Don't blame the bartender if in September the cup of coffee at the bar will cost you 10 or 20 cents more. Once again in the dock, it is the climate emergency which, three times (but a fourth wave is on its way), has inflicted on Brazil the torture of the feared frosts capable of destroying the seedlings before harvest. A disaster like this hasn't been seen since 1994, when huge fortunes changed hands after crops were destroyed. This could also be the case this time, given that for now (but the budget could grow) 11 percent of the crop went to waste. And the impact on prices, already up 35 percent at the end of June for Arabica, could be really substantial: from 400 reais for a 60-kilogram bag last winter, half of current prices, to over 1.000 reais.
But the conditional is obligatory: the big names, Nestlé, Iab and Starbucks, control the market and therefore set the price, followed by Coca Cola (it recently entered the capital of Vergnano coffee) and also by some pocket multinationals of our house, first of all Lavazza which is not so pocket-sized with its 2 billion turnover.
But coffee is only one chapter, albeit one of the most followed by the large soft commodities operators, of the great global transition that climate change is imposing on agriculture, with epochal repercussions ranging from workers' income to the strategic and military choices of the vati Countries, passing through the epochal transformations that the rise in temperature on the earth is already causing at every latitude. It is being talked about these days in Rome, at the Ifad, during the UN pre-summit which deals with the repercussions and the role of small farmers, the first victims of the great heat. Without forgetting, however, that as almost always happens, for someone the revolution can be a godsend.
The Financial Times, for example, has tracked down the extraordinary story of Mr. Andrea Passanisi, the lord of the avocados that thrive on his land at the foot of Etna. About twenty years ago the young Passanisi, now 37 years old, discovered the virtues of the tropical fruit. Why not try to grow it in Sicily, instead of dad's vineyards which, thanks to the heat and humidity, yield less and less? A good choice because today in the plain of Giarre the climate is now tropical, which allows the company to collect 1.400 tons of avocados a year intended to enrich the canteens of Italians (and others). In short, the great heat also creates new proposals: the olive trees in the pre-Alpine areas of Lombardy, for example, but also the more and more numerous vineyards in northern Europe, Denmark included, but above all in the green hills of Kent, where Henry Ward, heir to an agricultural firm boasting 300 years of history in wheat and orchards, has set aside 2.500 acres south of London for the production of Pinot noir, the basis for giving life ad a good champagne, vinified under the advice of the Duval-Leroy maison. But the day is not far off when the champagne will arrive from the Okanagan Valley in the heart of Canadian Ontario. The increase in temperature, combined with the improvement of winemaking techniques, has allowed an "extraordinary improvement" (oenologists' words) of production, with an immediate impact on the local economy: by now there are more than 200 farms offering a wine stay plus accommodation, as in the Langhe or Chianti.
These are just a few examples of an epochal transformation which promises to be deeper and more lasting than that which affected Europe in the Middle Ages, struck by the glaciations evoked by Brueghel's paintings, or in the XNUMXth century, when the eruptions of Indonesian volcanoes obscured the light even on the fields of Provence. There will be winners, but also losers. The demarcation line is the same drawn by the previous revolution, the one that changed agriculture in advanced countries to the sound of pesticides and new variants: in the coming years land productivity Germans will rise by 3 percent, that of the Egyptian camps, bombarded by the heat, will drop by 7%. And conflicts over water will multiply, ever more precious and in demand in the new Tropoci.
It looms a new kind of geopolitics. Canada and Russia will be the two coffers that will be able to supply food to a growing population. In both countries, the far north is destined to become arable land, to be managed with great care to avoid nasty surprises in terms of CO2. In any case, the key to supremacy in food in the coming years will be there. Without forgetting that even the avocados of Giarre are asking for a reform in the management of water flows.
