CLIMATE CHANGE 27
What do farmers know and want?
It is pointless to start working with farmers if we don’t understand their perceptions about climate change. What are they most concerned about? Do they think the climate is changing? As a preliminary activity therefore we
developed a questionnaire to find out more. We asked farmers (mostly in Brazil, Guatemala, Uganda and Tanzania) about a range of topics, including any changes they may have seen in temperature and precipi- tation, yields, pests and diseases. For each question we developed a 9-
point scale, so that a reply to the question "have you seen any indication that the weather in coffee zones has changed over the past few years?" could be placed in box 1 (no change) or box 9 (very definite changes) or in any of seven points between these two extremes. With enough farmers questioned it is possible to develop simple histograms to judge the range and prepon- derance of opinions.
It is pointless to start
working with farmers if we don’t understand their perceptions about climate
change. What are they most concerned about? Do they think the climate is changing?
The results surprised us: we were
expecting a wide range of responses, which we got, but not the generally emphatic view that climate change is real and affecting farmers now. Thus in the bar charts (see page 28), we see the response to the gen- eral question about whether farmers have noted changes in the weather. In the middle of the figure we see the response about variability of weather and in the bottom, answers related to the incidence of dis- eases. Most of the responses were equally
emphatic, except for those relating to whether quality was affected (good to bad effects) and whether farmers had changed the area of coffee that they were growing (more or less), where no clear trend was observable in either case. We believe these results are especially interesting because
Coffee farmers need tools to help them adapt to the effects of changing weather patterns
the people asked are the very ones directly experiencing the effects of weather and cli- mate on coffee every day of the year, over many years.
What are the likely effects of climate change on coffee?
Before we select a set of tools (‘tool’ here can mean a wide range of techniques and protocols, such as enhanced ground cover, water storage, shade) we need to figure out exactly what are the biggest risks that farm- ers face from climate change. This will not necessarily be the same in
each coffee zone, so a good deal of data gathering and elicitation of expert opinion is advisable. As a first start, we recently visited farms and coffee experts in Brazil to find out more. From this we have developed a rough problem tree, the idea of which is to break down the problem into component parts as a first step towards designing ways of avoiding or transferring risks. There are risks of being too reductionist
in this approach, so it should be seen as only one way of looking at a complex prob- lem – just one of a number of possible tools for thought. But what we found in Minas Gerais (the main coffee-producing state of Brazil) made us think. For some farmers at least, climate change is good because the risk of frost is receding so they can plant lower down than previously. But are they right? Europe for instance
has just experienced two severe winters that some climatologists believe may be related to greater expanses of warm water affecting Polar air movements, so could something similar happen in Brazil? On the other hand it seems that dry sea-
sons in Minas are now sometimes very intense, though opinion is divided about whether this is related to climate change. Then the rainy season can arrive late or stutter slowly into life, giving rise to more
flowerings and making harvest more difficult and more likely to be affected by coffee berry borer. Overall therefore, many farmers in Minas Gerais are perhaps somewhat concerned, but by no means convinced or worried about climate change. So would they be receptive to new ideas or want to change their customary practices? In São Paulo state on the other hand we
learned of farmers that had abandoned cof- fee because maximum temperatures had exceeded the danger threshold of 32-33ºC during flowering, causing them to abort. Some farmers had planted shade, often fruit trees and then eventually dug up the coffee and become fruit farmers. How wide- spread this practice is, we do not yet know. What is clear however is that there may be a wide and valuable range of experiences that we need to tap into.
What can we do?
This is where things get complicated. Take maximum temperature: certainly we want to help farmers avoid a catastrophic yield loss due to an exceptionally hot day during a major flowering. The obvious tool to deploy is shade,
which we know can reduce maximum tem- peratures by 3ºC or more. But what if the farmer plants shade and then finds himself facing the sort of weather conditions many Colombian farmers have faced over the past three years – that is, almost continu- ous rain? Shade will reduce maximum tem- peratures but also may increase minimum temperatures and create an especially dank environment conducive to fungal diseases. Dense shade will also tend to depress
yields, though there could be some improvement in cup quality. Even if such rainy conditions do not appear, the opposite – a prolonged drought – may arise. This raises the possibility of competition
between coffee and shade trees for avail- able soil moisture, and there is now some suggestion from modelling that this can
May 2011 C&CI
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