The world’s coffee market will be severely and negatively disrupted
by climate change in coming years, although the impact on Hawaiian growers
might actually be moderated somewhat.
A new study, The Impact of Climate Change on IndigenousArabica Coffee (Coffea arabica): Predicting Future Trends and IdentifyingPriorities, suggests that much of the globe’s coffee-producing terrain may
become unsuitable for growing the crop.
“The evidence from coffee farmers, from numerous coffee
growing regions around the world, is that they are already suffering from the
influences increased warming,” the report says.
The homeland of coffee is in Africa, and that’s where the
study assessed the impacts of climate change, modeling the impact at 2020, 2050
and 2080. It notes that coffee is a crop that does best in a fairly limited
geographic range, and can’t take a lot of climate change:
“Arabica coffee is
confirmed as a climate sensitive species, supporting data and inference that existing
plantations will be negatively impacted by climate change."
What that means in a time of climate change, is that coffee
locked by its roots into a specific piece of land won’t do well as the climate
zone around that land moves to another elevation or rainfall regime.
“Based on known occurrences and ecological tolerances of
Arabica, bioclimatic unsuitability would place populations in peril, leading to
severe stress and a high risk of extinction,” write authors Aaron P. Davis,
Susana Baena and Justin Moat of the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens,
and Tadesse Woldemariam of the Environment
and Coffee Forest Forum in Ethiopia.
This bad news isn’t entirely new. The scientific literature
has been sniffing along this path for some time.
A 2006 study in the Brazilian Journal of Plant Physiology
study appears to confirm the sensitivity of coffee to climate. Its abstract
sets the tone: “Overall, drought and unfavourable temperatures ... are expected
to become increasingly important in several coffee growing regions due to the
recognized changes in global climate, and also because coffee cultivation has
spread towards marginal lands, where water shortage and unfavourable
temperatures constitute major constraints to coffee yield.”
Why doesn’t coffee do well in dry conditions? Probably
because it evolved in conditions with reliable moisture, the Brazil study says:
“The native home of coffee species is characterized by low-water-deficit
conditions, which probably allowed evolution without the need to develop extensive
mechanisms to cope with drought stress.”
Still another report, this one from 2007, also predicts hard
times for coffee. it is entitled, Global Warming—the impact on global coffee.
The authors argue that coffee farmers who want to respond to
climate change need to start planting at higher elevations, where weather is
cooler, and to do it soon.
“Since coffee is a perennial that may be in the ground for
20+ years, decisions on planting or replanting should now take climate change
into account,” write authors Peter Baker and Jeremy Haggar.
The Hawai`i Data Book says that in 2010 the state had 8,000
acres in coffee production on 830 farms, with a farm value of $33.4 million. http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/info/economic/databook/db2011/section19.pdf
Near half that acreage is in a single farm on Kaua`i, which
mainly grows catuai varieties of arabica coffee. And some of the world’s most
prized arabica coffee, generally of the typica variety, is grown on hundreds of
small holdings in the Kona area of the Big Island. An arabica variety called
mocha or mokka is grown extensively on Maui.
Will Hawaiian coffee respond negatively to climate change?
Perhaps, although the moderating temperature impact of the surrounding ocean
may help keep the coffee fields from warming too much. On the other hand,
predictions of reduced rainfall as the climate warms pose a significant problem
for coffee growers.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2012
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