Coffee production may be imperiled as forests are destroyed for more crops

Every day, we drink more than 2 billion cups of coffee worldwide, by some estimates, and demand keeps rising.

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To grow beans to quench this thirst, ever more forests have been felled globally for farming. But in an ecological and agricultural irony, the more forests are destroyed to grow coffee, the more the crop’s long-term prospects are jeopardized by changing rains, according to a new report by Coffee Watch, a nonprofit industry watchdog.

The group, whose findings were published Wednesday, mapped deforestation in Brazil’s southeastern coffee belt and compared it to rainfall changes and crop failures in the same region. It found that as companies destroyed local forests to make way for plantations, rainfall in those areas decreased, which led to crop failures and lower yields and, ultimately, higher prices for consumers.

“The ecologically destructive way we grow coffee is going to result in us not having coffee,” said Etelle Higonnet, the group’s director.

“Deforestation for coffee cultivation is killing the rains, which is killing the coffee,” she said in a phone interview. If the trend continues, she added, farmers will produce fewer crops even as more forests are destroyed to accommodate more farmland.

The report argues that clearing forests to meet demand for coffee will exacerbate rainfall patterns that are already shrinking yields for farmers. (Coffee production is at risk because the crop is highly sensitive to rain patterns and not very resilient to drought.)