A climate-fueled fungus that has decimated coffee regions around the world has reached Kona; what’s on the line is more than a really good cup of coffee
Suzanne Shriner remembers the moment she heard the news that coffee leaf rust had been spotted on the island of Maui, just around 100 miles from her farm on the Kona Coast of the island of Hawaii. It was a Friday afternoon in October—seven months into the pandemic—and Hawaii had just re-opened to tourists.
“I got the text and my stomach dropped,” recalls Shriner, who farms with her extended family and serves as president of the Kona Coffee Farmers Association. Like most of her peers, Shriner had been trying to mentally prepare for the moment for a long time. “We’d hoped we would have a few more years,” she says. “But when I learned it was here, I knew we had a massive challenge ahead of us.”
Coffee leaf rust, or Hemileia vastatrix, was first identified in Sri Lanka in the 1860s and has made its way through most of the world’s coffee-growing nations since then. The fungus, which thrives in warm, wet conditions and travels on the wind, debilitates and destroys coffee trees. It’s also one of the biggest factors most scientists point to when they say that climate change is coming for your morning cup of coffee.
Until this fall, Hawaii was one of the last coffee-growing regions in the world still untouched by rust. After the news broke, Shriner and other farmers, whose century-old operations spider out along a set of “upcountry” mountain roads, started to worry. They began turning over the waxy green leaves on their coffee trees, scanning for transparent dots and splotchy circles of orange spores. And, within weeks, they found them.
Coffee has been central to Hawaii’s agricultural economy since the 19th century; the bulk of the beans are grown in Kona, where a unique variety of tree (Kona Typica) along with the volcanic soil and mild temperatures combine to create a $50 million industry and a unique flavor profile that fetches upward of $60 a pound.
Now, in a state already hard hit by the impacts of climate change, farmers, scientists, and lawmakers are scrambling to prepare for the onset of rust. And although no one can predict just how much damage the fungus will do, its arrival could result in loss of production, changes to the flavor of the coffee, and a rise in prices for consumers.
“Rust is really going to change everything we know about coffee in Hawai’i.”
Because addressing coffee leaf rust can be an expensive endeavor, experts also worry that many of Hawaii’s roughly 800 small-scale producers—whose mostly family-scale operations average around five acres in size—could exit the business. And for those farming organically, the odds look even worse.
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