Say it ain’t so, Joe
Lack of new growing sites, coupled with climate change, threaten industry worldwide
Coffee consumption is surging — just as climate change results in dwindling land suitable for beans. And you know what that means for your pocketbook,
The world’s habit of drinking about two billion cups of coffee a day is taking its toll on the planet and climate change could have an effect on our daily hit of caffeine.
Coffee consumption also appears to be increasing, so much so it is estimated that 40 million to 50 million bags more of coffee will be needed in the next decade, says Andrea Illy, chair and CEO of illy caffè, who adds that is similar to the entire crop Brazil produces yearly. Brazil is the world’s top coffee producer.
Growing conditions in Mexico and Central and South America are changing as temperatures swing from severe heat to cold and once predictable rainfall turns into anything but. Add to that more pests and the spread of coffee rust — a fungus that can wipe out entire crops — and a coffee climate crisis is near at hand.
The topic of the warming planet is of keen interest at the Global Coffee Forum, a meeting of the world’s top coffee makers, in Milan, Italy.
“Sooner or later, in months or years, we’ll have to make a bold decision about what to do,” Illy said Wednesday. “We don’t know where this coffee will come from.”
The U.S.-based National Coffee As- sociation said nearly100 million people are involved in the coffee industry worldwide.
“This is very much on our radar,” said Joseph DeRupo, a spokesman for the NCA. The association serves 325 companies representing 95 per cent of coffee commerce in the U.S.
There are other factors that need to be considered in adapting to climate change, like new growing sites, DeRupo said.
“If there is global warming that is appreciable, perhaps coffee can be grown on the Sierra Nevada in Cali- fornia. Apart from global warming as such, China is undergoing efforts to grow coffee even, tearing out tea plants to grow coffee, I understand.”
DeRupo added coffee consumption patterns have been strong but fairly consistent and he is unsure if demand will be growing exponentially.
Already, some are predicting a global coffee production shortage this year.
Alexander Myers, a Kansas University doctoral candidate in sociology, is studying the coffee trade and globalization. Myers says the movements away from small coffee farms run by local farmers toward more technical, mass production farms could further harm the land and make the shortage worse.
Coffee usually grows in smaller, shaded areas but a technical growing process is more like a large soybean farm and it requires a lot more water.
“It’s very taxing environmentally,” Myers said in a news release concerning his study, “Trading in Crisis: Coffee, Ecological Rift, and Ecologically Unequal Exchange.”
There are two main types of com- mercial coffee: the premium bean Arabica and the more bitter Robusta. Brazil grows mostly the smoother Arabica.
However, Arabica coffee, used by illy and also by Starbucks, is most at risk from the warming earth, Illy said.
Coffee is highly sensitive to climate change, wrote Christian Bunn of the department of agriculture economics at Humboldt Universitat in Berlin, in a study published in the journal Climatic Change.
His research indicates that climate change could reduce the global area suitable for coffee by 50 per cent.
“The world’s dominant production regions in Brazil and Vietnam may experience substantial reductions in area available for coffee. Some regions in East Africa and Asia may become more suitable, but these are partially in forested areas, which could pose a challenge to mitigation efforts,” Bunn wrote.
The future of the coffee industry is sustainability, such as figuring out how to waste less and recycle more. The industry is also working hard to figure out how to reuse the popular K-cups, DeRupo said.
“With the single cup brewing format becoming more popular, there is less coffee being wasted. That could impact demand. You make one cup at a time as opposed to making a pot and dumping the rest down the sink,” he said. With files from Bloomberg