Climate change set to cause coffee problems

“Climate change was through to affect coffee very gradually, but some shocking situations are being reported as a result of really drastic, chaotic changes, such as very little or too much rain.”

That is what Peter Baker, of the Centre of Agricultural Bioscience International (CABI), said last weekend whilst delivering a speech to the 25^th annual International Conference of Coffee Science.

Alongside explaining his fears about the sudden impact of changing weather patterns, the coffee researcher noted that disease and the continued presence of pests could once again plague the coffee growers and plantation owners of the world.

These perennial problems could cause major problems because of a perfect storm of adverse climatic conditions and a lack of available funds to fight disease and infestations on the ground. By paying farmers more, it is argued that they’d be able to afford preventative and reactionary products such as pesticides easier therefore securing their futures.

“Growers are not receiving adequate compensation for all their work, and that means they can’t allocate the funds needed to mitigate the impact of climate change,” Baker said.

One such person who is feeling the impact is Teodomiro Melendres Ojeda, who grows organic coffee on his farm in Peru.

“We coffee producers are living between a rock and a hard place,” he told Bloomberg.

His plantation had been hit by coffee rust, which has advanced at a rapid rate thanks to the presence of unusually high temperatures. The perennial bane of the coffee industry has begun to creep towards higher altitudes across Latin America, affecting areas that were usually considered out of reach.

For example, in Guatemala, the fungus only used to be prevalent up to 3,000 feet above sea level. So far this year it has been recorded reaching heights of 6, 000, according to Nils Leporowski, the president of the local National Coffee Association.

Mario Ordonez, a deputy manager of a Honduran-based coffee group shares these glum outlooks: “Rust is a problem that’s going to be around for a long time,” he said.