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Gulp: Climate Change May Be Causing a Global Coffee Shortage
Source: www.motherjones.com - Thursday, February 27, 2014
This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If there was ever a reason to rise up in support of a benevolent climate-obsessed world dictator, this could be it. Climate change has already taken the Winter Olympics , your Eggos , and the McDonald's dollar menu , and now it's coming for your coffee, too. An epic drought—Brazil's worst in decades —is threatening exports from the world's largest coffee exporter and driving up wholesale prices worldwide. We've officially entered the realm of bloggers' worst-case scenario. Now, let's not get too hasty. The world is not going to run out of coffee next week. Analysts still estimate an increasingly tight global coffee surplus of less than 1 percent of total production through the remainder of the year. But the Brazilian drought is causing a significant pressure on global supplies, and when coupled with burgeoning demand from increasingly affluent consumers in Asia (and Brazil itself), that means prices are surging and that surplus could quickly become a shortage if the drought continues to intensify. Arabica coffee futures are up more than 50 percent in just the last two months in response. The current run on coffee is an example of the kinds of follow-on effects to be expected as the climate warms and rainfall patterns become more erratic. The ongoing lack of rainfall, coupled with record high temperatures across the whole of
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