Some Mexican producers grow coffee under banana trees, for example. The fruit is for farmers to consume themselves, says Arguello Campos, and farmers sell the large banana leaves to the U.S. food market for tamale wraps. This practice can generate up to 30 percent of their total income.
In places that are increasingly too hot or dry to grow coffee, such crops may someday support former coffee producers, but for now, they supplement coffee revenues.
Buying Time
Daniele Giovannucci, a former coffee consultant for the World Bank and founder of the Committee on Sustainability Assessment, sees coffee’s climate adaptation as splitting into two paths. One is specialty coffees, such as shade-grown gourmet varieties. The other, which is easier to scale, is varietals suited to new climate conditions.
A coffee plant wilts in the sun on a plantation near Manizales, Colombia. (Photo courtesy of…
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