Global warming hits coffee as meeting examines crisis

Seed Daily: Delegates representing coffee producers and consumers met here Friday to discuss global warming's effect on coffee growing, as producers warned climate change has forced them to find new growing grounds. Some 1,000 delegates from 77 countries are meeting for three days to examine how changing weather patterns will affect production over the next five years, organizers said.

Coffee producers say they are getting hammered by global warming, with higher temperatures forcing growers to move to higher, cooler, and more prized ground, putting their cash crop at risk. "There is already evidence of important changes" said Nestor Osorio, head of the International Coffee Organization (ICO), which represents countries that export or import the beans. "In the last 25 years the temperature has risen half a degree in coffee producing countries, five times more than in the 25 years before," he said.

Sipped daily by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, coffee is one of the globe's most important commodities, and a major mainstay of exports for countries from Brazil to Indonesia….

Coffee beans shot by Jeff Kubina, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license