Coffee, Rust, Deforestation, Climate Change and The Global Market

Coffee, like gold, sugar and oil, has long been one of Latin America’s major exports, sustaining everyone from independent farmers in mountain regions to corporate bankers in capital cities, all while keeping weary minds alert throughout the world.

Yet over the last decade, changing climate patterns have intensified droughts and plagues in the region, creating conditions less suitable for coffee production and wreaking havoc on the industry that came to define, even shape, many hillsides in rural Central and South America. Today, as coffee growers struggle to recover from a string of weather-related events, some industry analysts have already foreseen a major shift in coffee production towards Asia and away from Latin America.

The long series of problems came to a peak this spring, when coffee prices doubled after a severe drought stunted the growing season in Brazil, the world’s top coffee exporter. The extent of the damage remains unknown, but the price hike arrived at the same time that many other Latin American nations underwent a record-breaking epidemic of coffee rust, or “roya” in Spanish, a fungus known to suffocate coffee trees and lower bean yields.
The rust outbreak began in 2012 and has since affected nations spanning from Mexico to Peru, with countries in Central America experiencing the highest levels of crop loss, said Monika Firl, social projects manager at Cooperative Coffees, a Montreal-based sourcing co-op that imports specialty coffee.
“In Nicaragua in particular, farmer groups have been really hit hard,” Firl said. “Some groups that we are working with might have 20 percent of their total harvest. There are other farmers we are working with in El Salvador that will have 5 or 10 percent of their usual harvest, so for a farmer that’s already living on the edge, this is disastrous.”
The outbreak is just one of three major epidemics to hit Latin American coffee growers in the last six years. There was also a coffee rust outbreak in Colombia from 2008-2011, where nearly a third of the nation’s harvest was lost to the fungus. Along with this year’s drought in Brazil, the three events were caused by erratic climate patterns, said Peter Baker a senior scientist specializing in commodities and climate change at the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International.
“It’s difficult to point the finger directly and say it’s because of climate change, but it’s consistent with more chaotic weather patterns which I think we’re seeing globally,” Baker said during a phone interview in May 2014.

Aside from higher prices and lower quality brews for consumers worldwide, the wave of agricultural catastrophes threatens the economic foundation of coffee growing nations in Latin America, where total coffee production has dropped about 20 percent since 2011, an estimated loss of more than $1 billion. In Central America alone, about 5 million people get their livelihood, directly or indirectly, from the coffee and their future remains uncertain.
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states “the suitability for coffee crops in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and El Salvador will be reduced by 40 percent” with increasing of temperatures. Regarding Brazil, the report says warmer summers could make coffee crop unfeasible in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, the nation’s major coffee growing states.

In 1870, Sri Lanka was the largest coffee producer in the world. At the time, it was a British colony known as Ceylon and the small island supplied Europe with much of its coffee until the first signs of a rust outbreak appeared in 1875. The fungus spread quickly and the colonizers failed to slow infection rates, resulting in the loss of 95 percent of the coffee harvest in less than 20 years.

It’s too early to tell whether the same fate awaits Central and South America, but the prospects are worrisome, Firl said.
“The position rust puts farmers in is so challenging,” Firl said. “Most of the support going out to farmers, I feel, is misguided. It’s pushing them towards chemical solutions, it’s a lot of talk and a lot of showcasing, grandstanding new policies, grandiose summits and very little is going to farmers to help them get through what’s a very horrific plague.”
Most efforts to combat the outbreak have been centered on developing new fungicides and fungus-resistant coffee trees, Firl said. Yet these remedies have proven to be problematic in Honduras, where 50 percent of coffee plants were rust-resistant varieties and the nation still suffered a 28 percent loss of coffee yields during the most recent outbreak.

Other areas like Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar and China where much of the rising coffee production is driving deforestation. While sustainable and fair-trade coffee certifications have made significant impacts on the industry over the last decade, Baker said they haven’t done enough to curb destructive land use practices.
"That’s a principle problem, that you have a lot of new coffee coming onto the market every year and most of that, I think, is coming from deforestation so this is something the coffee industry doesn’t really want to talk about, but it’s happening,” Baker said, citing studies by David Gaveau of the Center for International Forestry Research, that link coffee price fluctuations to deforestation rates in Sumatra.
The globalized production of coffee has kept crop prices relatively stable. New exports from Asia replace crop losses in Latin America and, until recently, consumers have remained unaffected.
“What the last years have told us is we lose millions of sacks of coffees because of rust and yet the price goes down,” Baker said. “So roya is a sort of earthquake that reminds us that we’re sitting on top of a fault and the fault is that the global market doesn’t work for agriculture in general.”

taken from here