Your Morning Cup of Coffee Is in Danger. Can the Industry

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Your Morning Cup of Coffee Is in Danger. Can the Industry Adapt in Time?



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Workers weed coffee plants at a Starbucks-owned coffee farm in Costa Rica, where climate change could damage the health of the industry George Steinmetz for TIME

By Justin Worland/Alajuela, Costa Rica
June 21, 2018

Howard Schultz wants to know if I drink coffee. The Starbucks boss is sitting on a balcony overlooking the company’s leafy farm in the Costa Rican province of Alajuela, where I’m told the coffee–harvested and roasted on-site–is a must-try. Like more than 60% of Americans, I drink coffee at least once a day, and sometimes I indulge twice or even three times. The Costa Rican blend Schultz pours me has a special taste that mixes citrus and chocolate flavors.

But the future of my cup of Costa Rican Arabica is not guaranteed, Schultz says. After nearly four decades at Starbucks, he is leaving at the end of June, and in the role of executive chairman for almost 15 months, he has been looking past Starbucks’ day-to-day operations to its long-term challenges and opportunities. Climate change ranks high among them.

As temperatures rise and droughts intensify, good coffee will become increasingly difficult to grow and expensive to buy. Since governments are reacting slowly to the problem, companies like Starbucks have stepped in to save themselves, reaching to the bottom of their supply chains to ensure reliable access to their product. “Make no mistake,” Schultz tells me, “climate change is going to play a bigger role in affecting the quality and integrity of coffee.”

This farm, with its verdant vistas and a trickling waterfall, seems far removed from the rising sea levels, blistering heat and destructive storms that characterize climate change. But global warming is exactly why Starbucks bought the 600-acre plot in 2013, and why Schultz makes the 3,500-mile trip from Seattle a few times a year as he has done on this March day.

The farm is Starbucks’ field laboratory into the threats posed to coffee by climate change and its testing facility for how it can adapt to the challenge. Schultz hopes that the research here will inform agricultural practices for millions of farmers across the globe, including the ones that supply the company. “We have to be in the soil, growing coffee, to understand firsthand how to rectify and fix the situation,” he says.


Study after study has laid out the threat climate change poses to the coffee industry. Rising temperatures will bring drought, increase the range of diseases and kill large swaths of the insects that pollinate coffee plants.

About half of the land around the world currently used to produce high-quality coffee could be unproductive by 2050, according to a recent study in the journal Climatic Change. Another paper, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that that number could be as high as 88% in Latin America.

While rising temperatures have caught many industries flat-footed, coffee companies have responded in force, bolstering their presence on the ground in coffee-growing countries like Costa Rica, Ethiopia and Indonesia. Instead of just purchasing coffee, they work with small farms to help them adapt to changing conditions, providing seeds, monitoring production and suggesting new agricultural practices. “Everybody talks about climate, but the only sector that’s actually doing something at scale is the coffee industry,” M. Sanjayan, the CEO of Conservation International, tells me as we tour the Starbucks farm in Alajuela.

Not that the industry sees a choice. Declining supplies and a growing coffee-drinking population mean climate change could turn a daily pick-me-up into a high-priced luxury, threatening the continued growth of the industry’s customer base.

Addressing that challenge was an important facet of Schultz’s job in his final years at Starbucks. “It’s not only about the environment,” he says of his work on climate change. “It’s also to procure high-quality coffee, to get the best possible yield, at the best possible price.”



During our visit to the Starbucks farm, Schultz stops at the company’s Costa Rican farmer support center. The structure is designed to accommodate crops brought in fresh from the field, but still maintains the gloss of a corporate office for the high-level executives who cycle through on occasion.

Schultz greets Carlos Mario Rodriguez, director of global agronomy at Starbucks, with a big smile and a familiar handshake. In this building, Rodriguez meets with local farmers, offering them different seed varieties developed on-site and advising them on how to protect their yield in the face of a changing climate.

When he’s not teaching planters, Rodriguez, the former head of Costa Rica’s national coffee institute, spends his days among the coffee trees on the property, surveying experiments designed to develop the perfect coffee bean–one that can survive drought and heat while also meeting the company’s quality standards. On the farm, he stops to show me one 4,300-sq.-ft. field where he says 50 new coffee varietals are being tested for their climate resilience as well as taste.


Rodriguez and his research are the vanguard of Starbucks’ efforts to adapt. Beginning in 2013, Starbucks decided to invest in growing its footprint in coffee-producing countries. It now has support centers in nine countries–a number Schultz said could triple in the coming years–and a 10-year, $500 million investment fund that supports sustainability programs, such as adaptation training for farmers and testing new coffee varieties.



All this work on the ground in Costa Rica may sound obvious. Companies in sectors from energy to technology invest in research and development to better their products. But the coffee behemoth’s focus on local farms represents a seismic shift. Selling coffee to consumers has always been a separate business from growing the beans. And because an estimated 25 million people farm coffee around the globe, big coffee companies have typically found suppliers in whichever place experienced a strong harvest that year. If one country’s yield suffered, the companies simply looked elsewhere.

But with climate change, that supply chain is no longer assured. Arabica coffee–the variety found at Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and pretty much every other American retailer–grows in a narrow region of the tropics known as the Coffee Belt, which stretches from Central America to sub-Saharan Africa to Asia. Conditions must be just right or a harvest is lost. In the past, some areas occasionally experienced off years because of a bad storm or a temperature fluctuation.


Researchers say that in the future such challenges will be constant. Farmers in some regions will be able to adapt by growing at higher elevations, but in others there is nowhere else to go. Entire regions risk becoming unable to continue producing Arabica coffee, and Schultz and others say there’s no way to make the more resilient Robusta variety, which is sometimes blended with Arabica to make instant coffee, palatable to the broad coffee-drinking public.

Scientists also warn that climate change increases the likelihood of disease, including the dreaded la roya, or stem rust. That disease cut coffee production in Central America by about 15% in the 2012–13 growing year. Due in large part to rust, the price of a pound of coffee for consumers in the U.S. jumped roughly 33% between ’11 and ’13. “Climate change is good,” says William Corrales Cruz, a small-coffee-farm owner in the Costa Rican region of Naranjo. “If you sell rust.”

Starbucks says it is eager to share the lessons it learns about adaptive farming with coffee growers around the globe. For big coffee companies buying from a variety of small suppliers, the argument goes, there’s no value in trying to gain a competitive advantage by hoarding trade secrets. Improving all coffee growers’ ability to survive climate change benefits the entire industry, Schultz says.

The company’s network of farmer support centers distributes free seeds, teaches new adaptation methods and serves as a resource for farmers who are eager to learn how to adapt, regardless of whether they do business with Starbucks. “It may be hard for people to understand why we are sharing all this information,” says Schultz. “If we don’t, there’s going to be tremendous adverse pressure on the coffee industry.”

In Costa Rica, farmers say climate change has already made it difficult to predict harvest conditions. “One year it’s too short, one year it’s too long,” says Corrales Cruz of the rainy season. The nation’s coffee industry is suffering as a result. Fifteen years ago the average coffee farm in Costa Rica produced about 14.5 bags of coffee per acre. Today that number is down to fewer than 10 bags per acre.

It’s a harbinger for the coffee industry, and a sign of the seriousness of its adaptation challenge: climate change is happening now, and it is happening fast. Remaking the complex system of trees, plants and wildlife that allow for coffee to thrive in a particular place takes careful consideration over an extended period of time. “Changes we make today,” says Peter Läderach, a climate-change specialist at the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, “may only be yielding fruits in five or 10 years.”