Scientific American is one of the first things I reach for on the news stand and I always find at least one really good article.
March 2011 was no exception, but I don’t know if the word “good” can be applied. Thanks to climate change and migrating tropical rain bands coffee, for our children, may well become an occasional luxury rather than the staple of American life that it is today.
And that's not nearly all the trouble that's brewing ...
I knew that the tropics were wetter than the mid latitudes where I’ve lived, but I’ve never been anywhere tropical but for a ten day work trip to Hawaii a few years ago. As the article revealed there is a specific ‘rain band’ just north of the equator, and it moves based on global temperatures.
During the Little Ice Age the band never moved north of 5 degrees. Today it moves between 3 degrees and 10 degrees depending on the time of year and solar activity. The temperature changes we’ve already set in motion due to carbon dioxide emissions will shift the band into a range from 8 degrees to 15 degrees north. And that’s a disaster for coffee production.
Coffee wants a lot of rain at the beginning of its growing season and it needs about six feet of rain to make proper beans. Colombia, the world’s third largest producer, will basically lose its production some time between the middle and end of this century.
The article was more about the rain bands and less about coffee production, so I had to do some digging in the mighty coffee wiki. Both Colombia and Indonesia, producers three and four on the list, were described as being in trouble due to these changes. The world ships about 150 million sixty kilogram bags annually and loss of these two will take out 12% of production.
Brazil ships a third of the global total, a massive forty five million of the sixty kilogram bags. Their production is far south of the equator but warming driven drought is a concern. Crops failed in 2001 and this report from last fall indicates 2011 is to be a troubled year, too.
But by the time the coffee crop is in trouble we’re going to have other issues. Look at what climate change does to wheat production.
We’re already seeing governments falling all over North Africa and the heat is on in the Persian Gulf states. Wheat prices and availability, driven primarily by Russian fires last summer, are the source of the unrest. The fix is in for 2012, too. A few weeks ago we had a massive 2,500 mile long winter storm that impacted U.S. wheat production at the same time an epic cyclone hit the northeast portion of Australia’s wheat producing lands.
The first government to fall in modern times due to climate related issues was Somalia. This year we’ve seen the entire arc from Morocco to the Persian Gulf inflamed due to food costs. Weather events this spring indicate to me that this problem is going to get worse rather than better, and that assuming we get lucky with a decent growing season in the U.S., Canada, and the wheat producing former Soviet Union countries.
But don’t let me spoil your morning cup with all this grim news …