The Promise and Perils of Our Coffee Future

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People everywhere keep wanting more and better coffee. But can our planet keep supplying it?

Great news: demand for top-quality coffee is on a roll in every region of the world. Not-so-great news: coffee production is diminishing, and places suitable for cultivation will shrink drastically over the next three decades.

Maybe good news: innovative solutions are in the works. But will remedies come in time to keep filling our K-cups?

Coffee labeled as single origin, sustainable, or fair trade is no longer a niche market. Scandinavia, Germany, and Italy have been connoisseurs for years, and the expanding economies of eastern Europe are in love with specialty coffee culture. Asia’s growing middle class also wants more and better coffee; the Asia-Pacific region’s specialty coffee market is forecast to grow by 15.3% annually from 2022–2030, reaching a total value of $16.9 billion, according to Research and Markets.

Third-wave coffee shops, importers, and roasters have taken off in the Middle East and in South Asia, with Dubai and India leading the charge.

India’s fast-growing Hatti Kaapi and Third Wave Coffee companies are aiming to open 500 new shops between them by 2023.

In Dubai, the craze has gone from new coffee shops to coffee importing and roasting. The Dubai Multi Commodity Center (DMCC), which opened in November 2018, is able to process up to 20,000 metric tons of green coffee annually. DMCC says it aims to bring Dubai and the Middle East back to a long-ago predominance as a hub of coffee activity.

Southeast Asia is also in trend. Indonesia’s Janji Jiwa chain was included in Forbes Asia magazine’s 2022 “100 To Watch” list of hot companies. The Kopi Kenangan chain, also from the archipelago, says it will open thousands of stores across Southeast Asia in the next few years. Singapore-based chains like Ratio and Flash Coffee are betting on continuing high demand, investing in expansion over the next five years. And in China, so is Coffee Box and many other companies. Then there’s Korea, Japan, Taiwan.

In the United States, coffee consumption rose by 14% from January 2021 through January 2022, according to the National Coffee Association. Fifty percent of people in the U.S. — 150 million people — consume specialty coffee every day.

So is this a great moment for coffee producers worldwide?  Unfortunately, the consumption boom comes just when output is decreasing. Yes, world coffee production for 2022/23 is forecast to rebound by 7.8 million 60-kilogram bags from the previous year to reach 175.0 million bags, a rise of 4.7%.  But even after this slight year-on-year recovery, production will be 27% lower than the previous high-yield year of 2020, according to Brazil’s Conab coffee industry agency.

An inconvenient climate

We’ve all heard the dire warnings that a production shortfall will be inevitable as weather becomes more extreme. One of the first major studies, in 2014, by the Natural Resources Institute in the U.K.  predicted a sharp drop in output in Latin America, Vietnam, and Africa. Of the three temperature-change scenarios studied, the least severe would see a 76% shrinkage of viable growing acreage in Brazil’s most suitable areas over the next 50 years. In, Colombia viable acreage would shrink by 63%.

A 2022 study by the International Coffee Organization projects that four of the top five producers of coffee in the world (Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, and Indonesia) will see their best coffee growing areas decrease in size and suitability. These and other studies name a variety of causes: drought, floods, coffee leaf rust (CLR), other pests. But the factor behind all of them is climate change.

Coffee is an especially finicky crop that does not like changes in seasonal weather. Disruption of weather patterns and seasons affect the bush’s growth phase, flowering phase, and ripening phase. Excess rain causes berries to fall while still green, making them unusable. Even a moderate lack or excess of sunlight can ruin a harvest.

And climate change is not only about warming. Last year, abnormally cold weather caused a destructive wave of frost in Brazil, reducing output by 30–50%. This year, severe rains flooded fields in Brazil’s main coffee-producing region, Minas Gerais, and entire harvests were lost.

Then there’s water scarcity. The growing impact of the 2020 drought may hinder flowering prospects for Brazil’s 2022 crop. And this comes after the 2021 harvest dropped 25.7% to yield one of the nation's smallest crops in 10 years.  The Brazilian arabica harvest has the potential to be revised down by 3–4 million bags from the estimate at the early harvest, according to Comunicaffe.

But wait, it gets worse. Pests like coffee berry borer and CLR thrive from increased temperatures, making vast new areas hospitable to infestation. Rust is spreading to places where it wasn’t a problem even 20 years ago. Coffee berry borer, previously found only below 1,500 meters above sea level, is now found on Mount Kilimanjaro, at elevations 300 meters higher than where it found was 20 years ago. An infestation by borer beetle alone can destroy 60% of a coffee crop.

Beyond these pressures is price volatility — coffee prices on the NYSE dropped below production cost for the first time ever in 2019.  

Unsurprisingly, many farmers in Latin America decided to leave the sector. While some young people study agronomy, marketing, and related skills to revitalize the family farm, many third- and fourth- generation growers abandon coffee plantations for other crops or for work in the cities. In Colombia, where 96% of coffee farms cover less than 1.4 hectares (3.5 acres), there were 600,000 family-owned farms in 2008. By 2018, the number had declined to 570,000.  The count now stands at 540,000.

The sunny side of climate change

There is, however, hope. The same climate projections that show the bottom tier of high-altitude coffee regions becoming inhospitable also show new regions opening up to coffee cultivation.

Countries and regions at the northern tips of today’s growing areas in the Northern Hemisphere will become more suitable, including China and the United States. The same is true at the southern tips of areas in the Southern Hemisphere: Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, New Zealand.

Ethiopia, the native home of the coffee plant and the fifth biggest producer of arabica, should see its ability to grow coffee remain unchanged.

Honduras, whose crop suffered severely recently, has significant land area at elevations more than 900 meters above the necessary minimum altitude for coffee. So Honduras’ future looks good as it will continue to have suitable conditions at high altitudes after other countries’ highest elevations become too warm for coffee cultivation.

That could happen in ultra-high elevation Nicaragua as well, where analysts say the optimum altitude for coffee will rise from 1,200 meters above sea level to 1,600 meters by mid-century.

But it will take a while for these new areas to produce coffee. Moving farms to places where coffee is already being grown, though not with optimum output or quality, could prove a better bet than zones where cultivation has never been tried. Production in these low-output zones could be improved with new techniques, new varieties, and a new management approach.

Enlisting wild species

One long-shot effort that has paid off was a quest by coffee botanists to uncover and revive wild species that are resistant to rust and borer, yet with flavor approaching the quality of Coffea arabica. Finding a new coffee that tastes great and also tolerates heat and drought is “the holy grail” of coffee research, according to Aaron P. Davis, a well-known scientist who for years has been on this quest at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The re-discovery in 2018 of the West African Stenophylla species, presumed extinct for 100 years, was like stumbling on the Chalice itself. Finally cupped in 2020, it was rated on a par with high-quality arabica. Best of all, Stenophylla grows in warmer conditions — up to 6.8°C higher than arabica — and at lower altitudes. It is also resistant to CLR and drought. But its rarity, low yield, and slow growth cycle mean that it will take years, even decades, before it can be grown on a large scale.

Meanwhile, Cenicafé, Colombia’s coffee science institute, has been cross-breeding arabica with caturra to develop rust-resistant varieties. Cenicafé developed its first hybrid in 1980, which mixed caturra and another variety of Timor Hybrid coffee, which is an arabica/robusta hybrid. In 2005, the institute released its “Castillo” variety, followed in 2015 by a new hybrid called Cenicafe 1 variety.

But the more the genetics are modified, the more the rust fungus has mutated over time, so the institute keeps working to stay ahead of the game. Cenicafé also evaluated 65 genotypes for water deficit resistance and found nine Ethiopian Coffea arabica genotypes and three hybrids of Caturra and Coffea canephora (robusta) that have their own built-in mechanisms for adaptation to water deficit. Brazil’s Federal University of Lavras has been conducting CLR-infection experiments to isolate the most resistant genotypes.

Big Coffee has also been kicking in. Nespresso contributed about five million trees to smallholders in Colombia, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Nicaragua for insetting — an agroforestry practice that balances a business’s carbon emissions by planting trees within its supply chain. This is helping to offset soil erosion and loss of biodiversity caused by Nespresso’s large-scale farms. But it is mainly small specialty importers and sustainability coalitions that are doing the grunt work — a topic to be covered in a later article.

New technologies are increasingly important: Remotely piloted aircraft (ARP), harvesting yield sensors, automatic grain classifiers, and remote sensing are being tested and evaluated. Precision agriculture (PA) is one type of innovation being introduced in coffee-growing regions, helping to increase output and advance sustainable cultivation.

Groups that provide PA training are urging governmental coffee agencies to support small producers’ access to innovation. Representatives of coffee associations such as FNC in Colombia and the many coffee co-operatives in Nicaragua and Mexico say that governments should provide growers with more social protection and infrastructure, like access roads in remote mountain areas, and broadband internet to allow farmers to keep up with innovations and take online courses.

There are ways to sidestep disaster. Changes in growing conditions may be inevitable, but a collapse of coffee isn’t. Connecting farmers with the means and the know-how to meet demand in today’s key product segment — in the more profitable specialized, organic, and certified coffees — ultimately gives them an incentive to stick with this demanding crop.☕

Credit: Table and maps are reproduced from “Expected global suitability of coffee, cashew and avocado due to climate change,” a study by Roman Grüter, Tim Trachsel, Patrick Laube and Isabel Jaisli published on January 26, 2002 on Plos One, Public Library of Science.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261976