Your cold brew won't survive a hot world
BNN Bloomberg
Hundreds of thousands of acres of coffee production were wiped out this year by extreme weather and climate-driven blights. Every coffee lover in the world will be paying the price.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of coffee production were wiped out this year by extreme weather and climate-driven blights. Every coffee lover in the world will be paying the price. Coffee futures have surged nearly 90 per cent in 2021, and once cheaper inventories are exhausted, analysts expect retail prices to spike in 2022. Nobody should be surprised.
Humanity consumes a half-trillion cups annually of the caffeinated brew — almost double from a decade ago — yet coffee production is one of the most antiquated industries in all of agriculture. There hasn't been a major effort to develop a new coffee bean varietal in half a century and we're now witnessing the consequences: a crop that simply can't survive much longer in our changing climate.
The good news is growing climate pressures are spurring a movement to modernize coffee production. The two main species of coffee plants grown today in the world’s “Bean Belt” are robusta and arabica, the latter being the more flavorful and coveted of the two. Most modern strains of arabica were developed in 1967 by the Portuguese government. Decades later, this aging crop is succumbing to modern scourges like coffee rust fungus and borer beetles, along with oscillating heat and moisture levels.
“Current varieties of coffee aren’t optimized for current conditions,” said Vern Long, chief executive officer of World Coffee Research, an industry group funded by major roasters. “It’s a crop health crisis. Imagine if the last time vaccines were worked on was 1967.”
World Coffee Research is launching a global breeding network in 2022 to encourage the development of heartier and more diverse coffee varieties. New biotechnology startups are also using Crispr and other gene-editing tools to jumpstart the long-overdue evolution of this cultivated plant, the genome of which was first sequenced in 2017.
