The New New
The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster
Scientists are scrambling to head off one unexpected impact of climate change
Late in the summer of 2012, while walking his coffee groves on a hillside rising above Santa Ana, El Salvador, Mario Mendoza Corleto noticed something unusual: the leaves on some of his trees were coated with an orange fungus and had begun dropping to the ground. It was “leaf rust,” a form of blight that had pestered coffee farmers in El Salvador since the 1970s. Normally, spraying the trees with fungicide once or twice a year would keep the disease at bay. Not anymore. “This year it was totally different,” Mendoza recounted to me recently. “Spraying didn’t help.”
As the days wore on, the problem only worsened. By September, many of Corleto’s once-bushy trees stood completely bare. Their green fruit hardened in the sun, never ripening into the candy-red cherries that Mendoza’s workers would pick and process into coffee beans destined for specialty roasters. That year, half of the trees on his family’s 100-year-old farm died. The next year, as Mendoza’s remaining trees continued to struggle, he laid off most of his workers. The harvest was a quarter of its usual size.
