Mexico to Peru: the big rust. Introduction to the great roya outbreak of 2012

PS Baker

Belo Horizonte, 12th September 2013

Mexico to Peru The 2012-13 rust outbreak covered a massive area

Equivalent area for European eyes

What’s going on?

• Short answer:

• We don’t know! • Long answer:

• Wait for Jacques’ presentation

Coffee leaf rust – coffee’s first plague Ceylon 1880s

• Response then: a diversification strategy = tea

Ceylon 19th cent rust disaster covered~ 160k ha coffee

• In terms of area, the present outbreak dwarfs the Ceylon event

• Peru area affected = 178,000 ha? (press report)

• But in terms of value, Ceylon event still bigger?

£12m damage in 1880

= USD1.5 billion in 2010 (price inflator)

= USD 7.5billion (average earnings inflator)

• And the Ceylon outbreak was iconic for many reasons

• E.g. Marshall Ward’s pioneering studies on the rust life-cycle

Harry Marshall Ward

• From his memoirs he gives this description of a expatriate coffee farmer:

• “He cannot come home for want of money, and his coffee costs more than it yields: he goes about the barren acres in a moody and despondent way that speaks of disappointed hopes, misplaced talent and wretched despair.”

H. Marshall Ward

“Wretched despair” 2013 style

• “I don’t know how organic coffee can have a future. There is nothing that works to control rust in the field and I am not seeing anyone in the market offering more to create additional incentives for organic farmers.”

[Miguel Medina, Anacafé (Apr 2013)]

• “You’ll see more people emigrating to the United States and Mexico. You’ll see more people here at traffic lights asking for money,”

[Gerardo Alberto De Leon, marketing manager Fedecocagua, Guatemala]

1880 to 2013

• “Some will stop producing coffee and will produce other crops, including illicit ones…”

• “Guatemala is likely to never return again to producing 4.8 million 100-pound bags of coffee that it grew just two years ago.” [Nils Leporowski, Pres. Anacafé Guatemala]

1880 to 2013

• 130+ years of coffee rust and it’s still the same story

• The full cost we will not know for some time

• It’s bad

• What went so wrong?

• What follows here – I will look at some of the problems that this outbreak has thrown up

• Think of it like an earthquake that shows we were sitting all the time on a fault-line

Guatemala rust summit in Apr 2013

A working group compiled the following list of shortcomings:

• Chronically insufficient economic resources to deal with the rust: most farmers make very modest profits and spraying is costly, so why do it if CLR has not been a problem?

• The problem was underestimated – some warning signs were there but were not acted upon;

• Ineffective application techniques (poor droplet size, wrong frequency & timing of applications) due to lack of training;

• Poor infrastructure – very bad roads after storms in 2010 leading to more difficult access to farms;

• Conflicting advice: technologists promote rust resistant varieties, roasters prefer susceptible varieties.

Guatemala rust summit in Apr 2013

Requirements – more information and research needed on:

• Weather data: temperature, amount of rain and rain patterns, relative humidity, solar light and shade, El Niño y La Niña;

• Levels of infection, incidence, and severity;

• New crop varieties and more testing and improvement of quality of catimors;

• More socioeconomic information about farmers;

• Monitor not only CLR but other diseases;

• Trials on farming systems: tree density changes & shade modification to increase resilience of coffee plantations;

• More studies on rust – its genetic variety and virulence

Guatemala rust summit in Apr 2013

Working group recommended the following to prioritize limited resources to deal with present situation and lower its impact in future years:

• Improve information collection: systematize, analyse, distribute and share with producers to take corrective/preventative actions;

• Develop diagnostics and monitoring for early warning;

• Increase use of new technology e.g. cell phones and improve producers’ networking capacities;

Guatemala rust summit in Apr 2013

Further recommendations:

• Campaign to renovate plantations and promote better farming practices;

• Carry out physical and chemical soil analysis and promote better soil use and conservation;

• Create insurance programs;

• Better equipped extension services for knowledge and technology transfer.

Guatemala rust summit in Apr 2013

In other words, pretty much everything needs to change

Widely expressed opinions at the meeting were that an attitude change is now required by all stakeholders, to understand that:

• ‘We are playing under new rules’ – with more extreme climatic conditions than previously;

• ‘We can’t go on as we have been’ – a greater need to be more proactive, less reactive.

But why reports from Mexico to Peru? When no major Niño/Niña event

– NOAA: June 2012 Global Climate Update “Earth’s fourth warmest June on record”

– Something exceptional about 2012?

Was it climate change?

• Certainly the increased altitude range of the disease over recent years can be explained by CC

• But we should not rush to blame everything on CC

• But: increased pests and diseases are exactly what you would expect to see as a result of climate change, especially more extreme, chaotic weather

• So it is useful to consider this as an ‘awful warning’ of what may happen in the future

Centam rust: it’s complicated

• A climate component (roya attacks at higher altitudes now)

• A knowledge component (lack of awareness, complacency)

• An economic component (costs of regular spraying are high)

• A technology component (lack of varieties, neglect of long-term research)

• Institutional problem (lack of support for routine disease monitoring and awareness raising, training)

• A lack of agency (poor following up, implementation) due to chronic weakness/underfunding of support institutes

It’s a complex system

• A mix of climate, biology, social organization, commerce etc.

• Nowadays often called a Social-Environmental System (SES) – now a lot of scientific interest in complex systems

• A complex system is always difficult to analyse and impossible to fully understand (highly non-linear, full of tipping points)

– E.g. the global financial system – nobody completely understands it or can predict what will happen next

• The point here is that with a more unstable climate, disruptions will become more common

A Black Swan event? From Nassim Taleb

• A Black Swan event is a metaphor for an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.

• They are hard-to-predict and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology

• Because they are rare, science is not good at predicting them due to the nature of small probabilities

• We are all bad at dealing with this: we can be individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

A perception problem?

Dis

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Time

What happened Model 1:

A perception problem?

• From: “we can handle it”

• To: “it’s out of control, it’s a new strain, it’s not our fault, we need help (funds)?”

Dis

ease

inte

nsi

ty

Time

It’s okay, it’s just a blip

Oops, we’ve got a problem What happened Model 2:

What do we do?

• It’s all about organization, being prepared

• Having a Plan B

• And Plan C, etc.

• This is really what we are trying to do with c&c

• It is a comprehensive response

• It’s systematic

• Not afraid to ask difficult questions

Asking difficult questions

• Yesterday we had the 18th century social thinker: Thomas Malthus

• And later, a more recent social thinker:

• In one of her songs, Beyoncé raises a crucial question about complex systems:

• “Who run this Motha?”

“Who run this Motha?”

• An answer is given by Thomas Freedman:

• ‘Globalization is where everything is connected and nobody is in charge’

Nobody is in charge

• We are having to cope with systemic failure

• It’s a time of great change – the New Reality

• We can’t expect these problems to be solved by someone else

• It must be us!

• This is the reason why we must work together, because that way we can do a lot

• There are many technical challenges that can be solved

• We will see an example of this in the Colombia presentation

Reflexão final: It’s hard what we do

www.coffeeandclimate.org