A recent paywalled article from the New York Times (NYT) titled “Coffee Prices Are at a 50-Year High. Producers Aren’t Celebrating,” claims that climate change is damaging coffee production in top coffee-producing countries. This is not borne out in the data. [emphasis, links added]
Coffee production data show that there has been a steady increase over time, despite—and perhaps due in part to—increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and the slight warming of recent decades.
Honduras, Brazil, and Vietnam are the main regions mentioned in the NYT article. The NYT claims that the costs of producing coffee have increased due to a variety of factors, including increased costs for fertilizer and “ill-timed rains and volatile temperatures,” which make it difficult to make a profit even as coffee prices are higher than usual.
The NYT insists that coffee farmers worry about climate change as the main culprit of higher coffee costs, “which has diminished the supply of coffee around the globe via rising temperatures, droughts, and excessive rains — most recently in Brazil and Vietnam, the world’s two largest coffee producers.”
If the modest warming of the past century is the real driver behind difficulties facing coffee production, it should show up as a trend in existing coffee production data.
Looking at world coffee production, however, it seems that other factors must be weighing more heavily on coffee prices.
Since just 1990, 35 years of climate change ago, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data show:
- World coffee production increased by 82 percent;
- World coffee yields increased by 67 percent;
- World record production and yields occurred as recently as 2020. (See figure below)
Focusing on specific regions covered by the NYT doesn’t show any kind of decline trend either.
In Brazil, FAO data indicate coffee production has increased 132 percent between 1990 and 2023, with 2023 being the third-highest production year on record. In Vietnam, coffee production skyrocketed an amazing 2,026 percent over the same timeframe. (See figure below)
The NYT writes that in Honduras, climate change has wrought “devastation” on coffee plantations, where “[r]ising temperatures were stressing plants and diminishing yields.”
FAO data show that Honduras has always had large seasonal swings in coffee output, and while the last few years have seen a slight decline in production from previous record highs, yields have increased.
Overall, between 1990 and 2023, Honduras has seen an increase in coffee production by 220 percent and yield increases of 45 percent. The most recent record-high production season was in 2018. (See figure below)
False claims about a climate change-induced coffee crisis are nothing new; Climate Realism has addressed the attempts by media outlets to stir up fears about coffee production and climate change dozens of times in just the past couple of years.
Each time, a news outlet hypes a low-yield season in one particular part of the world, while ignoring positive trends in the same country in previous seasons, and especially positive trends elsewhere in the world.
This myopic, seasonal alarm makes it clear that many mainstream media outlets are unaware of (or are ignoring) the fact that production of crops has always varied from year to year, with high and low years for production, impacted by seasonal weather conditions, economics, and other factors like trade policies and subsidies often outside the farmers’ control.
Looking at long-term trends in production and yield tells the real story, not a single season’s production or yield. With coffee, [trends show] increasing production and yields, leading to long-term gains for producers.
The New York Times would do well to take a look at the publicly available data before hyping false claims of a climate change-induced coffee crisis.
The NYT did admit that high fertilizer and transportation costs were contributing to problems faced by coffee growers, which is ironic since the anti-fossil fuel policies that climate alarmists have pushed are a large part of the reason for the limited supplies and higher prices.
Additional restrictions on fossil fuel development and use—policies called for by climate scolds and endorsed by the NYT—would only increase fertilizer, insecticide, fungicide, and transportation fuel costs more.
This would make it even harder for coffee growers to make a living.
This applies even to non-chemical fertilizers since oil and gas make up the bulk of the affordable energy needed for transportation and processing technology.
Likewise, the NYT reports that regulations from Europe “aimed at limiting deforestation” have targeted coffee producers, likely at the behest of the same environmentalists now falsely blaming climate change for increased coffee prices.
The New York Times would do well to take a look at the publicly available data before hyping false claims of a climate change-induced coffee crisis.
If its reporters had done so, they would have found that while year-to-year variations in production are not unusual, overall, coffee production is doing well, with long-term trends showing no sign of any crash.
Read more at Climate Realism
