The climate has a direct impact on the Mekong coffee industry

MB+ - In villages around the city of Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnamese farmers wait for the monsoon that normally arrives in April or May.

“The fruits look ripe outside, but the bean is crispy and small because there was not enough rain,” says 28-year-old Y Bel Eban from Krong village, pointing to some small green beans in his hand.

>> See More: Specialty Coffee in Da Nang end Roastery Coffee in Da Nang

Eban said there were only three 30-minute downpours this spring. These were no good for the coffee plants, which need water every 15 to 20 days. Many plants died, hurting local farmers who depend on coffee to make a living.

Buon Ma Thuot is the largest city in the “coffee kingdom” of Vietnam’s central highlands. Ninety-five percent of the country’s coffee is produced in this area, helping to make Vietnam the world’s second-largest coffee exporter after Brazil.

A few kilometres away from Buon Ma Thuot, a major tributary of the Mekong, the Srepock River flows from the central highlands into northeastern Cambodia. On its journey through six Asian countries, the Mekong provides livelihoods for at least 60 million people.

Yet severe drought in the region of the lower Mekong basin, which encompasses Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and southwestern China, has pushed the river to its lowest level in a century.

As the world warms, farmers will experience events like this more often. How they grow coffee will have its own part to play, with intensive farming potentially leading to soil depletion and deforestation.

Climate change and water shortage

Coffee plants grown in the direct sun in a village near Buon Ma Thuot, central highlands, Vietnam (Image: Karoline Kan/China Dialogue)

“In the past, rains arrived earlier and on time and the weather was more predictable,” said Eban. “But in the past few years, the weather has been exceptionally harsh.”

Drought has been a constant burden for Vietnam’s coffee-growing provinces in recent years. In 2016, it caused a state of emergency in the central and southern regions of the country.

Coffee growing itself can worsen the problem of water scarcity. In 2018, Vietnam grew coffee across 688,400 hectares, yielding over 1.6 million tons of beans. With so many plantations in need of water for irrigation in the central highlands — and unpredictable weather limiting rainfall — ponds, lakes and groundwater have been drying out. To maintain basic irrigation, local farmers are having to dig wells deeper and deeper.

Associate Professor Dr. Le Anh Tuan of the University of Can Tho, a leading expert on climate change in the Mekong delta, said that recent droughts in the region show signs of being affected by climate change.

“They have become more frequent than in the past and… they often take extreme forms in the region,” he said.

Across the lower Mekong basin, temperatures have risen by between 0.5 to 1.5 ºC in the past 50 years and continue to rise, according to the WWF. The onset of monsoon rains may be getting less reliable, and “these trends are very likely to accelerate and intensify in coming decades as the rate of climate change increases,” Dr. Tuan explained.

Land changes, such as deforestation and desertification, also contribute to extreme weather events. “Climate Change and Land,” a recent report by an intergovernmental body of scientists convened by the United Nations, shows how such changes can increase the intensity and duration of extreme heat and rainfall, sometimes in areas hundreds of kilometers away.

Because plants return water to the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration — a process known as evapotranspiration — “changes in forest cover directly affect regional surface temperatures,” the report notes. “Increased evapotranspiration can result in cooler days during the growing season and can reduce the amplitude of heat-related events.”

The situation upriver

More than a thousand kilometers up the Mekong from Buon Ma Thuot, the coffee farmers of Yunnan province have also been feeling the heat.

In this Chinese stretch of the Mekong (where it is known as the Lancang), Li Yemei grows coffee near her village of Dakaihe.

She points to the dry leaves of her crop and explains that she will lose money this year.

“Many coffee trees have died from drought,” Li says. “The coffee didn’t blossom fully, and the fruits didn’t grow.”

Dakaihe is a coffee-growing village close to Pu’er, a place world-famous for its black tea. In fact, Pu’er also makes up half of Yunnan’s coffee yield, which in turn accounts for 95% of China’s coffee production.

Coffee has been grown in Yunnan for more than a century, but the scale was small until Nestle began to buy beans from the province in the 1980s. High profit margins in the ’80s and ’90s lured many tea farmers to switch to coffee, and the industry expanded quickly.

But from 2009 to 2013 droughts occurred in Yunnan every winter, bringing water shortages and turning farmland barren for millions of residents.

“Yunnan is suffering from an increasing adverse effect from climate change,” said Ding Yihui, special adviser on climate change at the China Meteorological Administration, to provincial officials. “Climate change has affected Yunnan’s socio-economic development and people’s living environment.”

This was certainly true in 2011, when a bitter cold snap impacted four million people and caused losses of 1.5 billion yuan (US$225 million).

Ding added that climate change weakens nature’s ability to adjust and restore, and has extended the drought in Yunnan.

“For sensitive plants like coffee, even a short drought can ruin an entire year’s crop,” said Juliet Lu, a member of the Land Lab at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science.

According to the Yunnan Coffee Industry Association, the drought this year has affected more than 2,000 hectares of coffee in Yunnan. It estimates that production would decline by 5-10%.

In Vietnam, coffee output is also predicted to fall sharply due to water scarcity, Reuters reported.

According to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), climate change will have made about half of the world’s coffee-producing land unsuitable for growing by 2050.

“Different studies show that the size of the areas suitable for coffee production will decrease significantly in the next 20 to 30 years because of climatic change,” said Annegret Brauss, project manager at the International Trade Centre in Geneva, where she is working on the climate resilience of international value chains in Africa. “The industry faces challenges from extreme weather, such as the interruption of transport routes due to heavy rains or challenges in the coffee drying process due to increasingly unpredictable weather patterns.”

>> https/43factory.coffee/en/mekong-coffee-growers-struggle-with-drought-and-a-warming-climate.html