What We've Been Led to Believe About Coffee and Climate Change Part Two
Zooming in on the direct effects of climate change on coffee farms.
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On Tuesday, the New York Times published an article called “The Last Eight Years Were The Hottest on Record.” This news is likely not surprising to most, especially if you live in one of the many areas that experienced record heat waves in 2022. And if you’re reading this, you likely have some understanding that the warming planet will have—or already has had—a negative effect on coffee.
In my latest episode with Karla Boza, the third-generation coffee farmer explains why climate change has such a devastating effect on coffee. It’s not just about the coffee plants themselves (although they are gravely affected), but about the entire ecosystem and labor force surrounding coffee.
Karla: So the way that weather happens and works in El Salvador—and why it’s supposed to be an ideal country for growing coffee and why it has worked so well in the past—is that we have very distinct weather seasons … so it’s either raining, which is our winter, or it’s not, which is our summer...
So what happens is that at the beginning of the year, let’s say around April or something, we usually have a very strong rainfall. That strong rainfall indicates to the plant, “Okay, the winter is here, and the rainy season is here, and it’s time to grow and expand.”
Then, if you get a certain amount of millimeters of rain, it tells the plant, “Okay, it’s time to put out the flowers,” and maybe a week after that initial rainfall, you will have coffee blossoms come up, and that starts the whole coffee cycle. Once they shrivel up, you will see that in between, there is this little seed, and it will just start growing and growing and growing and plumping up, ultimately becoming a coffee cherry for you to harvest.
Karla says that this annual process needs to be predictable: Coffee-picking is labor-intensive, and knowing how much rain a coffee plant receives and how long it’ll have to ripen can tell you a lot about the quality of the cherry before you ever get to taste the beans inside. And for a long time, this process was predictable. But, because of climate change, that system has been completely disrupted.
Karla: But what happened last year was that during harvest, it rained during December. And the rain alerted the plants during December, saying, “Oh, the rain is coming. You need to start creating coffee flowers to restart that whole process.”
So [the rain] altered that, and a lot of our trees thought that winter was coming … and that was really destructive for the whole cycle of our coffee. So then, right now, even though it’s still raining and raining and we’re still in our winter, we have coffee cherries that are already red and mature and ready to be harvested, even though—maybe I want to say 85% of our coffee trees and our coffee cherries are still green. They won’t be ready to harvest until maybe a month from now.
That is super damaging because it disrupts the whole cycle of these trees and ultimately affects your costs because you need to pull people from their day-to-day activities on the farm and into coffee harvesting. They need to pick and choose these coffee cherries that are [scattered throughout] the whole farm, which could even be in between the same coffee plant.
I wanted to highlight this section because it reflects my theme of this year, of getting closer to our coffee. For many, coffee is a fixed good, a means of delivering caffeine to your body to jumpstart your day. For some (I’d venture to guess many of the readers here), coffee is a more nuanced subject, with variations in quality based on the coffee shops you go to or the bags you buy. But when you zoom in at the farm level, coffee has become erratic and unreliable, and simple things such as rain falling too soon can have cataclysmic results.
When I Google “coffee and climate change,” a familiar factoid pops up over and over again: By 2050, “about 50 percent of the land with conditions suitable for growing the two main species of coffee, arabica and robusta, which account for 99 percent of commercial supply” could be unsuitable for growing coffee. This isn’t far away, but it’s far enough to be an abstraction—a thing we can trick our minds into thinking we don’t have to contend with today. Our understanding of coffee and climate change is so consumer-focused—who will have access to coffee and how much—that we forget who’s suffering right now.
There are a lot of jumping-off points we could explore if we look closely at coffee and climate change. In my conversation with Karla, we talked about how expectations around coffee quality—which come from buyers and roasters, and impact farmers—are becoming more stringent, even while climate change makes coffee-growing ever more challenging.
Then, I saw this article from Zac Cadwalader, an editor at the coffee publication Sprudge:
The piece is about non-coffee coffees, or items meant to mimic coffee in some way, often united under the umbrella goal of building a sustainable product. “Each product launch and revelation around this space comes marauding with claims about making coffee ‘more sustainable,’ citing cherry-picked facts about deforestation and other alleged negative side effects of some coffee farming practices,” he writes.
Cadwalader mentions Zero Coffee, a “cell-based” sparkling coffee drink that seeks relevance through generalized claims that growing coffee is bad for the environment. “These claims function as a sort of zero-sum game, in which the vague totem sustainability becomes the end-all be-all, conveniently forgetting to ledger the impacts on those who stand to lose the most from not-coffee: the producers, those very real, terribly inconvenient human beings who actually grow and harvest the coffee in the first place,” Cadwalader says.
Cadwalader goes further by discussing just how many of the “facts” that these start-ups wield are misconstrued, and that it’s not coffee itself that’s harming the environment. But what I think is often glossed over is that part of the reason climate change is so devastating to farmers is that we—roasters, importers, consumers—expect a fixed item from an inherently volatile landscape. Coffee is an agricultural product: It will always differ in taste from year to year, even without the added impact of climate change. If we care about its future, we must allow for, and build in, risk mitigators for these fluctuations and changes.
New entrants to the coffee industry may well understand that coffee growing will radically transform because of climate change. But some use this fact as an excuse to create products that nobody asked for rather than analyze why climate change is so devastating to begin with—or assist the people for whom environmental changes will cause the most harm.
Climate change is obviously disastrous in its own right: It impacts how farmers organize their labor, affects yields, and creates unpredictability and uncertainty in quality—and it’s an unavoidable eventuality that climate change will severely limit and change where coffee can be grown. But we have yet to find a way to create flexibility in the actual coffee we receive, because so much of coffee is bought based on rigid understandings of quality.
Truthfully, consumers have yet to really feel the impact of climate change on coffee, so perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen headlines that clearly lay out how difficult it has made coffee farming, as Karla did in this episode. It’s time to demand more, and look beyond the typical headlines, to ask: Whose voice is being heard? And when a legitimate concern like climate change is being discussed, whose interests are being represented? In most cases, it’s not the people who are most affected.
More on coffee and climate change here.
Photo by Irem Dursun
Have you read Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi? Her section on coffee is right up your alley.