for Brazilian agricultural losses in the 1990s, and they identified two primary causes: excessive rain during the harvest period, and dry spells during the reproductive stage. Both of these eventualities are virtually certain to increase in severity and frequency in coming decades as climate change intensifies.
Climate models show that by 2050 it is very likely that 50 percent of all agricultural lands in Latin America and the Caribbean will be subjected to desertification and salinization. Water scarcity is a huge problem for Arabica, though not for an immediately obvious reason. “Arabica is not a particularly thirsty crop,” said Kenneth Davids, the founder of CoffeeReview.com, a comprehensive online coffee buying guide. “In most places in the world it’s not irrigated”, and where it is—parts of Brazil, Yemen, Ethiopia, Northern Australia, and Kauai—it’s only at “the most industrialized end of the business. Small growers don’t irrigate and the larger growers irrigate selectively.”
And yet while Arabica may not be especially thirsty, the tradition method used to mill it requires enormous amounts of water. Moreover, Arabica cannot withstand serious drought. A global analysis conducted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 identified a number of “hot spots for future drought,” two of which were Central America and parts of South America. Nations expected to be hit by drought in the IPCC’s analysis include Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Columbia, and Brazil. Drought was also projected to increase in frequency, duration, and severity in sub-Saharan Africa. The IPCC study ended by pointing to the possibility of “worldwide agricultural drought.”
The bad news doesn’t end there. According to the IPCC, even regions that are not projected to be hit as directly by drought will suffer consequences from accelerating climate change. Areas that get more rainfall, such as the higher mid-latitudes, will get this extra wetness in winter, out of the main growing season when crops cannot benefit as much. Another major problem will be the disappearance of glaciers: Himalayan, African, and, most problematically for specialty coffee, Latin American. According to the IPCC, Latin American glaciers—in Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru—may be gone completely within 15 years, leaving coffee growers bereft of a regular source of water.
These projections are based on the IPCC’s “best-case scenario” for the growth rate of global greenhouse gas emissions. In the last three months, the world’s leading climate monitoring laboratories have published a series of studies and data-sets finding that that rate is actually accelerating faster than previous worst-case projections, including those of the IPCC. If the world continues to warm at its current pace, scientists at a recent UN climate conference in Copenhagen warned, by 2050 drought may cover a full third of the earth’s land surface, beginning at the equator and extending outward in both directions. In this scenario, coffee cultivation will change in ways that are difficult to imagine.
Already, many people in the coffee industry are beginning to seriously consider how to adapt to climate change. “The smart [producers] are already working on the problem,” said Dan Cox, a former president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America who now runs Coffee Analysts, a coffee testing service. “With climate change and what it’s going to mean for glaciers and rainfall—they know they need to evolve.”
The International Coffee Organization has advised all coffee growing countries to devise methods to cope with, and adapt to, climate change. But coffee is one of the most heavily traded commodities in the world, and a high proportion of coffee growers are impoverished. Coffee is also generally farmed as a monocrop, which makes any kind of long-term drop in yields a career-ending problem for many farmers—not a good scenario for people already living on the poverty line.
But it’s not just impoverished coffee farmers who are going to be hit by climate change—it’s the entire coffee industry. Yields are down and if they stay down it will affect everyone from large estate owners to exporters and importers. It will affect roasters, retailers, and cafes. And of course it will affect consumers, who will see the price of their lattes rise even higher than they are currently.
The coffee industry as a whole doesn’t have great tools to adapt to climate change. It’s going to be a huge problem for everyone, everywhere. The best thing for the industry would be if world leaders muster the will and political wherewithal to do something deep and systematic to prevent runaway global warming by regulating carbon emissions. At the moment, however, pessimism about a global agreement to restrict greenhouse gas emissions is warranted. This means that, as the ICO has advised, it’s time for everyone to begin considering what to do about serious climate change.
In much the same way that New Zealand and Argentina do battle to sell the world’s best grass-fed beef, East Africa and Latin America fight for the mantle of world’s finest coffee producing region. And of course there’s internecine warfare too—Kenya pitted against Ethiopia, Guatemala
against Mexico, Brazil against Columbia, and so on. Some of these countries and some of these regions will be better equipped to adapt to climate change than others. In East Africa, where coffee accounts for more than half of the GDP of many countries, the funding and infrastructure to adapt to climate change is limited.
But in the wealthier Central American countries, as well as Columbia and particularly Brazil (the world’s fifth largest economy), with proper funding government officials can launch substantial public information campaigns to apprise coffee farmers of the adaptation options available to them, and to figure out how to reconfigure the industry in response to a warmer atmosphere. It will be a monumental undertaking for every country and every region, and many growers will be incapable of making the transition..
The four primary options for adaptation are hardier seeds, selective harvesting, changing milling practices, and, at the most dire end of the spectrum, moving. Unfortunately, as drastic as the last option is, in many cases the question may not be whether it’s necessary but simply how soon.
To some extent the coffee world can mitigate climate change by reducing its carbon footprint. Or perhaps a more accurate way to put it is that consumers can mitigate climate change by buying higher quality coffee, which is often organic and shade-grown. The use of fertilizers and pesticides produced using petrochemicals account for the largest source of carbon emissions in global agriculture, and the finer coffees are far less likely to have a petrochemical base than their commercial brethren. But virtually all climate policy experts agree that for global warming to be effectively mitigated world governments will have to make laws and sign treaties limiting carbon emissions. The coffee industry may be able to play at least some part in hastening the kind of political backing such action would require. Coffee is the second most popular beverage in the world, after soda. It’s an integral part of daily life for millions of people across the globe. If the world coffee industry can somehow unite to warn the world of the threat climate change poses to its product, it may help bring global warming home in a way that photographs of collapsing Arctic glaciers do not.
For while climate change may seem like a distant, abstract problem, in fact it is rapidly becoming the most serious threat to global stability and prosperity in the world.
Climate scientists agree with remarkable unanimity that without far-reaching action to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, we will see catastrophic climate consequences occur within our lifetimes. Still, for many people global warming is hard to see in daily life—it hasn’t yet become visually so apparent that it cannot be ignored. But the same elusiveness does not exist for people in the agriculture industry, and certainly for people in the coffee business. In the past, climate disasters were a normal part of doing business, but they only occurred occasionally.
Take a moment to consider what happened during the night of July 17, 1975, when temperatures across southern Brazil dropped below freezing. Chilly weather isn’t unusual in Southern Brazil, but this frost was different. For one thing, it was enormous: it stretched across the entire state of Parana, parts of which saw, for the first time in recorded history, snowfall. And it lasted for two days and two nights.
Brazil was then, and remains today, the world’s largest coffee producer. The effect of the “Black Frost,” as it came to be known, was to drive international coffee prices dramatically higher—up to a high of $3 per pound of green coffee, a 300 percent increase. A scandal ensued, with congressional hearings, market panic, and editorials in the New York Times. In Mark Pendergrast history of coffee, Uncommon Grounds, he writes that the Black Frost got its moniker from the visual devastation it left on the ground—low-flying airplanes passed over vast tracts of blackened flora. From the perspective of just about anyone in the coffee industry, however, the name was appropriate for its metaphorical poignancy—it took three years for international coffee prices to stabilize.
The Black Frost provided a glimpse of how quickly an unusual metrological event can reconfigure the coffee industry. Because of climate change, it must now be viewed as nothing less than emblem of the future. How will the coffee industry respond to the threat the greenhouse effect poses to its existence? And how will the world respond to the threat climate change poses to civilization? These are questions that everyone—within the coffee industry and without—must begin contemplating.
