Tiny Insect Threatining Coffee Plants Worldwide

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The highlands of southwestern Ethiopia is the region where coffee where coffee first originated hundreds of years ago. Although coffee remains Ethiopia’s number one export, the nation’s coffee farmers have been struggling.

The coffee grown in Ethiopia and Latin America is a climate-sensitive crop, requiring just the right amount of rain and an average annual temperature between 64 degrees Fahrenheit and 70 degrees Fahrenheit to prosper. As temperatures rise — Ethiopia’s average low temperature has increased by about .66 degrees F every decade since 1951, according to the country’s National Meteorological Agency — and rains become more variable, Ethiopian coffee farmers have suffered increasingly poor yields. Last year was especially bad, with exports dropping by 33 percent.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a tiny insect known as the coffee berry borer beetle has been devastating coffee plants around the world, and new research suggests even slight temperature increases promote the spread of the pest, as reported by the Guardian.

The beetle is a relatively recent problem in Ethiopia and Latin America, where most Arabica coffee is grown. A field survey of Ethiopia’s coffee growing regions conducted in the late 1960s found no trace of the beetle, however in 2003 researchers reported that the pest was widespread. New research is linking the spread of the beetle to rising temperatures.
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Coffee may not be a basic food crop, such as wheat, but it is arguably one of the most important agricultural products. Valued as high as $90 billion a year, coffee, which is grown in more than 70 countries, is one of the most heavily traded commodities in terms of monetary value. Seventy percent of the world’s coffee comes from small, family-owned farms and more than 100 million people are dependent on the crop for their livelihood. Researchers estimate that the coffee berry borer causes more than $500 million in damages each year, making it the most costly pest affecting coffee today. Coffee growers have tried various tactics to stop the beetle, but to little avail. Pesticides don’t help, and even if they did, they are an unfavorable option, given their negative effects on coffee quality.

Since the 1980s, the beetle has gradually spread to every coffee-growing region except Hawaii, Nepal, and Papua New Guinea, when prior to that it was mostly confined to just a few regions in Central Africa.

Biologists at Kenya’s International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology, suspects temperature increases are to blame. Scientists there have recently identified the temperature range in which the beetle can survive. They found that the average minimum temperature the borer requires to reproduce is about 68 degrees F, and the mountainous regions of Ethiopia did not reach that temperature until 1984.

Twenty years ago, Colombia was the second-largest coffee exporter in the world, and regularly sent abroad more than 12 million bags of Arabica coffee each year. 2009 represented the country’s worst year ever when at an International Coffee Organization meeting in February, a Colombian coffee representative revealed that the country’s coffee exports had dipped to 7.9 million bags last year.

Infestation by the coffee borer, excessive rainfall and reduced application of fertilizer were to blame.

The female borers kill coffee plants by burrowing into coffee berries to lay up to 200 eggs, attracting herbivores and pathogens.

“I think the coffee industry has two options,” she one researcher. “Either they start investing in climate research, or they educate the consumers to drink something else.”

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