Arabica coffee, the most popular kind, is picky. Coffee producers and the coffee industry are threatened by climate change.Starbucks seeks solutions.
“To grow properly, coffee crops require specific temperature, light, and humidity levels,” says the Inter-American Development Bank, a Latin American and Caribbean bank. The coffee belt in Latin America meets such characteristics, according to a new IADB assessment.
The bank warned that “rising temperatures will reduce the area suitable for growing coffee by up to 50%” by 2050. IADB said that climate change may allow some countries to grow coffee.
Things must alter for coffee to continue prospering.
Starbucks, which buys 3% of the world’s coffee, is producing Arabica varieties developed to withstand a warming climate. For over 10 years, Starbucks agronomists have bred coffee trees to produce a lot of fruit quickly and resist coffee leaf rust, a climate-exacerbated disease.
After pairing hundreds of kinds, the company chose six that met its taste and flavor standards. Starbucks’ Costa Rican instructional and research center, Hacienda Alsacia coffee plantation, has a catalog of its six new types for farmers.
Taste profiles for each plant are in the catalog. One coffee tastes like melon, honey, and sugar cane, while another is citrus, herbal, and floral. The catalog also describes the plant’s size, structure, altitude tolerance, and production time.
Read More: Barcode Architects has now finished the triangular Casanova Tower
Michelle Burns, Starbucks’ executive vice president of global coffee, social impact, and sustainability, said “some of the varietals that we’re working with and testing are seeing their harvest in [a] two-year cycle,” instead of three or four. That would benefit Starbucks and its suppliers by producing more coffee faster.
Coffee weather
Starbucks relies on 400,000 farmers in 30 countries to supply its approximately 36,000 outlets. Like other coffee producers worldwide, they struggle to adapt to global warming.
Lions Gate Farms president Suzanne Shriner, a non-Starbucks supplier in Hawaii, has been affected by climate change.
She stated, “Our rainfalls [have] become more intermittent, and when they come, they’re more severe, which is hard on the plants.”
Shriner said Hawaiian growers are working with World Coffee Research, a charity that partners with the industry, including Starbucks, to solve coffee leaf rust, a major issue in the region.
She stated, “We’re looking for similar breeding innovations; we’re watching the Starbucks program closely.” Of course, climate change threatens more than coffee. Drought, ice, and strong rains can destroy cocoa and grape production. Farmers struggle to plan for extreme weather since it is unpredictable.
Starbucks’ single coffee varietal, Arabica, is especially vulnerable.
Fighting leaf rust
Miguel Gomez, a Cornell Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management food marketing professor, said arabica coffee needs additional climate-resistant varietals.
Current Arabica plants “are not resistant to water stresses,” he said. “They are more susceptible to diseases like leaf rust that occur during high temperatures.”
A coffee rust-resistant tree may appeal to growers. However, Fairtrade International’s coffee program senior adviser, Monika Firl, warned that it won’t solve climate change’s many issues.
“No silver bullet is going to fix climate change for farmers,” she warned.
Nature “adapts faster than laboratory science does,” she said. Breeds optimized for some situations may fail in others; therefore, a solution may work temporarily but not permanently.
Firl believes the industrialized coffee farm paradigm must be abandoned for coffee to be sustainable. “We need to bring coffee back to its forest roots,” she stated, for a healthy ecology.
Starbucks pledged forest protection and restoration and other climate goals in 2021. Burns said the company will keep exploring new varietals to respond to climate change in its “ongoing” breeding program.
In these tough conditions, Robusta and Liberica coffee perform better than arabica. Because consumers appreciate arabica’s taste and scent, Cornell’s Gomez said coffee manufacturers avoid these types. The goal is for it to taste like arabica but be hardier like other types.
Coffee supply chain security StarBucks
Starbucks identified rising costs or shortages of high-quality Arabica coffee beans as a supply chain risk that might negatively influence their business and financial results in their latest annual report.
It listed several factors affecting coffee prices and availability. Bad weather, water shortages, and crop diseases can raise Starbucks’ coffee prices or reduce supply. “Climate change may further exacerbate many of these factors,” the research said.
Starbucks sold farmers climate-resistant seeds from others, sometimes altered by Starbucks, before developing its own.
The company claims to have distributed three million seeds in five years. Starbucks has given growers 70 million coffee rust-resistant trees as part of its target of 100 million by 2025, along with the seeds.
Share this content: