August 30, 2016

Australian Report Predicts Global Coffee Shortage Will Get Worse

It's hard to know where to start in dismissing this nonsense.  All that global warming would do for ANY crop is to shift polewards the areas where it was grown.  There is no conceivable reason for an OVERALL shortage.  There are always new areas opening up for coffee growing anyway.

Secondly, the current problem is described as drought.  Yet a warming world would mean a wetter world so warming could in fact SOLVE problems of coffee growing!

Thirdly, if they understood any economics they would know that any lasting reduction in supply would cause price increases and sustained price increases would then draw out more supply.  Australia's empty North, for instance, could undoubtedly be opened up to coffee growing in some parts.  There is already a small operation on the Atherton Tableland.  They even grow Arabica there

A new report from Australia's Climate Institute predicts that by 2050, global warming will make at least half of the land currently used for coffee production unable to produce quality beans.

By 2080, it cautions, hot temperatures could make wild coffee plants completely extinct. Although this report is projecting what will happen to supplies in decades to come, the coffee shortage isn't really off in the distant future.

It's already started to fall.  Brazil -- the source for over a third of the world's coffee -- has seen its coffee stores dip dramatically in the last two years as the result of a long drought.  So far, unusually large harvests in other world coffee markets helped to make up most of the difference. 

But we can hardly expect these big harvests to continue. In fact, their trend may actually reverse.

Much of Brazil's latest shortfall was made up for by a record-breaking coffee harvest in Honduras -- which is a coffee-growing area that this new report says will probably be hit particularly hard in the coming decades.

Even the relatively smaller shift from Brazil's shortage in the last couple years resulted in a price surge and a jump in counterfeit coffee beans (which pretend to be fancier coffee varieties than they are).

With the spread of the shortage, we can only expect to see rising coffee prices and counterfeiting show up as even more of a problem in our daily cups.

SOURCE



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