The Short Summary
The Last Drop - The Changing Coffee Climate
Raising awareness of climate change with every cup of coffee.
The Last Drop will focus on the wholesale affects and collateral damage visited upon the cffee industry by Global Warming through the eyes of the producers, the families affected, and those of us in wealthier nations for whom coffee is a way of life. From it's Arabian roots to it's mid-16th century migration to Turkey and on to Europe, to the forest areas of the southwestern highlands of the Kaffa and Buno districts in Ethiopia, TLD will document coffee’s rise to prominence. Through first person narratives, we’ll learn how coffee has infuuenced the social, political and economic realities of these coffee drinking cultures, and how coffee has established a globally connected coffee community equally at risk of losing the rich heritage coffee has been responsible for providing for centuries. Ultimately, TLD will provide an awareness of the immediacy of the problem, that the time to act is now.
The challenges presented in TLD are not just abstract prognostications about our globally warmer future, with vague predictions what you'll have to adjust to at some point in an intangible future, but concrete examples that are affecting everything in our lives now, not only the inevitable disruption of our morning ritual but also influencing our politics and ultimately determining how we are governed and how much control we have over our lives.
A history of things to come...
In the past things were ok’ Don José laments, ‘my Rosa, gracias a Dios, was able to go to school and get an education, there's just no way I could do that now.’ Don José gestures inside to the kitchen where his daughter engages in futile attempts to get her kids to sit at the breakfast table, their round faces, eyes as big as saucers, steal looks from inside the doorway. ‘She may be the last generation of kids raised by coffee’ he says as if arriving at a conclusion. Don José is aware of other farmers whose crops have been entirely wiped out by La Roya. He’s been long wondering if he’ll meet the same fate.
La Roya is nothing new. The disease was first identified in 1869 on coffee plants from what is now Sri Lanka, where the disease effectively ended the coffee industry there. By the 1920s, La Roya was widely found across much of Africa and Asia, making its way to Brazil in 1970, where it rapidly spread to most coffee-growing areas in Central and South America. By 1990, coffee rust had become endemic in all major coffee-producing countries. An outbreak in the Americas in 2012 triggered a state of emergency and famine, causing $1 billion in damage and affecting over 2 million people in Central and South America alone.
Don Jose stares at the empty canastas, the baskets used to collect the ripe coffee berries during harvest. ‘There’s more peones (farm workers) than work,’ Don Jose admits. It’s December, height of the harvest, and normally the long calles, or rows of coffee trees, would be rife with peones, filling those canastas with red berries. But not this year. His crops have succumbed to La Roya, or coffee rust, a fungus historically implicated in decimating coffee production worldwide, and currently posing a serious threat to coffee’s future.
Don Jose has weathered storms in the industry before. He’s been around long enough to remember the coffee crisis that plagued producers in the early 90s, when price controls flagged as previous agreements safeguarding the prices vanished. It was at this time that Fair Trade was born, organizing the patchwork of family owned small farms into collectives for greater bargaining power, and allowing a fixed rate for their coffee, regardless of market fluctuations. These actions turned around an inequitable system destined to bankrupt thousands of coffee growers into a viable industry. Don Jose thinks back on that transformation. 'Not only could I pay workers a fair wage to tend to the coffee and harvest, I could send my Rosa to school. I could provide a decent life for my family.' Don Jose ambles past the discarded, empty baskets, 'my Rosa is grown, but others are not so lucky' he laments, 'I don't see how organizing is going to help any. This problem, it's bigger than us'.
Don José is referring to past efforts that no longer work against La Roya, or are just not financially feasible. Organic pesticides, planting at higher elevations, replacing lost crops or combinations of the above, have, in the past, proven effective at mitigating the spread or at least softening the blow of the fungus. But the global warming of recent decades brought higher temperatures, erratic and torrential rains and higher humidity - perfect conditions for the rust. La Roya can now cycle unfettered and more rapidly through its reproductive process, infecting the leaves of a plant, and finding new plants on which to grow. Don Jose’s experience of the industry’s resilience offers precious little comfort. 'How can we bargain at the table with Climate Change?'
It’s a compounding problem and a downward spiral. No crop means no income to buy better fungicides or replace diseased plants. Looking out across his farm Don José sighs. It's still early in the day. The sound of flatware on plates and the hiss of the propane stove invade the morning stillness. A pot on the stove throws clouds of steam that mimic the thick, morning mist swaddling his coffee trees. Inside, his daughter is having no better luck at corralling her kids for breakfast.
Don José is not alone. More than 90 percent of the world’s coffee comes from small farms in lower-income economies, on plots owned or rented by a single family and planted with a single crop, just like his. As production collapses, farmers and their families are forced to seek jobs outside their farms.
The Last Drop will focus on the wholesale affects and collateral damage visited upon the coffee industry through the eyes of the producers, the families affected, and those of us in wealthier nations for whom coffee is a staple in our way of life. From it's Arabian roots to it's mid-16th century migration to Turkey and on to Europe, to the forest areas of the southwestern highlands of the Kaffa and Buno districts in Ethiopia, TLD will document coffee’s rise to prominence, and how it's adoption by these countries has influenced everyday life, Through first person narratives we’ll learn how coffee has influenced the social, political and economic realities of these coffee drinking cultures, how coffee has established a globally connected coffee community, equally at risk off losing the rich heritage coffee has been responsible for providing for decades.
Even the best efforts of a former US vice-president had trouble convincing the American public that climate change was actually a thing, despite an Academy Award winning TED-like motion picture, complete with graphs and charts and lasting nearly 2 hours. Perhaps that’s because global warming is, currently, an intangible concept, and not a bank. Coffee isn't a bank either, but it does make up 1.6% of the total U.S. gross domestic product. In 2015, consumers spent 74.2 billion dollars on coffee, supporting 1,694,710 industry jobs, and generating nearly $28 billion in taxes.
Additionally, western nations are addicted to coffee. If the Opium and Spice Wars taught us anything, it's that nations will go to great lengths to preserve their profits from commodities that people are addicted to.
How will the loss of something so woven into the fabric of our economic, social, political and cultural lives and histories change things? And what does that say about us as a society? TLD addresses this future, not with abstract predictions, but by detailing how coffee's current crisis influences our lives now in substantial ways, from how we are governed to how much control we have over our future.
Take, as only one example, the 2016 presidential election, driven by an isolationist, Make America Great Again, approach that demonized immigrants for upending the American way of life. Former President Trump never backed down from his stereotyped characterization and motivations of these refugees, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” What was once a third rail in American politics, this new anti-immigrationist stance proved to be effective in incentivising an unprecedented wave of conservative voters, emboldening newly elected legislators to enact laws that threaten everything from our environment (withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord), to civil liberties (the unconscionable discriminatory policy of the Muslim Ban). Put in present day realities - the effects of global warming on the coffee you're drinking influence policies and politics worldwide.
And global warming, and it's subsequent effects are destined to get worse. We're seeing only the very top of the melting iceberg here. Coffee production is expected to be halved by 2050, and further predictions forecast the demise of all wild plants by 2080. If the threat of a coffee-free future isn't adequate motivation, the economic realities ought to be incentive enough for even the most die-hard deniers to consider acting proactively - just in case..
Combining the qualities of being a bellwether for climate change, a cultural touchstone, an economic powerhouse and possessing the ability to influence politics worldwide, coffee is the perfect catalyst to inspire a deeper understanding of the effects of climate change on our lives and way of life.