[LINK] "For Tanzania’s coffee farmers, climate change is a buzzkill"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera America's Tom A. Peter looks at how climate change is undermining the coffee industry of Tanzania.

For the last 20 years, Fredrick Damien has watched as his coffee trees have produced fewer and fewer beans. Back in the 1990s, his half-acre farm at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro turned out as many as 330 pounds of coffee a season, but now he’s happy to harvest 200 pounds of beans. He’s tried planting other crops to make up for the shortfall, but in this region coffee is the only viable cash crop.

“I’m trying to put more effort into growing bananas, but I’m mostly just asking God for a miracle,” he says.

The culprit cutting into Damien’s bottom line is one that he only vaguely understands and that has no easy solution: climate change. Over the last 60 years, rising nighttime temperatures have taken a toll on coffee production in this remote corner of Africa, reducing yields by roughly half. Countries throughout East Africa and other coffee growing regions around the world are likewise expected to experience reduced yields if current trends continue. As the world feels the effects of global warming more acutely, coffee farmers, the vast majority of whom live on razor thin margins, are likely to be among the hardest hit.

“We are feeling very worried because we don’t have any other alternatives [to generate income] like mining. We just have coffee. If the weather keeps changing we will have nothing else to do,” says Mary Faustimi, general secretary of the Mamsera Agriculture Marketing Co-operative Society, in the Kilimanjaro region. “We’ve tried to mitigate the effects of climate change. We’ve stopped cutting down trees, and we’ve done what we can, but it’s frustrating because now it depends on other people."