Coffee Farmers Hopeful For Their Dying Crops | Short Film Showcase

Coffee is the second most traded commodity after oil. Socially and ecologically, it still represents a big chunk of Guatemala's economy, Guatemala's social networks, and biodiversity sustainability as well. Recent outbreaks of pests and infestations linked with the low prices chrome in the market have put more pressure on the public farmers. The beetles are gonna attack your coffee again. Is it due to that price? If there are too many of these, if the price goes low, it was really eye-opening to look at how many communities were really on the razor edge of not having enough water by the end of the dry season. Literally not having to water their crops, who they're going to feed their families, or the food they counted on to sell to have money to buy the things they needed.

How does this depend so very narrowly and so very particularly on the climate of that year? Most of Guatemala is playing fed agriculture: coffee, sugarcane, all the vegetables we produce. They are entirely related to precipitation. Every time we have a drought, it hits these populations really hard. Millions of people are in this vulnerable state where climate variability, let alone climate change, challenges our livelihood. Sure, but it reflects a larger challenge. People in agriculture are tied so tightly to the timing of the amount of rainfall that comes during the wet season.

There's not much heavier climate work at the timescales that might help inform agriculture over years and decades. So what we're trying to do is fill this really rather large and serious gap in our knowledge about the climate system. Better policy, better management, and better planning will come with better information. You'll replace more frequently.

So the current frost crisis in Central America has been linked to an increase in temperature. If I drop this in touch with this coffee plant, it's transmitted that way too. We're bringing now this historical record, some precipitation to try to understand those connections and manage better the risk. So the communities can be better prepared.

Here in Guatemala, they're looking where to plant coffee and asking very specific local research questions. It's going to make a much broader range of information available to these communities and to Guatemala and Honduras in Central America in general. Then each stakeholder in each government in each community will hopefully be able to draw some information as useful for that. You know, this stuff is happening. We are facing droughts, and we're facing more extreme precipitation events.

The fact that we're bringing climate information to them allows them to better manage this risk. So we have this connection between climate, prices, and pasinetta stations that improves their ability to succeed.