Tag Archives: climate change impact

Coffee Data Trends and the Coffee Snob

Coffee Production and Consumption Impact on NanoRoast and You

I love sifting through data to gain enlightenment (who doesn’t?) I finally got around to reading the latest USDA coffee import/export report, and it explains a lot about the factors affecting the specialty grade coffee NanoRoast sells. Here are a few nuggets you might find interesting:

1. World production barely moved the needle at all, while the size of the market increased. The table of domestic consumption includes many more countries than it did ten years ago. While it doesn’t appear that any are drinking mega-factors more than they did some five years ago, the picture for ten years ago is jaw-dropping. Countries like Russia, China, Japan and Korea drank very little of the specialty class of coffee ten years ago, and now they are major players. The list of buyers for Cup of Excellence competition lots shows this change year over year. We’ll look at that in detail in another post. Why the slowdown in consumption growth? Bottom line: More people drinking coffee, and more people wanting to drink the good stuff and willing to pay for it at the same time that the supply has decreased in the specialty market (due to weather, rust disease, war, volcano misbehavior, etc.)

2. Climate change is affecting coffee growers around the world. Some traditional coffee-producing countries are finding the conditions amenable to really top quality coffee eroding as droughts and temperatures increase. In short, the optimal coffee-growing areas are moving up the mountain where there is less acreage to farm.

3. Is there any good news for coffee lovers? One factor in the report that bodes well for coffee drinkers everywhere is that the production of Robusta isn’t growing nearly as fast as Arabica. As farmers everywhere begin to realize higher prices for their higher-quality product, there may be more effort to produce the kind of quality coffee we actually want to drink. At the same time, small farmers are starting to get better prices for their high-quality coffee crops, helping them improve life for themselves and their kids world-wide. That’s really good news.

Enjoy the Blessing of Really Good Coffee!

s

High end coffee and climate change: Not good

CLIMATE CHANGE, RAIN AND EFFECT ON COFFEE COUNTRIES


I’ve read the report from the UNESCO on outlook for water worldwide by 2050, and I am so glad my kids live in British Columbia! The forecast is also worrisome for coffee production according to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture that forecasts impact on coffee-growing lands. There was a synopsis of the bottom line in the Daily Coffee News that lists the winners and losers by region:

Biggest potential winners:  Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi, Papua New Guinea, Uganda

Biggest potential losers, immediately:  Central America (especially El Salvador and Nicaragua), Brazil, Viet Nam and India

Biggest potential losers, intermediate term:  Andes region, Indonesia, Brazil again

Also significant in the mix is that even areas that receive enough rainfall will be challenged so that high-grown quality arabica coffee must be grown at even higher altitudes, and there is less land there. For example, most high-quality arabica is grown at altitudes over 1200 meters above sea level (MASL), or just under 4,000 ft. and usually not more than 7,000 ft. or 2200 MASL. There are not too many locations across the world between 23.5 degrees North and 23.5 degrees South with sufficient rainfall AND altitudes in this range AND people who want to grow high-quality arabica coffee. The main areas are East Africa and PNG. It could be that if the market develops, as in SW China for example, more of the population of high-altitude locations in the coffee belt might start growing and producing high-quality arabica. Let’s hope so. Even better, let’s start (as a species) to manage our planet a bit more responsibly.

Enjoy and treasure your coffee!

s