Starting March 12, the Thailand Coffee Fest 2020 trade show will be presented at IMPACT Exhibition Hall 1-2 , Muang Thong Thani. Thai and foreign distributors, including those from Guatemala, Brazil, and Bhutan will sell beans. The Specialty Coffee Association of Thailand will announce the annual winner of best Thai coffee bean. This year’s theme will be Coffee Wisdom. The festival website declares:

Specialty Coffee Association of Thailand (SCATH) and The Cloud proudly present Thailand Coffee Fest 2020 which is the greatest coffee festival in Southeast Asia from March 12-15, 2020 at Impact Exhibition Hall 5-6, Muang Thong Thani. In order to support and promote Thai coffee industry and for the coffee market growth in Thailand and International, we must support everyone in coffee processes from farmers, processers, roasters, baristas and consumers. This coffee festival is about praising Thai Coffee and developing the Thai coffee market for sustainable growth.

Just in time for Thailand Coffee Fest 2020, the Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book, Coffee Is Not Forever. A Global History of the Coffee Leaf Rust.

It is shelved among General Books in the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.  The TU Library collection also contains several other books about the coffee industry, growing methods, and other related subjects in general terms. The TU Library also owns books specifically about coffee growing and trade in the Kingdom.

The author of Coffee Is Not Forever, Stuart McCook, is professor of history at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Professor McCook is a specialist on the environmental history of tropical crops and commodities. His faculty homepage adds:

Prof. Stuart McCook’s research focuses on the environmental history of tropical crops and commodities, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. McCook looks at the interplay between economy and environment by studying the origins of epidemic crop diseases. McCook’s current research project is a global history of the coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix), a catastrophic crop epidemic that spread across the world’s coffee zones between 1870 and 1980. His other research and teaching interests include global history, commodity history, the history of science, technology, and medicine, disease and history, the history of natural disasters, and Latin American history.

As TU students of economics and business know, the global coffee industry is highly important. Coffee is one of the most traded agricultural commodities in the world. In 2017 alone, 70 per cent of total coffee production was exported, with a value of USD 19 billion or 599,450,000,000.00 baht. Also in 2017, the sector had a retail market value of USD 83 billion or 2,618,650,000,000.00 baht, providing jobs for 125 million people worldwide.

Yet, as Professor McCook points out in Coffee Is Not Forever, the industry depends on ecological conditions and problems may easily arise.

Coffee Is Not Forever investigates agricultural, social, and economic history, as well as plant genetics and plant pathology. How climate change may influence current issues is also addressed.

As a webpage on the University of Guelph website notes,

For many Canadians, the day doesn’t begin until their first sip of coffee.  But the growers who produce that coffee are struggling with a devastating disease that is putting their livelihoods at risk and leaving some coffee market observers to predict that the drink we take for granted could one day become as expensive as cognac.

University of Guelph professor Stuart McCook, Department of History, details what’s gone wrong in his new book, Coffee Is Not Forever: A Global History of the Coffee Leaf Rust…

When he began his book in 2004, coffee rust had already arrived in Central and South America. Growers initially saw it as an occasional nuisance that could be controlled. But over the past decade, the world’s top-growing countries, including Colombia and Mexico, have experienced severe outbreaks now known as “the Big Rust.”

These outbreaks have devastated thousands of hectares of farms, with some losing up to 80 per cent of their production.

McCook says several interconnected factors have allowed the fungus to cause as much destruction as it has.

“The problem isn’t that the fungus is evolving; the environment has — on two levels. The first is the climate, and the second is the economics of coffee growing, which has seen huge shifts.”

Climate change has meant the end of once-predictable weather patterns in the coffee tropics. Now, even small increases in temperature or moisture cause the fungus to multiply and spread.

At the same time, coffee prices have become volatile because of the cancellation of decades-old trade agreements. When prices plummet, farmers need to cut costs and that often means skipping the sprays or fertilizer that keep their trees strong – allowing the fungus to thrive.

What’s more, former government supports for farmers have been cut. Many farmers have tried to ride out the bad years when prices have been low and rust levels high, but many have made the choice to simply give up coffee farming.

For McCook, the rust is a good bellwether of what could happen with many crops facing both climate and economic change, each feeding the other to create a vicious cycle.

“That’s really what I mean with my title, Coffee Is Not Forever. I don’t mean that coffee is going to go extinct. I mean it’s possible that enough coffee farmers could face this fatal combination of a changing environment and a changing economic reality that they simply choose to abandon coffee.”

There are some solutions, McCook said. Geneticists are working on new coffee varieties that would merge trees that grow the coveted arabica bean with the robusta variety, which makes an inferior coffee bean but whose tree is more resistant to rust.

There’s also a movement away from monoculture farming to biologically diverse and shade-filled farms, which are highly resistant to the rust although less productive. Advances in fungicidal approaches and fertilization techniques could also help.

Here are some thoughts on coffee, found in books, some of which are in the collection of the TU Library:

• I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• Coffee, which makes the politician wise/And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

• Civilization in its onward march has produced only three important non-alcoholic beverages—the extract of the tea plant, the extract of the cocoa bean, and the extract of the coffee bean.

All About Coffee (1922) by William Harrison Ukers, Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)