Extreme temperatures and severe droughts are ravaging Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, and taking a heavy toll on local harvests. Global demand, meanwhile, continues to surge, particularly in China. Now a beverage that has always been a daily staple, affordable to anyone in need of a boost, has started to become something of a luxury item.
The international price of Arabica, which accounts for most of the world’s ground roast, has doubled in the past year.
In the Brazilian region of Alta Mogiana, where coffee is a way of life, some farmers have seen their harvest shrivel by a third. Others by two-thirds. A few have nothing left at all. The scarcity has now made coffee looting a lucrative enterprise, forcing farmers to contend with both changing weather patterns and criminals.
It’s difficult to overstate what coffee means to Brazil. This is a country where breakfast is called, simply, “morning coffee.” People don’t schedule meetings, they schedule coffee. Nearly everyone in the countryside makes a big thermos of joe in the morning — not to drink, but to leave out, just in case a visitor stops by.
The plant that forged this culture and, to some degree, this country is the Coffea arabica. Yielding a smooth and sweet coffee, it is widely preferred over other varieties and accounts for roughly 60 percent of global coffee consumption.
But it is notoriously fickle. The plant takes at least two years to bring to harvest and it thrives only in a narrow temperature window, between 64 and 70˚F, in areas with significant rainfall. It has always been a perfect fit for the highlands of southeastern Brazil, in the mist-cloaked mountains of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro states.
But not last year, said Jean Vilhena Faleiros, president of the Alta Mogiana Association of Coffee Cultivators. “We had an average temperature of 80 degrees, with long periods in the 90s,” he said.
Climate research suggests this could be the beginning of the end of Coffea arabica in much of South America.
By the turn of the century, researchers have found, vast swaths of the continent will no longer be suitable for cultivation. The Andes countries could lose between 16 and 20 percent of such territory. And in southeastern Brazil, home to most of the country’s coffee fields, the losses are predicted to be even more severe — between 20 and 60 percent, according to a paper in the journal Regional Environmental Change.
In Vietnam, there is a push to grow the sturdier Coffea canephora, which yields a sharper and earthier Robusta coffee, though extensive flooding last year delayed the country’s harvest, further limiting global supply. Researchers are calling for farmers in Brazil to make a similar switch to canephora, and some are.
Rodrigues Alves was walking up to his coffee storehouse. Normally overflowing with reserves, it now held just 25 sacks of Arabica.
But this coffee, he said, he would never sell.
“This is the thief’s coffee,” he said. “You’ll need to have something to hand over so you won’t be killed.”