Enjoy your morning coffee while you can. As a new report by Lina Zeldovich of Quartz notes, your caffeine supply faces “an existential threat” from fungi, beetles and climate change.
It’s a rather eye-opening examination of the problems faced by the coffee industry, where half the land needed for production could disappear by 2050. But the biggest problem might be diversity (or lack thereof) in the beans themselves.
Most of the beans we like are produced by just one plant species, known as Coffee arabica. First discovered in Ethopia, C. arabica can be grown pretty much anywhere, but its uniformity means it may have lost important disease-resistant traits. So scientists are actually hunting down wild coffee species (there are up to 125 non-domesticated species) and sequencing the DNA of coffee beans from gene banks.
Still, up to 70% of those wild varieties could become extinct soon thanks to climate change and deforestation.
Savor that K-cup while you can, my friend.
Subscribe here for our free daily newsletter.
Join America's Fastest Growing Spirits Newsletter THE SPILL. Unlock all the reviews, recipes and revelry — and get 15% off award-winning La Tierra de Acre Mezcal.
