There is noth­ing like a good visual to drive home a point. Fortunately, or unfor­tu­nately, Mother Nature has pro­vided the world with the photo-op needed to put a face on the cost of cli­mate change – Tuvalu Island. For cen­turies Polynesians have lived on this group of island atolls near the Gilbert Islands and Australia. The US used it as an Air Operations base dur­ing WWII.

The once thriv­ing Tuvalu is now all but evac­u­ated because the sea level is ris­ing and engulf­ing the entire island. The pop­u­la­tion of the island has been evac­u­ated to reset­tle­ment camps in Australia. This isn’t just an odd occur­rence, this is the real thing, they are not going back home again. Rising tem­per­a­tures are caus­ing changes in sea lev­els in places not seen before. Soon Tuvalu, and its cul­ture and peo­ple, will be gone, rel­e­gated to being just a reef warn­ing on nau­ti­cal maps.

For years now, CoffeeTalk has cov­ered the approach­ing effects of cli­mate change and the impli­ca­tions on sup­ply and sus­tain­abil­ity. Up until now, it felt like the words went out, but all folks heard was ‘blah-blah-blah.’ I cer­tainly under­stand this. The issue of cli­mate change and the more accu­rate but less com­pelling ‘Global Warming,’ has been so firmly imbed­ded into the con­tentious­ness of the national polit­i­cal debate that the real­ity of cli­mate change has been lost. It has devolved to the point that if you accept that there is global cli­mate change hap­pen­ing now then you must be a Democrat and if you don’t think this…a Republican.

How ridicu­lous must we become as a peo­ple before we stand up and put a stop to this non­sense? The real­ity of cli­mate change is not open for debate; it is not a polit­i­cal ques­tion, it is here – now! What caused the cli­mate to change is the only debat­able ques­tion, and not a par­tic­u­larly use­ful one at that. Those that want to debate the causes of Global Climate Change please gather at the other end of the room.

We in cof­fee who have been to ori­gin and have spo­ken with grow­ers know that cli­mate change is real and the effects are inten­si­fy­ing. Reduced crop yields, deser­ti­fi­ca­tion, shift­ing grow­ing areas, and pop­u­la­tion dis­place­ments that are begin­ning to hap­pen are just the tip of a rapid melt­ing ice­berg. At the cur­rent pace of change, more land and peo­ple will be affected until the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion finally becomes out of control.

While politi­cians debate how to mit­i­gate the dam­ages of global warm­ing, we in cof­fee have no choice but to pro­duce strate­gies that adapt to the real­ity of con­di­tions on the farms. Water sup­plies are becom­ing scarcer and less pre­dictable, land that once sup­ported high qual­ity cof­fee agri­cul­ture is now no longer pro­duc­ing and avail­able land for new plant­i­ngs is increas­ingly scarce; drought is increas­ing the impact of pests, and extra­or­di­nary rain­falls are knock­ing the flow­ers and cher­ries off the trees. The costs of pro­duc­tion are ris­ing while yields are drop­ping. If spe­cialty cof­fee can­not adapt its prac­tices quickly, we may face the prospect of qual­ity alti­tude grown ara­bi­cas sim­ply disappearing.

In this issue of CoffeeTalk, we con­tinue this con­ver­sa­tion with in-depth explo­rations of the sci­ence and real­ity of sus­tain­abil­ity and cli­mate change. We also would like you thoughts, email us at info@coffeetalk.com.

On another note: CoffeeTalk is please to have Dan Bolton join us as a Contributing Retailing Specialist writ­ing on issues and oppor­tu­ni­ties fac­ing retail­ers in the US mar­ket. Dan is very well known in our indus­try as a deter­mined leader and advo­cate for the suc­cess of retail­ers and the cof­fee indus­try as a whole. We are very for­tu­nate to have him be part of our edi­to­r­ial voice.

Correction: Last issue in the View we stated that Green Mountain Coffee’s P/E was 265 when in real­ity it was 120, a big dif­fer­ence (but still quite a lot). We apol­o­gize for any con­fu­sion or mis-information this may have caused.

Cheers,