LONDON/NEW YORK/SAO PAULO- Coffee leader Brazil is turning to stronger and more bitter robusta beans, which are hardier in the heat than the delicate arabica, in a sign of how climate change is affecting global markets – and shaping our favorite flavors.
Brazil is the world’s biggest producer of arabica, yet its production has stayed largely flat over the last five years. Meanwhile its output of cheaper robusta – generally grown at lower altitudes and viewed as of inferior quality – has leapt and is attracting more and more international buyers, new data shows.
The expansion is challenging Vietnam’s longstanding robusta dominance, while squeezing smaller players, increasingly leaving output concentrated in fewer regions and more vulnerable to price spikes if extreme weather occurs.
It also promises to gradually alter the flavor of the world’s coffee over the coming years as more of the harsher and more caffeine-charged robusta variety, widely used to make instant coffee, makes its way into the pricier ground blends currently dominated by arabica.
Whatever your taste, Enrique Alves, a scientist specializing in coffee seed cultivation at Brazilian state agritech research centerEmbrapa, said that it might ultimately be thanks to robusta that “our daily coffee will never be missing” as the globe warms.
“It is much more robust and productive than arabica,” he added. “For equivalent levels of technology, it produces almost twice as much.”
The two dominant varieties are contrasting.
Arabica, which accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s coffee, is generally sweeter with more variation in flavour, and can be worth more than twice as much as robusta coffee.
Robusta might be less refined, but it offers much higher yields and more resistance to rising temperatures and is becoming an increasingly attractive option for farmers in Brazil, which overall produces 40 percent of the world’s coffee.
“The world will in the near future use a lot of Brazilian robusta, I’m sure of that,” said Carlos Santana, Brazil-based head coffee trader for EisaInteragricola, a unit of ECOM, one of the world’s largest agricultural commodity traders.
Roasters around the world are increasingly experimenting with adding more Brazilian robusta, known as conillon, to both their ground and instant coffee blends, he added.
“It is gaining ground in the world blend.”
Brazil has raised its robusta production by 20 percent to 20.2 million 60-kg bags over the past three seasons, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows. Meanwhile output of robusta in Vietnam has fallen 5 percent to 28 million bags.
The Southeast Asian nation’s position as the world’s top robusta exporter is secure for now; it exported 23.6 million bags last season versus No. 2 robusta producer Brazil’s 4.9 million.
Yet things are changing on the international front for Brazil. The bulk of its robusta crop has traditionally been gulped down by strong domestic consumption of more than 13 million bags a year, but the country has now built up a healthy surplus for export.
Up until this year, a lot of Brazilian beans ended up in warehouses certified by the ICE Futures Europe exchange, the market of last resort for excess coffee without international buyers.
Data from Cecafe, Brazil’s coffee export association, shows that in 2018, 2019, 2020, between 20-50 percent of Brazil’s conillon exports went to the Netherlands, Belgium and Britain – home of nearly all of the exchange’s robusta coffee stocks.
By contrast, in the year to May, only 2 percent went there, with Mexico and South Africa among the countries which have been importing a lot more Brazilian robusta, bound for roasters who turn green beans into retail coffee blends.
