Climate prices Time to wake up and smell the coffee on food inflation and weather

Our morning coffee is the latest staple threatened by climate chaos: the price of quality arabica beans shot to its highest level in almost 50 years last week amid fears of a poor harvest in Brazil.

- Heather Stewart

It follows warnings that orange crops have been wiped out by the floods in Valencia, Spain; and the soaring cost of olive oil in recent years, as the southern Mediterranean has sweltered.

The cost of the beans accounts for only 5% of the price of a fancy latte, according to the economic research group Capital Economics, so the impact on coffee drinkers is likely to be minimal, but almost every week seems to bring news of climate-induced price rises.

In the rich world these cause inconvenience. In developing countries, they can mean outright hunger. Sometimes these price jumps follow extreme weather, as in the case of the Spanish floods.

Scientists tell us such events have become more common as a result of the climate crisis. Or the jumps may result from the higher temperatures that have become a new and alarming normal, forcing farmers to rethink longstanding cultivation patterns.

A paper for the UN's Department for Economic and Social Affairs said: "Staple crops like corn, soya beans, wheat, rice, cotton and oats exhibit suboptimal growth when exposed to excessive heat."