Why Is Your Morning Joe So Expensive? Brazil‘s Coffee Farms Have the Answer

The Washington Post

12:56 JST, March 16, 2025

FRANCA, Brazil – To understand why coffee now costs a record $7 per pound in a typical American supermarket, take a bumpy dirt road into the hills of southeastern Brazil, past lines of purple-flowered trees and into the parched coffee fields of Augusto Rodrigues Alves.

As the farmer paced his desiccated land on a recent morning, his phone kept ringing.

Normally, these types of calls from buyers would be welcome for Rodrigues Alves, 27, who exports artisanal coffee to the United States and supplies Starbucks. But not this year, and not after this harvest.

“I don’t have any coffee,” he said hurriedly.

Then, to another caller: “I’m out of stock, nothing, zero.”

Rodrigues Alves’s dilemma illustrates the precariousness and limits of global coffee production in a quickly warming world. Extreme temperatures and severe droughts are ravaging Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, and taking a heavy toll on local harvests. Global demand, meanwhile, continues to surge, particularly in China. Now a beverage that has always been a daily staple, affordable to anyone in need of a boost, has started to become something of a luxury item.

The international price of Arabica, which accounts for most of the world’s ground roast, has doubled in the past year. Coffee brands – from artisanal to Folgers – are now charging far more than they did just a few years ago. At most city cafes, a simple cup of coffee can feel like a lavish indulgence – even before tip.

In the Brazilian region of Alta Mogiana, where coffee is a way of life, some farmers have seen their harvest shrivel by a third. Others by two-thirds. A few have nothing left at all. The scarcity has now made coffee looting a lucrative enterprise, forcing farmers to contend with both changing weather patterns and criminals.

“I’m not going to be able to collect anything this year,” said Tiago Donizete Rodrigues, 40, a third-generation coffee farmer. “I’m going to have to buy coffee from other producers to continue selling to my clients.”

After losing more than 200 acres of his coffee crop to drought last year, Rodrigues Alves said, he was forced to take exceptional action. He first over-pruned his surviving coffee fields – “skeletonized them,” as he said. It will take three more years before he’ll be able to bring them back to harvest.

Then he swept up the coffee detritus that had spilled onto his warehouse floor. In normal years, it would go into the compost heap. But this year, some buyers were interested in his “café porcaria” – junk coffee.

“So I sold it to them,” he said.

Where Arabica coffee reigns

It’s difficult to overstate what coffee means to Brazil. This is a country where breakfast is called, simply, “morning coffee.” People don’t schedule meetings, they schedule coffee. Nearly everyone in the countryside makes a big thermos of joe in the morning – not to drink, but to leave out, just in case a visitor stops by.

The plant that forged this culture and, to some degree, this country is the Coffea arabica. Yielding a smooth and sweet coffee, it is widely preferred over other varieties and accounts for roughly 60 percent of global coffee consumption.

But it is notoriously fickle. The plant takes at least two years to bring to harvest and it thrives only in a narrow temperature window, between 64 and 70 degrees, in areas with significant rainfall. It has always been a perfect fit for the highlands of southeastern Brazil, in the mist-cloaked mountains of Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro states.

But not last year, said Jean Vilhena Faleiros, president of the Alta Mogiana Association of Coffee Cultivators. “We had an average temperature of 80 degrees, with long periods in the 90s,” he said.

Climate research suggests this could be the beginning of the end of Coffea arabica in much of South America.

By the turn of the century, researchers have found, vast swaths of the continent will no longer be suitable for cultivation. The Andes countries could lose between 16 and 20 percent of such territory. And in southeastern Brazil, home to most of the country’s coffee fields, the losses are predicted to be even more severe – between 20 and 60 percent, according to a paper in the journal Regional Environmental Change.

The vulnerability of the plant to climate change is likely to remake the world’s coffee hierarchy and knock Arabica from its throne. Already farmers are beginning to shift to other species.

In Vietnam, there is a push to grow the sturdier Coffea canephora, which yields a sharper and earthier Robusta coffee, though extensive flooding last year delayed the country’s harvest, further limiting global supply. Researchers are calling for farmers in Brazil to make a similar switch to canephora, and some are.

As he sipped a cup of his coffee – which was sweet and light – Rodrigues Alves said the future of his business seems more uncertain than ever. And the great irony, he said, is that this should be the best time ever to be in coffee production, a time to get rich.

“If,” he said, “we had any coffee to sell.”

Guns and coffee

Farmers aren’t the only ones here trying to cash in on record coffee prices.

Earlier this year in Alta Mogiana, where Rodrigues Alves has his farm, authorities arrested a couple of grain merchants on allegations that they made off with more than $10 million worth of coffee. Then six masked men stole nearly $200,000 worth of coffee in the city of Cássia. The next week, Minas Gerais state police announced they had arrested a team of professional coffee bandits.

“This was a specialized group with know-how,” Detective Leandro de Prada Macedo Costa told reporters after the arrests. The armed group had experience moving drugs, police said, and had now moved into trafficking coffee, too.

“In this moment,” the detective said, “we’re seeing a new type of criminal group.”

Fear is spreading across Alta Mogiana. In interviews with nine farmers, and during visits to two farms, coffee producers unanimously expressed concern that they could lose what little they had left to thieves.

The region’s bucolic landscapes are becoming militarized, patrolled by armed guards and monitored by security cameras.

Fernanda Maciel, 65, said she is desperate to protect her diminished crop. She lost 90 percent of her harvest to frost in 2022. Then came the drought, and her fields were decimated once more. There is only one pocket still producing, in the shade of a large mahogany tree. For thieves, she said, it is “filet mignon.

“We’ve taken down all signs that identify us as a coffee farm,” she said. “We put up fences around the workers’ house and the coffee fields. We let loose guard dogs and bought surveillance drones. And soon we’ll hire an armed guard.”

A few miles away, Rodrigues Alves was walking up to his coffee storehouse. Normally overflowing with reserves, it now held just 25 sacks of Arabica.

But this coffee, he said, he would never sell

“This is the thief’s coffee,” he said. “You’ll need to have something to hand over so you won’t be killed.”

— McCoy reported from Rio de Janeiro.