CITIZENS’ CLIMATE EDUCATION: Your Morning Coffee & Climate Change

Enjoy that cup of coffee in the morning? Or two? I certainly do. Notice the price of coffee recently? I certainly have. On world markets, the price of ordinary coffee has more than doubled over the past year. What’s going on?

Rising temperatures, droughts, and excessive rains, most recently in Brazil and Vietnam – the world’s two largest coffee producers – have diminished the supply of coffee around the globe.  As we all learned in Econ 101, when supply goes down, prices go up. 

It’s not only the big producers like Brazil and Vietnam that are affected. Consider the case of Marysabel Caballero, a fourth-generation coffee farmer, and her husband, Moises Herrer, who were recently profiled in a New York Times article on coffee prices.  

Marysabel and Moises run a coffee plantation called Finca El Puente, carved into the mountains of southwestern Honduras. A cold snap in December and January damaged their crop, and then late rains prevented their workers from venturing into the plantations to pick ripe fruit, cutting into their coffee production for the year.  

The global drop in coffee supply is driving prices up, but the Honduran couple see the high prices not as a windfall but as a warning bell of catastrophic supply problems for years to come.  According to Marysabel and Moises, “Many producers are starting to lose hope.”  As more producers drop out and supply dips further, up go prices even further.

This climate-change-induced supply problem is not limited to coffee. Did you notice that your Valentine’s Day chocolate was more expensive? Indeed, in 2022, chocolate sold at $2,000 a ton, and now it is up to $12,000 a ton.  The culprit: droughts, floods, and heat waves in West Africa, the region that produces most of the world’s cocoa.   

Yet another example is sugar, where U.S. consumers saw prices rise by 8.9% in 2023 and increase 5.6% in 2024, with the increases driven by droughts and other extreme weather in major sugar-producing countries such as India. 

Without question, climate change is not the cause of every price increase in food (we’re all familiar with the soaring egg prices caused by avian flu, for example). But, overall, climate change is a substantial factor driving up food budgets, and its impact will only grow over time. 

So, when you sip your morning coffee and contemplate its higher cost, let it stimulate you to more than worry. Efforts to confront and combat climate change will be a long-term effort.  However, as the Chinese proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” To pick just a few examples of first steps:

• Educate yourself more about climate change and its impacts. 

• Download a free app called “Climate Action Now” that provides daily choices for climate action.

• Let your elected officials on both sides of the aisle know of your concerns.  

• Take that first step and get active. 

Rob Lindquist is a 23-year resident of San Juan Capistrano and teaches at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He is a member of the local Orange County South Chapter of Citizens’ Climate Education and Lobby.