Save our coffee!!!

The American Geographic Society had a very informative post about coffee prices on Facebook a few days back. I don’t really want to link to it, but I’m sure you can find it if you want. Anyway, here’s the text.

Coffee prices have hit a 50-year high due to a combination of rising costs of production, supply chain disruptions, and climate change–related declines in crop yields. Coffee plants are sensitive to changes in precipitation and temperature, and recent droughts in Brazil and Vietnam resulted in poor harvests. Coffee companies are passing on the extra costs to customers, with the average retail price of ground roast coffee increasing 15 percent in American cities in the past year and peaking at over $7 a pound. As climate change will continue to threaten coffee harvests in the years to come, projected to shrink the land available for coffee cultivation by half, prices are expected to keep rising.

They also helpfully link to three recent supporting articles in the NY Times, The Independent and on ABC News.

And they reproduce a map from a National Geographic article from a couple of years back.

“This map depicts the predicted change in suitability for growing coffee in different regions between 2000 and 2050 based on climate projections.”

Social media as it should be done.

And since we’re on the subject, there are some very cool resources on coffee diversity on the website of Christophe Montagnon, a renowned expert on the crop. For example, I really like this summary of the global history of arabica.

Shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

We’re going to need those resources — and indeed that diversity — if we want to keep drinking coffee.

Nibbles: Genebanks in the US, CIAT, Egypt, Cambridge Botanic Garden, Chilean wild tomato, Kenyan veggies, PNG diet, PGRFA course

  1. The USDA genebank is in the news. But will that save it?
  2. The CIAT genebank in on a podcast. Can’t hurt, I guess.
  3. The Egyptian genebank is in the news. And on a new website, apparently.
  4. Good to see botanic gardens in the news too.
  5. I wonder which genebank or botanic gardens this apparently re-discovered endemic Chilean wild tomato will end up in. If any.
  6. But genebanks are not enough. You need vegetable fairs too.
  7. Because vegetables are good for you. And not just in Kenya, also in Papua New Guinea.
  8. Want to learn about all of the above? Check out the resources from the Entry-Level Training School on Plant Genetic Resources in 2023.

Brainfood: QMS, Seed viability, Genotyping, Taxonomy, FAIR data, Evaluation data, Lentil data, Indian cryobank, Home genebank, Dry chain, Botanical gardens, Environmental monitoring, Bending the curve

Brainfood: Maroon rice, Dutch aroids, Sicilian saffron, Inca agriculture, Native American agriculture, Mexican peppers, Afro-Mexican agriculture, Sahelian landraces, Small-scale fisheries, Coconut remote sensing

Nibbles: USDA NPGS, Korean seed museum, Endangered plants, National security, Sicilian grapevines, Mike Jackson again

  1. A way to get free seeds from the US government? Yeah probably not. And if so, maybe not for long?
  2. Ok, let’s try the Korean government then.
  3. A way to find endangered plants in the US. And get the government to protect them, of course.
  4. A way to ensure national security? Why, conserving crop diversity of course. Government unavailable for comment.
  5. A way to ensure the future of Sicilian wine? See above.
  6. A genebanker looks back on the 1990s. And, given all of the above, sees that not much has changed?