Coffee could become a luxury in the UK if businesses don’t invest more to help coffee farmers, who are abandoning their crops because of climate change and historically low prices.
Temperature extremes, increased humidity and crippling market prices are forcing coffee producers in Peru to turn to other sources of income as they struggle to harvest healthy crops.
Farmers of the Arabica bean, used in thousands of Britons’ daily flat whites and cappuccinos, are deserting their farms or turning to other crops, as pests and disease trigger smaller harvests of lower-quality beans.
By 2050, up to half the land currently used globally to grow coffee could have become unusable for this purpose, experts predict. They fear the quality of coffee could be diminished as farmers turn to new varieties, and that lower production volumes could cause prices to increase.
Catherine David, head of commercial partnerships at Fairtrade, told PA Media: “While now coffee sales have grown and we can pick up coffee from all different price ranges, I think if we don’t invest now then coffee could become a luxury, longer term.
“It really is a crisis we are facing,” she said – adding that if the UK public were more aware of the scale of the problem, we would be “pretty scandalised” that brands, retailers and coffee shops we buy from weren’t “doing more”.
The poorest farmers are being hit the hardest, because they cannot invest profits in tools to improve the soil or buy new plants. In the Peruvian town of Tarapoto, farmers have even returned to growing the coca plant, the raw material for cocaine, despite a government initiative to reduce production.
Norandino, a Fairtrade co-operative representing the largest number of farmers in Peru (about 7,000) said extreme rainfall two years ago destroyed crops and caused buildings to crumple in the north west region Piura. Its headquarters were flooded with water.
In Montero, a valley district in Piura, leaf rust disease has continued to diminish yields after a devastating outbreak five years ago. The disease, which has been exacerbated by climate change, covers the leaves with orange dust and causes them to fall off, stopping the plant photosynthesising.
Over the last five years, coffee production in the area shrank from 80% to 20%, with many now turning to the more-resilient sugar cane.
Segundo Alejandro Guerrero Mondragon’s family, part of the Norandino co-operative, has been experimenting with new coffee varieties, planting higher up the valley, and replacing the lower coffee plants with sugar cane. Sons Hugo, 33, and Omar, 35, are also helping trial new varieties of coffee in a protected nursery, to produce a more resilient bean without compromising on quality.
Mondragon, 72, was one of the founders of the organisation that became Norandino. “Our area used to be free of all types of disease,” he told PA Media. “There was no rust, there was no brown eye, there was no borer (a beetle that is an aggressive coffee pest).
“Lately we were managing to partly control brown eye, but when we got rust it was a largely unknown disease and really concerned us, it hit us really hard and there was a huge drop in production.
“For me it was very disappointing, we had coffee plantations with a really good crop and we were left with next to nothing, it was almost completely destroyed.”