Deforestation Is Imperiling Coffee Cultivation, Report Finds

Every day, we drink more than two billion cups of coffee worldwide, by some estimates, and demand keeps rising.

To grow beans to quench this thirst, ever more forests have been felled globally for farming. But in an ecological and agricultural irony, the more forests are destroyed to grow coffee, the more the crop’s long-term prospects are jeopardized by changing rains, according to a new report by Coffee Watch, a nonprofit industry watchdog.

The group, whose findings were published on Wednesday, mapped deforestation in Brazil’s southeastern coffee belt and compared it to rainfall changes and crop failures in the same region. It found that as companies destroyed local forests to make way for plantations, rainfall in those areas decreased, which led to crop failures and lower yields and, ultimately, higher prices for consumers.

“The ecologically destructive way we grow coffee is going to result in us not having coffee,” said Etelle Higonnet, the group’s director.

“Deforestation for coffee cultivation is killing the rains, which is killing the coffee,” she said in a phone interview. If the trend continues, she added, farmers will produce fewer crops even as more forests are destroyed to accommodate more farmland.

The report argues that clearing forests to meet demand for coffee will exacerbate rainfall patterns that are already shrinking yields for farmers. (Coffee production is at risk because the crop is highly sensitive to rain patterns and not very resilient to drought.)

The report’s conclusions align with findings by Brazilian scientists published in Nature Communications last month. The study found that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest had led to about a 75 percent decrease in rainfall there.

The growing data show that deforestation affects rainfall and other growing conditions, which were previously difficult to quantify without advanced mapping and analytical tools.

Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer, with an environment uniquely suited to cultivation. But conditions in the main southeastern growing regions that have helped coffee thrive there — like reliable, timely rains and fertile soil — have degraded with deforestation, the reports states, and the forest felling continues.

According to Coffee Watch, a 2014 drought in Brazil was a turning point, when rain shortages became practically annual. Since then, when rain has fallen, the timing is often misaligned with the needs of finicky coffee crops. Simultaneously, as these moisture deficits continue, the soil dries, further undermining growth, the report concludes.

Last year, intense drought in Brazil contributed to shortages and wild spikes in global coffee prices, foreshadowing trouble ahead. Though the Brazilian government has made strides in reducing deforestation in some areas in recent years, a much more severe pricing crisis could be brewing if the annual rain cycles collapse. By 2050, extreme prices could be the norm as much of Brazil’s coffee belt becomes less fruitful, Coffee Watch predicted.

Still, deforestation for agricultural expansion is not at all unique to Brazil, and coffee growing is not the most problematic agricultural activity. Cattle ranching and soy farming are behind much of the forest felling in Brazil and elsewhere.

Forests absorb carbon and help regulate the global climate, but high demand for major commodities, like coffee, has driven deforestation worldwide. In 2023, the European Union adopted a law that would compel industry players in cattle, wood, cocoa, soy, palm oil, coffee and rubber to prove that their products do not come from recently deforested land.

To maintain access to the European market, which consumes more coffee than any country or bloc in the world, farmers in major growing and exporting nations like Vietnam and Ethiopia are preparing to provide geolocation data about the provenance of their crops.

Brazil has opposed the legislation. Last year it pushed for delays, writing to the European Commission. the executive arm of the European Union, that it is “a unilateral and punitive instrument that disregards national laws,” conflicts with principles of sovereignty, discriminates against countries with forest resources and raises production and export costs.

Last month, the European Commission called for a delay in putting the deforestation law into effect, saying the system is not ready technically.

But on Tuesday, the commission announced scaled-back requirements instead of a full delay, with rules beginning at staggered times for big and small companies. The proposal, the commission noted, still needs approval from the European Parliament.