Starbucks’ Howard Schultz says your morning coffee ritual is under threat
Scientists are already seeing the effects of climate change on coffee production around the globe, and they predict things will get worse by 2050
By Hilary Brueck
Outgoing Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz is worried about the future of your morning coffee ritual.
“Climate change is going to play a bigger role in affecting the quality and integrity of coffee,” Schultz told Time on a recent visit to a Starbucks coffee farm in Costa Rica.
As the Earth warms, predictable weather systems are going haywire. Rainy seasons are turning dry in some areas, while increased precipitation has brought flooding to others.
Farmers that grow coffee around the planet’s midsection are already feeling the pressure of less predictable growing seasons. In Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, bean counts are down due to the damaging Hemileia vastatrix fungus, which started spreading six years ago. Scientists think this coffee rust, as its known, thrives in radical high-and-low temperature swings, which are characteristic of climate change. Coffee production decreased 31 per cent on average in Colombia during a rust epidemic from 2008 to 2011, and the coffee indicator price went up 55 per cent in that time, according to a study in the journal Food Security.
“We have to be in the soil, growing coffee, to understand first-hand how to rectify and fix the situation,” Schultz told Time.
More demand, but less coffee to go around
Coffee is now the second-most traded commodity in the world (after oil). Coffee consumption in China has tripled in the past four years, according to a recent report from CBS News. Even Canada’s coffee habit increased an average of 3.3 per cent each year from 2010 to 2015, according to Euromonitor research. The Coffee Association of Canada now says more Canadian adults drink coffee than tap water on a daily basis.
That means coffee production will need to increase in the coming years to keep up with rising demand.
But time is not on Starbucks’ side. New coffee plant varietals take between four and five years to mature before their beans can be harvested, which is longer than the three to four years it takes a traditional coffee tree to bear fruit. Plus, some of Starbucks’ fungus-resistant trees don’t produce as many coffee cherries, so the yields are smaller than usual when they finally do arrive.