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By Hilary Brueck
Outgoing Executive Chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, worries about the future of your morning coffee ritual.
"Climate change will play a bigger role in the quality and integrity of coffee," Schultz told Time during a recent visit to a Starbucks coffee plantation in Costa Rica.
As the Earth heats up, predictable weather systems deteriorate. The rainy seasons are becoming dry in some areas, while increased rainfall has caused floods in other areas.
Farmers who grow coffee around the middle section of the planet are already feeling the pressure of less predictable growing seasons. In Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the number of beans is declining due to the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, which began to spread six years ago. Scientists believe that this coffee rust, as we know, is developing in radical oscillations at high and low temperatures, characteristic of climate change. Coffee production declined by an average of 31% in Colombia during a rust outbreak between 2008 and 2011, and the price of the coffee indicator increased by 55% during this period, according to one study of Food Security magazine.
In Brazil, an unusually unstable May may have slowed harvests and made coffee drying difficult, but in 2018, Brazilian production is expected to increase by six million bags, reports the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Scientists predict that "coffee-friendly" growing areas in Latin America (where pollinating bees thrive) could be reduced by 88% by 2050, as temperatures in the Tanzanian highlands reach their upper limit for coffee production.
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Starbucks is the fourth largest coffee seller in the world, according to a Euromonitor International survey conducted in 2017, so the company has a lot to lose in terms of climate change. To deal with this threat, Starbucks is studying new varieties of heat-resistant trees and drawing conclusions from open sources. The company is also distributing seedlings and seeds to newly developed coffee lines, promising to put 100 million soil in the ground by 2025.
"We have to be in the ground, grow coffee, to understand first-hand how to rectify and fix the situation," Schultz told Time.
More demand, but less coffee to go around
Coffee is now the second most traded product in the world (after oil). Coffee consumption in China has tripled in the past four years, according to a recent CBS News report. According to Euromonitor research, even coffee consumption in Canada has increased on average by 3.3% per year from 2010 to 2015. The Canadian Coffee Association now claims that more Canadian adults drink coffee than running water every day.
This means that coffee production will have to increase in the coming years to meet growing demand.
But time is not on the side of Starbucks. It takes between four and five years for new varieties of coffee to mature before their seeds can be harvested, which is longer than the three or four years that a traditional coffee tree takes to bear fruit. In addition, some Starbucks mushroom-resistant trees do not produce as much coffee cherries.The fields are smaller than usual when they finally arrive.
Of course, coffee is only a culture. Researchers have recently predicted that climate change is likely to cause shocks in corn production, undermine vegetable yields and make our food less nutrient dense. But climate experts have long said that people living in temperate coffee growing areas are more vulnerable to climate change than others.
The coffee disaster is infiltrating as climate change threatens the arabica plant
"Coffee is a delicate crop," Starbucks Bambi Semroc, vice president of sustainable markets and strategies for Conservation International, recently told Starbucks. "It has to grow at a precise altitude and receive a precise amount of rainfall – you already have these limiting factors, then climate change comes in and wreaks havoc on the ground that you thought would be suitable for coffee production."
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Read the original article on Business Insider
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