Climate Change
Are growers ready?
by James Di Properzio

There’s a coffee mug you may have seen. It illustrates global warming by showing a map of the world, and its picture changes when hot coffee warms the mug to show how the rising ocean levels will inundate the world’s coastlines. This is about as far as most people in the coffee world have gotten in considering the intersection of coffee and climate change.

“Nobody in the tropics is doing anything about it,” says Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans, who maintains relationships with growers and regularly travels to discuss coffee and environmental issues with them.

Cycon told me about the Arhuaca, a coffee-growing people of Colombia who have a priestly class living in isolation in the mountains. They call themselves “the elder brothers,” and they refuse contact with other peoples, to whom they refer as “the younger brothers.” Having observed the cyclical variations in both the vegetation and in the snow pack on the mountaintops over time, they have seen long-term changes as they’ve occurred, and realized it must be the result of the sort of changes they could see from development in the valleys. So the priests told the coffee growers downhill, who had been in touch with researchers, and in 1996, priests invited the researchers up to film a message. Their message for the rest of us, their “younger brothers,” was that we were permanently changing things about the Earth, and that whatever we were doing was wrong, so we should stop. Then they sent the videographers off and went back to their isolation.

Scientists understand very well how global temperature changes of just one degree Fahrenheit have already changed climates in many areas very noticeably, with corresponding effects on agriculture. In many of the regions with the best growing conditions, from the tropics and even through places like California, another couple of degrees is forecast to result in drought, invasive pests, and extreme weather conditions like the hurricanes and monsoons seen over the past couple of years. Coffee-growing areas are among those most vulnerable to these conditions, and the small changes thought to be inevitable in the next decade or two could render traditional growing areas unsuitable for the cultivation of coffee.

Arabica farms in India have already experienced the devastating effects of global warming. In the Coorg region, some areas have seen rainfall drop by one-third, from 106 inches per year to 70 inches, dramatically changing the ecosystem and growing conditions. With higher temperatures, too, infestation of Arabica plants with white stem borer has destroyed up to 35 percent of the crop, and robusta plants, immune to that borer, have been hit instead by the coffee berry borer. Growers there who had never given a thought to irrigation in such a wet climate have had to dig deep, high-volume wells, lowering the water table in the region. The Indian government has paid the farmers to monitor the life cycle of the borers so a means of fighting them effectively can be designed.

The prognosis for many traditional coffee-growing areas isn’t good. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has found that in Uganda, where the bulk of the land in the middle of the country is suitable for growing coffee, and where coffee and tea exports bring $422 million annually, a rise in temperature of only 2 degrees Celsius would make all of that land unsuitable for coffee production, while making a few scraps of land around the periphery of Uganda newly suitable. This would reduce the arable land for coffee to a small percentage of what is currently available and destroy the recent successes of coffee production as a development strategy there.

Awareness of the problem among growers is very slight. Many small local growers have no access to information that global warming exists, and most of the first-worlders in the industry who might be concerned about it on the global level haven’t begun to strategize about the coming changes. The UN can look at the big picture, but for countries like Uganda, the strategy may have to be one of adaptation to other crops, changing what is grown in each area as the local climate changes. As one crop becomes unsuitable, different crops may become viable in its place, except in areas expected to lose enough water to lose arability and turn to desert.

The other side of this migration of prime coffee-growing areas is illustrated by Tanzania. There, where coffee contributes significantly to the GNP, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development has collected scientific models of the changes that would be brought when the current warming trend continues through the next few decades. Here, though, increased temperatures are expected to increase coffee yields by nearly 20 percent. This is very good news, not only for coffee growers but for the nation’s GNP, so Tanzania has a complex strategy for reacting to global warming, taking advantage of the benefits to exports while adapting to the forecast losses in local staple crops such as corn.

A UNEP study has found that coffee and tea growers throughout the tropics are already under pressure from climate change. Many crops there are near their thermal limit, and even a slight change in average annual temperature could not only disrupt flowering, but even halt it entirely.

It is feared that changing conditions may lead some growers to move up to higher altitudes, where temperatures are lower. This is a very limited direction, as the band of higher ground on a mountain becomes geometrically smaller as you go up, and the potential for damaging the local ecosystem is immense. In Kenya, the total area for coffee and tea cultivation is expected to remain the same but to migrate upwards. The land now used around Mt. Kenya for tea production would all become useless for tea, and production would have to move up the mountain. That area is now forested, and the forests would likely be cut down, accelerating local and global warming. But with Kenya making more than $500 million of its $675 million a year in exports from coffee and tea, can the country afford not to move up the mountain? In growing areas already well suited to coffee and tea cultivation, the effects of global warming are many. The soil tends to dry more quickly, leading to cracking that can impact the smaller roots and soil organisms that support the health of the coffee tree. Coffee evolved under the canopy of larger trees, and so, in Arabica, the outer layer of the leaf cannot tolerate heat stress. And it can wilt. Both of these effects make the plant more vulnerable to pathogens, especially exotic pathogens that may move in to the area as it heats up. In terms of quality, higher temperatures may cause the flowering period to expand, stretching out the fruiting period, with a resulting decrease in quality.

Cycon is concerned about another possibility: About 30 years ago, Brazil had a drought that raised temperatures in areas of coffee cultivation, as droughts tend to do, by decreasing the vegetation’s ground coverage and eliminating the cooling cycle of rain and evaporation. A bacterial infection of coffee plants called “rust,” which causes a ruinously undesirable fault in flavor, had been unknown in Brazil; but the slight rise in average temperature caused an epidemic of the disease, and millions of coffee trees had to be destroyed. That sort of problem could arise across whole bands of the tropics with even a small global rise in average temperature.

What can most growers really do, though? Coffee growing will migrate to new areas. Growers whose farms will become less productive can’t move their land. These effects can’t be stopped at the local level, and irrigation and other remedies are only partial, temporary fixes. But coffee is a major world commodity. If those invested now realize that their fixed investments are in the process of changes that only global response can stop, they could conceivably put the united weight of a major industry behind fighting global warming, pressing world governments to implement the Kyoto protocols and go beyond them toward measures that would protect their investments and their industry. One example of adaptation comes from growers of the increasingly popular “red tea”—rooibos—in the Nieuwouldtville area of South Africa. They have changed cultivation techniques to preserve moisture, and in the process went organic, so that any loss in yield would be offset by the higher prices earned. With the help of the Environmental Monitoring Group, a Cape Town advocacy agency, they started plowing in a moisture-preserving technique, planted trees to slow drying winds across the crop and experimented with wild rooibos plants that tolerated drought better than the bred crop strains. During a 2003 drought that killed 40 percent to 70 percent of the rooibos bushes on local farms, the wild bushes scattered around the farms held on just fine. Hybridizing the wild and cultivated breeds may result in better-adapted plants that are productive and marketable. But it is still a work in progress.

One thing that many growers across the tropics can do for themselves is plant trees. In the past several decades, roughly half of the world’s coffee plantations have cut down their trees, or cut down forest to plant unshaded coffee. This decreases the ability of vegetation to counteract global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide, and it also raises local temperature. So these growers are themselves part of the problem. If growers worldwide appreciate the danger to their business, they can start by replanting trees and returning to shade growing. So, are growers ready for climate change? The answer, at this time, is clearly no. But look on the bright side: In the continental United States, where no coffee is now grown, maybe we will soon be able to grow all the coffee we need in the backyard garden.

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