A new report by an industry watchdog adds to growing scientific consensus that as forests are felled to make way for coffee farms, rainfall decreases and crops are more likely to fail. Every day, we drink more than 2 billion cups of coffee worldwide, by some estimates, and demand keeps rising. To grow beans to quench this thirst, ever more forests have been felled globally for farming. But in an ecological and agricultural irony, the more forests are destroyed to grow coffee, the more the crop’s long-term prospects are jeopardized by changing rains, according to a new report by Coffee Watch, a nonprofit industry watchdog. The group, whose findings were published Wednesday, mapped deforestation in Brazil’s southeastern coffee belt and compared it to rainfall changes and crop failures in the same region. It found that as companies destroyed local forests to make way for plantations, rainfall in those areas decreased, which led to crop failures and lower yields and, ultimately, higher ...
