With climate change weakening Honduran coffee production, is regenerative agriculture producers’ last hope?

As part of Groundwork’s commitment to “relationship coffee,” Co-Founder & Chief Coffee Guy Jeff Chean frequently makes coffee origin trips to create and strengthen trade partnerships and friendships with producers. Jeff typically visits Honduras in May when producers are harvesting and processing plentiful coffee. This year, that was not the case, and climate change is likely one of the culprits. 

The first thing Jeff noticed when he stepped off the plane was the extreme heat and smoke.

“All my memories of Honduras over the last 15 years are wrapped in the heat, humidity, and a whiff of smoke. Sometimes, walking off the plane feels like walking into a hot yoga class,” Jeff recalls. “This year, it was hotter, more humid, and more than a whiff of smoke.”

Smokey skies of Honduras 

In May, the air quality in Honduras’ second-largest city was the worst in the entire American continent. The pollution – classified as “dangerous” levels 50 times higher than the World Health Organization guidelines – was caused by forest fires and hot, dry weather exacerbated by El Niño and climate change.

Threats to Honduran coffee production are rising with the temperatures

Climate change is already threatening coffee production zones around the world. In Honduras, like in most coffee regions, predicted global temperature increases will continue to reduce climatic suitability for Arabica coffee at low elevations and increase suitability at higher elevations. This is because the water-stressed coffee plants in current growing zones adapt through a decreased rate of transpiration, whereas plants in cooler, wetter high-altitude habitats experience less water evaporating from their leaves. An oftentimes insurmountable burden falls on producers to move their operations to these less-stressful habitats, which also puts land-use pressure on high-altitude forests. 

Low-altitude coffee plants were droopy and covered in dust from the dry dirt roads

A 2015 study predicted that by the 2050s, Honduras would lose suitability at current growing altitudes but gain suitable growing areas at elevations 1500–2500 meters above sea level (masl). Nearly 25 years early, Hondurans are already seeing this shift happen. 

Historically, coffee zones in Honduras fall around 1000 - 1300 masl. When Jeff toured farms in western Honduras at 1000 masl, the stressed coffee plants were droopy and bare of flowers and fruit, even when growing under shade trees. There’s not much that smallholder producers can do to irrigate their crops because of how expensive and nearly impossible it would be to build irrigation systems or transport water to their remote farms. 

Jeff saw this type of habitat in elevations over 1500 masl in the same regions, where coffee trees were flowering among the moist and temperate air. Just 15 years ago, those altitudes were too cold to grow coffee. 

Thriving high-altitude coffee forests

Leaving Honduras empty-handed 

In search of Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) coffee, Jeff met with the producer associations CAFICO, Las Capucas, CAFÉSCOR, and individual farmers. Across these groups, many producers experienced shorter growing seasons and harvests up to 20% smaller than in previous years. Many farmers cannot remember any other time in their career when they had no coffee to sell in May, and they blame the warming climate. To a greater extent each year, these effects of climate change create a web of supply disruptions that ensnares all coffee-producing countries. This year, Vietnam was hit with a drought that drastically reduced Robusta yields and, because Vietnam is such a massive coffee exporter, caused global Robusta and Arabica coffee prices to soar. Panicked coffee buyers looked to other countries, such as Honduras, causing producers to scramble to meet surging demand. 

“There was a large spike in purchasing just prior to my arrival by large companies,” Jeff says. “The co-ops didn't know why, but I think it had to do with the uncertainty surrounding the Vietnamese Robusta harvest. Large roasters may have been covering their positions in order to make sure that they had coffee to roast in case their planned Robusta purchases fell through.”

Groundwork started buying ROC coffee from CAFICO last year, but this season, producers who were uncertain whether C market prices would fall after the drought in Vietnam finally ended sold their coffee to large roasters just weeks earlier. There was no regenerative coffee left for Jeff to buy. 

Bare coffee-drying beds are an unusual sight in May  

Like Jeff experienced, coffee shortages can upset trade relationships that roasters count on. More importantly, the pressure to hastily sell coffee means that producers can miss out on profit margins or development project opportunities. In this case, these Honduran producers sold most of their regeneratively-grown coffee as only “Fair Trade Organic,” a certification that sometimes fetches lower prices than ROC that Jeff was planning to buy. Producers can further benefit from maintaining relationships with roasters year after year with collaborative agricultural and community development projects, such as one that Groundwork is planning with CAFICO.  

Pioneering producers give the Honduran coffee industry hope through regenerative agriculture

One coffee producer that Jeff met, Lurvin Ventura, runs a certified Organic family farm called Finca la Cueva in San Marcos, Ocotepeque. The farm’s name “The Cave'' references Lurvin’s father, who was nicknamed “Batman” for his striking bat-shaped mustache. Despite the big Batman symbol painted on the entrance of the farm, Jeff was most struck by the thriving Anacafe 14 coffee variety that Lurvin planted a few years ago. The health of these young plants is due to Lurvin’s regenerative practices such as shade trees and rebuilding the soil with beneficial microorganisms. Jeff and Lurvin started the conversation about getting the farm Regenerative Organic certified. 

Finca La Cueva

Although regenerative farms require more effort to establish than conventional farms, they create ecosystems that are even more productive and self-sustaining in the long run. It becomes clearer with each production season that regenerative farming methods – especially restoring soil health and planting shade trees – are direly needed to transform coffee farms from carbon sources to sinks. Not only can regenerative farms combat global warming with their ability to sequester carbon in the plants and soil, but the healthier soil ultimately produces higher yields so that producers have sufficient coffee to sell year after year. 

Written by
Melina Devoney
Barista & Coffee Journalist