Most Americans don't think twice about leaving half a glass of water on the table when leaving a restaurant. Only when we pay for it do we tend not to leave a drop. Cost also influences drinking decisions: skip the cheap beer to avoid traffic on the way home, but finish a $20 drink even if it's poorly made.
Now it looks like we'll be playing this game with coffee.
Opinion columnist
Granderson Landing Station
LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports, and navigating life in America.
Rising temperatures, prolonged summers and droughts (courtesy of climate change) have crippled agricultural production in many of the world’s major coffee-producing countries. From there, we already know what happens: high demand, low supply, higher costs. Really, no matter where you stand on politics, the record heat has had an undeniable impact on agriculture and the global supply chain.
Vietnam, for example, produces most of the beans used for instant coffee and espresso in the world. This year, farmers spent part of what is normally Vietnam’s rainy season trying to save their crops from the worst drought in a decade. UNICEF reported that several provinces declared a state of emergency due to lack of rain and saltwater intrusion in the Mekong Delta. Rice fields were lost, fish and shrimp died, and tons of robusta coffee beans were left unsalvageable, driving the price to a nearly 50-year high according to the International Coffee Organization.
Coffee drinkers paid for those lost beans (as well as the similarly lost Arabica beans in Brazil) with their cups each morning through price increases. And when I say coffee drinkers, I’m mostly talking about Americans, since we’re the industry’s second-largest importer of beans. This year, the National Coffee Association reported that daily consumption hit its highest level in 20 years: 63% of Americans drink more coffee each day than any other beverage.
That includes water, which can't be good for your skin.
However, the coffee economy is changing along with the climate.
If this trend continues, there may soon come a time when restaurants charge us for that “extra cup with dessert” more often than not. If that threshold is reached, diners may treat coffee more like an expensive menu item (think cold-pressed juice) and less like the water we receive when we first sit down.
A study estimates that About half of the regions where most coffee beans are grown today will not be as viable in 2050 Due to changes in climate, the good news is that other parts of the world will be more favorable for coffee cultivation.
But there is more bad news: the regions that depend most on the coffee industry for their economy are already poor.
This is perhaps the most immoral aspect of seeing members of Congress downplay the impact of melting ice caps or having presidential debates in which the issue of global warming is handled as an afterthought. Developing countries are the ones who routinely suffer most from climate changes brought on by industrialized, wealthier countries like our own. It is only our distance from so many of the calamities to which we contribute that allows so many candidates for public office to adopt psychological manipulation as an effective political strategy.
Two summers ago in Pakistan, More than 1,700 people died, millions of homes were destroyed and hectares of crops were lost after flooding due to record rainfall and melting of glaciersIn Panama, a 20-year drought caused delays in trade because the Panama Canal did not have enough water. About 40% of the world's cargo traffic uses the canal, and at one point More than 160 cargo ships They were in limbo due to lack of water.
During the coffee harvest season in Costa Rica, nearly 60% of the pickers are migrants from neighboring countries such as Nicaragua. If this economic ecosystem collapses in Central America largely due to man-made climate change, the ripple effect will far exceed the price of coffee in a restaurant.
This would exacerbate the region’s humanitarian crisis, which has already forced millions of people to move to our southern border and tainted political rhetoric with racial fearmongering. The World Bank estimates that another 100 million people could face food insecurity by 2030 due to displacement and loss of agricultural land. The United Nations predicts that over 140 million people will be uprooted within 30 years due to rising sea levels, droughts and other extreme weather.
Amali Tower, who runs an advocacy organisation for climate displacement, said: “One of the problems is the absolute lack of understanding of how climate change is forcing people to move. We need to address climate displacement as a human security issue and not a border security issue.”
A tall order when only 37% of Americans believe climate change should be a priority issue for the president and Congress, according to the Pew Research Center.
As usual, the economy tops the list.
It's as if it's a matter of choosing between one or the other, when in fact one directly affects the other. The rising price of coffee is not the only example of this dynamic. However, given how much Americans love to drink it, there is hope that the high price of coffee may finally be what wakes us up.
@LZGranderson
