As we have been tracking over the past couple of years, global warming has been impacting coffee growing regions around the world -- from excessive rains leading to flooding to increased temperatures minimizing the available coffee-friendly agricultural regions.
The Guardian now has another update for us: The temperatures are warming enough that they are inviting a lovely little pest, the coffee berry borer, to live in higher and higher altitudes. This little beetle wants the same thing we do -- coffee, delicious coffee! -- but couldn't hang with the coffee crops all that often because they preferred a cooler clime than the beetle's 68F degrees. Warming kicked up temps in parts of Ethiopia's mountainous growing region to this level in around 1984 and scientists have been tracking the borer's population expansion ever since -- it's now present in every coffee growing region except Hawaii, Nepal and Papua New Guinea.
Coffee's commodity price has been slowly increasing as a result of environmental and economic pressures and is at its highest this year. With an estimated $500m damage sourced to the coffee berry borer crew, it will only serve to increase the cost even more.