You like coffee, right? It’s the rich, black joy-juice that many of us use instead of adequate sleep, a loving morning buddy that helps us stagger through the challenges of late-stage global capitalism.
Like all of our cash crops, coffea arabica has been lovingly perfected by happy, jittery farmers over the last century and a half to create the perfect beverage-precursor we know and desperately rely upon today.
The problem with highly developed crops designed to be uniform and reliable is that they’re not genetically diverse.
And that means that if something comes along which could wipe them out, the chances of them developing an immunity in time to survive is slim-to-nil.
Which brings us to la roya, or “leaf rust”.
It’s a fungus which occurs periodically in the equatorial regions like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, our prime coffee locales. And unlike lots of other things, like humans, it is finding climate change very much to its liking.
You can see where this is going, right? We’re in an arms race with a coffee-destroying fungus, and the fungus is winning.
Weirdly enough, there’s been barely any serious R&D in the coffee biz compared with other crop varieties. That’s mainly because it’s growing in poor countries without the sorts of government investment that happens in, say, Australia.
That’s being rather hastily amended now, hopefully not too late as the stakes could never be higher. At least, that’s according to this very excellent read, The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster, which you should definitely check out over a lovely hot and terrifyingly finite cup of Joe.
Also, reports that I have been stockpiling coffee in vast underground tanks in which I also periodically swim are exaggerated.
On an unrelated note: anyone fancy a dip?