Peak Coffee? Global Climate Change Threatens Shade Coffee

[amborin]

Heat Damages Colombia Coffee, Raising Prices





TIMBÍO, Colombia — Like most of the small landowners in Colombia’s lush mountainous Cauca region, Luis Garzón, 80, and his family have thrived for decades by supplying shade-grown, rainforest-friendly Arabica coffee for top foreign brands like Nespresso and Green Mountain. A sign in the center of a nearby town proclaims, “The coffee of Cauca is No. 1!”
As coffee prices keep rising, and shortages are seen, how will civilization survive or at least keep its citizens awake?

But in the last few years, coffee yields have plummeted here and in many of Latin America’s other premier coffee regions as a result of rising temperatures and more intense and unpredictable rains, phenomena that many scientists link partly to global warming.

Coffee plants require the right mix of temperature, rainfall and spells of dryness for beans to ripen properly and maintain their taste. Coffee pests thrive in the warmer, wetter weather.
Bean production at the Garzóns’ farm is therefore down 70 percent from five years ago.....

The shortage of high-end Arabica coffee beans is also being felt in New York supermarkets and Paris cafes, as customers blink at escalating prices. Purveyors fear that the Arabica coffee supply from Colombia may never rebound — that the world might, in effect, hit “peak coffee.”

snip

climate change and coffee:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/03/10/science/earth/20110310-coffee-3.html


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/science/earth/10coffee.html?_r=1&ref=business


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Shade Grown Coffee Protects Migratory Birds and Makes a Delicious Cup of Coffee

Coffee - it is perhaps surprising that something so commonplace in our everyday lives, so ubiquitous throughout culture, plays such an important role in the lives of our migratory birds. Facing devastating habitat loss and degradation on their breeding grounds in the United States and Canada as well as on their wintering grounds in Central and South America, migratory birds have found refuge in the lush forest-like environments of traditional coffee plantations. In fact, researchers at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center have revealed that of all agricultural systems in the tropics, traditionally-managed coffee plantations support more species of birds -- over 150 -- than any other type of agriculture.

Yet coffee farming in Latin America is changing. Traditionally, coffee was grown under a canopy of shade trees, providing critical wintering habitat for many species of migratory birds and preserving the rich biodiversity inherent in tropical rainforests. Increasingly, however, industrial coffee farms, where land is cleared of its lush vegetation to grow coffee in full sun, are replacing traditional coffee farms. With this conversion from traditional shade grown to industrial sun-grown coffee comes a corresponding decrease in migratory bird species, and this decrease in species diversity is dramatic -- over 90% fewer bird species are found on sun-grown coffee farms than on shade-grown coffee farms.

By choosing shade grown coffee, coffee drinkers not only help common birds that use shade coffee plantations during the winter like the Baltimore Oriole and Ruby-throated Hummingbird, but also a host of at risk WatchList species.

Please visit the Audubon Watchlist to learn about species that are facing threats such as habitat loss on their breeding and wintering grounds or with limited geographic ranges.

http://auduboncoffeeclub.com/pages.php?pageid=39

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Shade Coffee and Migratory Birds

Shade-Grown Coffee Plantations
Play a key role in the conservation of migratory birds, which find a sanctuary in their forest-like environment. The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) has developed the only 100%-organic shade-grown coffee certification.....


http://nationalzoo.si.edu/scbi/migratorybirds/coffee/lover.cfm

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/scbi/MigratoryBirds/Coffee/default.cfm

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