This is one of the most popular plants in the world.
It takes about 3-4 years to grow before producing berries
which are picked, washed, pulped, dried, and roasted to make coffee.
The world consumes about 500 billion cups of it every year.
It’s grown by millions of farmers across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
But there’s a crisis on the horizon.
This is the only area where the coffee plant can grow.
And as man-made climate change warms the planet, it’s shrinking.
Here in Colombia, one of the biggest coffee producers in the world, the impact of that crisis can already be felt.
There are over a hundred species of the coffee plant.
The vast majority occur in the wild while a few are cultivated on a farm.
Two of which are by far the most common.
Robusta coffee has a bitter taste, and is used to make espresso and most instant-coffee.
Arabica coffee is the good stuff. It has a smooth and mild taste and is used for high-quality coffee.
Both species require specific conditions to grow, but arabica is particularly sensitive.
The plant needs temperatures between 18–21°C.
Too hot and the berries won’t grow correctly. Too cold and it can freeze.
It also needs a specific amount of rain, preferably with a 3 month dry season to flower.
And crucially, it needs warm days and cool nights. So it grows best at a certain elevation.
Altogether, that means Arabica grows best between these latitudes.
And if you were to create a perfect place for it, it would look a lot like Colombia.
Specifically, the Zona Cafetera, Colombia's coffee region.
The coffee farmers grow and process it all by hand here
which is why Colombian coffee has been considered the best in the world for over a century.
But the zona cafetera is also where climate change is already taking a toll.
Greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the region by 1.2 degrees (C) since 1980.
That’s enough to push the optimal elevation for coffee higher up the mountain
leaving the plants down here to overheat and produce lower-quality beans.
That’s what’s happened here on the Villa Gloria farm, which sits at a low elevation.
The warmer climate is also ideal for pests and fungi.
Up the slope, some coffee plants at the Santa Fe farm are afflicted with a fungus called coffee rust.
And here, at the El Oasis farm, changing weather patterns have made it hard to predict the lifecycle of the coffee plant.
Since 2013, the amount of land used to grow coffee in Colombia has fallen by more than 7%.
And scientists expect things to get worse.
The zona cafetera is projected to warm by .3 degrees per decade and see more extreme weather.
In fact, coffee growing regions everywhere are going to be affected.
A recent study estimates that by 2050 the amount of land that can sustain coffee cultivation will be reduced by 50%.
And it's not just cultivated coffee.
Another study estimates that 60% of wild coffee species could be at the risk of extinction because of climate change.
Some of these are used to breed more resistant
varieties of Arabica which makes them critical to sustaining coffee production.
That’s not only bad news for the plant, but also for those who have relied on the coffee industry for generations.
In the early 20th century, Americans and Europeans were buying more and more coffee.
So prices were high, and that created a boom in coffee producing countries.
Where does it all come from? Mostly from South America… Let’s fly there
Colombia was the second biggest producer in the world at the time.
It was mostly grown on large coffee plantations,
called haciendas, that dated back to when Colombia was a Spanish colony.
And the work was done by peasants, indigenous people, and former slaves, many of whom were
forced off their lands and subjected to brutal conditions.
The plantations were profitable while prices were high
but in 1929, the US economy crashed. Demand for coffee fell and so did the price bankrupting the plantations.
Fearing that Colombia’s entire coffee industry would vanish, the government stepped in.
They purchased these large coffee fields from the owners
-- many had more than a thousand hectares, about the size of 1800 football fields.
And broke them up into smaller plots of about 16 hectares each, before selling them to laborers.
The idea was that these smaller farms would grow other crops along with coffee to sustain themselves through price fluctuations.
This not only saved one of Colombia’s most important industries, but turned it into one dominated by small-holder farmers.
To support the new small farms in 1927, the government had created Fedecafe,
an agency that would organize and represent the farmers, by negotiating fair prices and favorable deals with other countries.
The most important one was in 1962, when Colombia signed the International Coffee Agreement
with 69 other countries and set a price minimum for export.
As coffee prices recovered, Colombia’s small-holder coffee farmers started thriving.
By the 1970s, Colombia was using the coffee farmer, or cafetero, as a marketing tool around the world.
It is here that they buy their coffee, coffee grown by men like Juan Valdez.
Because for Colombians, their coffee is more than just the richest in the world, it is a national heritage.
Today, Colombia is the world’s third largest coffee exporter
and there are about 500,000 mostly small farms that make up the industry,
but just as these farmers are starting to face the climate change,
the economics that support them are disappearing.
There are several ways farmers can protect their coffee plants from the effects of climate change.
Shade trees keep the plants cool and stabilize the soil.
Farmers can move their crop uphill, where it's cooler.
They can also switch to more resistant varieties of coffee plants.
The problem is all these solutions cost money that many smallholder farmers don’t have anymore.
It started in the 1980s, when the coffee agreement fell apart along with the price minimum.
Since then, more countries, especially some in Asia, have increasingly flooded the market with cheap coffee.
It sparked a crisis around 2009, when extreme weather and coffee rust decimated Colombia’s crop.
Production fell to its lowest levels in decades.
In 2013, thousands of farmers went on strike and demanded that the government provide more
financial support and establish a reasonable price minimum.
The government increased subsidies to coffee growers but without an ICA, a return to a price minimum was no longer possible.
So coffee prices continued to fluctuate. Today it's below what many farmers need to break even.
That’s why it's so hard for these farmers to adapt to climate change.
It’s forced many farmers in the Zona Cafetera to replace coffee with other crops.
And it’s not just a problem in Colombia.
80% of the world’s coffee is grown by 25 million smallholder farmers. Many are living in poverty.
From central America, to Africa, to Asia, climate change is making it harder for them to grow coffee.
Unless the price of coffee rises again and
farmers have the financial means to cope with climate change, small farms everywhere will
continue to be at risk of losing their livelihoods.
And in the Zona Cafetera, that could spell the end of an entire culture built around coffee.