The coffee price hikes have stemmed from lower production in important coffee growing regions, particularly in top grower Brazil, reducing the availability of beans.
That’s the closest I could find in the article as to a reason. It’d be nice to know if it was just a bad year or if this is going to be a permanent challenge going forward due to climate change or some other factors.
Coffee can be a pain to grow. As someone else mentioned, you have to have the right environment (rain, sunshine, soil, etc).
Adding to this is that it’s easier to grow other things that are in just as much demand. Vietnam has switched to growing durian fruit — less fussy and makes them just as much money.
Coffee is also quite carbon intensive.
It’s also due to very bad weather/floods in the second largest producer, Vietnam.
And since extreme weather events are increasing in intensity and frequency, it’s not going to get better (as a trend at least).
Coffee is quite sensitive to environmental factors and only grows in certain specific regions as a result. Those factors are being upended by climate change. Coffee is going to very rapidly become a luxury product.
Billionaires don’t care. Twenty dollars or two dollars for a cup is effectively the same price to them; insignificant. It’s the rest of us that get fucked.
Those factors are being upended by climate change.
How, exactly?
It’s my understanding that coffee does best in warm climates. Shouldn’t global warming, at the very least, change where we grow coffee as opposed to just removing the areas we can grow it in?
Others have given the detailed answer, but the really simple one is this; “How many jungle plants grow well in deserts?” If it was simply a matter of “hot = good”, surely the answer would be “all of them.”
There are specific conditions that every plant requires to grow well. Some plants are more tolerant of disruption to those conditions, some less so. Climate change affects all of those conditions. Increased global temperatures can make some places hotter, some places colder, some places wetter, some places dryer, and have all sorts of other knock on effects too.
Yeah coffee likes the wet sides of tropical mountains. It evolved in Ethiopia. Sometimes mountain plants wind up a stupid level of rugged like cannabis where you can plop that shit anywhere and it’ll do OK. But other times you wind up with something that has absurd and picky conditions
Short answer: more atmospheric heat = more energetic weather = more extremes and variation.
Many crops don’t just need an average temperature, they need protection from extremes and the climate they evolved for. Buckle up.
