For more than 3 decades, Gustavo Patiao has been developing valuable Arabica coffee beans on his Finca El Ocaso estate, located on top of the misty hills of Salento, 1,800 meters high, in western Colombia. Every day, parrots can be seen howling along the branches of the surrounding cloud forest, while tired farmworkers sweat and struggle to load baskets with hand-picked coffee underneath.
Patiao, 62, claims to drink up to 15 cups of Salento coffee a day, but in its purest and hardest form. Its first flavor came here on his grandfather’s estate at the age of 10, served with a dose of water panela or boiled sugar cane juice.
Until 2015, Patio idea that her own young people can simply continue the circle of relatives of the culture of coffee culture. That year, record temperatures burned the earth and caused a quarter of the expected harvest to rot. Then, in 2016, landslides caused by unprecedented rains destroyed a significant part of the plantation. “We weren’t in a position for that, ” said Patiao.
The surrounding Farm El Ocaso. (Credit: Peter Yeung)
Changing climate situations are a fatal risk to the long-term nature of coffee plantations such as Patiao in Colombia, the world’s third largest producer. The volatile climate has led to an unprecedented build-up of heat waves and prolonged and devastating droughts. At other times of the year, incessant rains cause landslides and fatal flooding. Diseases of invasive crops and insects related to climate replacement are also increasing. All these adjustments have created an incredibly complicated environment for coffee cultivation.
“Too much sun makes the flowers bloom too soon, the beans ripen too much and rot inside, and the higher rains remove nutrients from crops in the soil,” Patio said in this year’s dry season, grimacing when he grabbed a handful of soil an allowance. “In all my years of painting on this earth, situations have never been so bad.”
The demise of the would be a crisis for some of Colombia’s poorest communities: it generates $2.64 billion a year, making it the country’s largest agricultural export, and employing two million people, a quarter of whom are a quarter of the entire rural population.
“In all my years of paintings on this earth, they’ve never been so bad.”
The scenario has become even less sustainable due to a risk from farmers in an organization that seeks to protect them. The National Coffee Federation of Colombia, or Fedecafé, is a cooperative that was founded in 1927 to form the country’s coffee producers nationally and internationally. But Fedecafé, to which farmers must subscribe and pay six cents for every pound of coffee they export, rejects humanity’s scientifically proven role in climate replacement, rather than explaining the replacement of the recent climate as a component of a “natural cycle.” “
Because of his denial of climate change, Fedecafé “failed to adequately prepare farmers for climate change,” according to Mauricio Galindo, Colombian director of Rainforest Alliance, a non-profit environmental organization. Many farmers would gain advantages by switching to crops that can in the changing climate, such as avocado or bananas, but do not get this advice, Galindo told VICE News.
Many coffee makers are suffering to earn a decent wage, and the meager profit margins are further eroded due to the mandatory rates paid by manufacturers in Fedecafé, equivalent to a 15.3% source of income tax.
Fedecafé’s alleged denial of climate is back at least to 2012, when World Coffee Review interviewed the organization’s leading climatologist, Alvaro Jaramillo. “The climate on earth has been transforming for more than 4.6 billion years and mountain formation and volcanic activity continue to create new climate cycles,” he said at the time. “Since 2007, we have noticed that the global world is entering a new era of global cooling.”
Scientific studies suggest otherwise. According to a publication in Coffee and Cocoa International last year, the mountainous region where Patiao coffee is grown, and most Colombian coffee, is warming to 0.3 degrees Celsius consistent with the decade, an astonishing rate that is nearly double the global average. 0.17 degrees. The amount of sunlight in the region has also decreased by 19% in a few decades due to the accumulation of a canopy of clouds caused by climate change, he discovered, with excessive climatic occasions and fungal diseases that are more common.
“It’s a hockey stick curve that in the 1980s has continued ever since,” said Peter Baker, an agronomist at Climate Edge, a social enterprise that operates with small farmers, who participated in the studio. “But warming is only one component, time is also more chaotic. When it rains, it rains more. When there’s a drought, it gets worse. Diseases are going to increase. It’s never easy to grow coffee, but it’s unprecedented. »
Gustavo Patio on the coffee plants of his Finca Finca El Ocaso. (Credit: Peter Yeung)
Between 2008 and 2013, Colombian coffee production fell by about 33 cents, largely due to excessive weather situations in El Niño and La Niño, when the number of rains, storms and droughts increased. According to Baker, occasions like these will become more common as the weather crisis intensifies.
Due to the global climate replacement, there would possibly not even be Colombian coffee to choose from and sell in the long run. As average temperatures rise, optimal coffee culture will increase at higher altitudes. But dominance is limited and, according to a report published in Climatic Change magazine in 2015, climate change will reduce global coffee dominance by about 50% by 2050.
Galindo argues that Colombia’s coffee regions, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO that reflects “a centuries-old culture of coffee culture,” want to be analyzed separately to assess the spaces that deserve to discourage coffee cultivation and genuinely select crops. But he understands why Fedecafé hesitates to recognize the effect of anthropogenic climate replacement on the national coffee industry. That would diminish his own role in the country.
“You can’t undermine yourself and be ‘the arrangement of coffee producers without coffee’. It is very difficult to tell your farmers, even if all the evidence indicates that in 20 years your coffee plantations will be dead, which impede coffee development.
“She can’t mine herself and be an ” association of coffee-free producers, ” said Galindo. It is very difficult to tell your farmers, even if all the evidence indicates that in 20 years your coffee plantations will be dead,” which prevent the development of coffee.”
Others were more direct about Fedecafé’s lack of action. “Some countries have been too slow to resist change, and Colombia is one of them,” said Baker, the agronomist. “There is the spectrum of climate minimization.”
Instead of adapting to the climate, Fedecafé moves by focusing on getting a better generation to mitigate damage and efficiency, such as with more resilient tree varieties. So far, the plan is working. As of June, Colombian coffee growers produced 14.2 million bags of coffee beans, about 1.9 billion pounds, 30% more than in 2013, reversing the downward trend observed in previous years. But they do not yet meet the national production targets of 14.7 million sacks, a deficit that Fedecafé attributes to excessive rain and cloudiness, which has surprised the clinical community.
The largest palm trees in the world grow in the Cocora Valley, near the Finca El Ocaso estate. (Credit Peter Yeung)
Some farmers say this short-sighted technique, which maximizes the short-term benefit that long-term sustainability, is realized at the expense of their own well-being. Many coffee makers are suffering to earn a decent wage, and the meager profit margins are further eroded due to the mandatory rates paid by manufacturers in Fedecafé, which equates to a 15.3% source of income tax. As a result of this tension, controversy erupted last year when Fedecafé’s executive leader Roberto Velez revealed that he was receiving a salary of 105 million pesos, or $28,000, consistent with a month, or the equivalent of about $350,000 a year.
“State policies are offering us subsidies or fair prices, even if we work so hard to produce a smart product,” said one farmer from the Risaralda region. “Instead of helping us, the state is squeezing us.”
“Instead of us, the state is squeezing us.”
However, The director of Fedecafé, Alvaro Goion, defended the group’s remedy for farmers and his resolve to describe climate replacement as cyclical. “Colombia is living one of its most productive moments in terms of agronomic situations in its areas of coffee development,” he told VICE News. “At least for our country’s areas of coffee development, we have no transparent evidence that a new invisible climate trend is happening lately.”
The reality contradicts those claims on Patiao’s farm. The clusters of ripe red coffee cherries are a few meters from the plants that do not have them, and this asymmetric maturation of the crops, according to the farmer, is an effect of unpredictable climatic situations, a marked replacement of what was once dry and rainy. Array’s climate cycles have reversed the practices of 100 years ago, and coffee trees are incredibly sensitive to small climate change. “Our economic survival is based on knowing the returns we will have the year,” Patiao added. “But now it’s almost impossible.”
Patiao has struggled to adapt. A new reinforced canopy of walnut cafeteria trees provides shade and cover for coffee planting to mitigate excessive weather conditions, and select products such as banana, banana and lime are now grown as collateral in the event of a failed harvest.
In the 18 months until May 2019, Colombia 40,000 hectares of coffee plantations.
However, smallholder farmers, who make up the vast majority of Colombian coffee production, have very little margin for error. Of 500,000 farms, 95 consistent with one percent have a domain of less than five hectares and the average is less than two. Its small length makes many forced to close their doors. In the 18 months leading up to May 2019, Colombia has lost 40,000 hectares of coffee plantation dominance, according to Fedecafé, and since the 1990s, the general land dominance used for coffee has fallen to 20 percent.
“Due to fluctuating coffee costs and lack of institutional support, this is a steady cycle of poverty,” said Dr. Jessica Eise, who interviewed forty-five coffee makers in Colombia as part of her PhD. Purdue University in its delight with climate change. “It is a grueling task and it is very difficult for them to plan long-term because they have to focus on the precariousness of everyday life. They know what the climate is to replace and live it as chaos and an existential threat.
Coffee at Finca El Ocaso. (Credit: Peter Yeung)
Of the farmers surveyed through Eise, more than 90% said there had been adjustments in average temperatures on their land, 74% said droughts had been more serious and 61% said they had increased hillside erosion and landslides caused by heavy rains. . Most reported an increase in invasive pests and crop diseases, while 91% reported differences in the fruiting cycles of their coffees.
Testimonies from farmers in Colombia’s Risaralda region heard through VICE News reveal the development of a depression and symptoms of an imminent environmental disaster. One farmer said that recently a very intense heat wave, he thought “the whole region was going to burn.” Another revealed that relentless rains had caused landslides, absolutely destroying their coffee plants. “There were no flowers and all the crops were lost,” he says. Others reported that agricultural production had declined by a third year in a year without getting married and that, in some cases, coffee sales were so low that there was not enough source of income to pay workers.
Type the coffee of Finca El Ocaso. (Credit: Peter Yeung)
Coffee experts like Mauricio Galindo see a “perfect storm” emerging due to a mix of climate change, a shortness of prospective chronic labor due to the coronavirus pandemic, and downward pressure on global coffee rates driven by higher production in Brazil, which has noticed that the coffee industry has weakened. last year’s top production charge. Combined with senior production officials, high taxes and younger generations who choose to settle in cities, the scenario is dangerous for those on the lower eche stages of the coffee industry.
Amid the dizzying flanks of the emerald hills of Salento, the irreversible replacement of the coffee landscape is a difficult fact to accept. Lacking institutionality to replace and with little capacity for independent adaptation, Colombian coffee growers face a slow march towards oblivion.
“My circle of relatives and I have invested our livelihood in this area,” Patiao said. “Even if I sought to escape and start a new life, what can I do?”