They are not pleasures for me, to be honest, so I wouldn’t give it a moment’s thought except that he gets prickly without them.
Take his morning coffee, for instance. He only has one a day — maybe another if he’s meeting someone — but he likes it after breakfast, and he’s more fun after he’s had it.
He’s been watching what’s happening to coffee beans around the world and says the outlook is not good: climate change and disease have been wreaking havoc in the main coffee-producing countries of Brazil, Columbia and Costa Rica, as well as Vietnam and Indonesia.
Brazil first lost a fifth of its coffee plants from drought and severe frosts in 2021, and the pandemic put freight rates up, so the price of beans shot up by 40 per cent. Things improved gradually after that, but now the alarm bells are ringing again.
Brazil, Columbia and Costa Rica all grow the arabica coffee bean, considered the smoothest and mildest flavour with a superior taste, while Vietnam and Indonesia grow the robusta bean, which is rather more bitter and used in espresso and stronger coffees.
Arabica is more sensitive to temperature and humidity, and the changing climate is forcing farmers to seek higher altitudes for planting, which is more expensive, if not impossible. Robusta is more robust, as its name implies, but it needs water to grow, and drought is affecting Indonesia’s plantations in Java and Sumatra.
Studies suggest that by 2050, about half the land currently used for high-quality coffee will be unproductive, so scientists are looking for coffee plants that can produce good coffee beans at higher temperatures. The recent rediscovery of stenophylla, a rare wild coffee from West Africa, has given them hope: they say it tastes just like arabica but grows at higher temperatures than the narrow band of 20°C to 22°C that arabica prefers.
At the same time, The Boss reckons global tea supplies are facing instability, too. Supermarkets in the UK have seen panic buying of tea because vessels sailing through the Red Sea are being attacked by Houthi rebels protesting the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. The longer trip from India and Kenya around the Cape of Good Hope is a ‘brew-tal’ reality.
He drinks a lot more tea than coffee, so he’s watching this one carefully, but he tells me the supply chains from India are working okay here. As if I care.
Then there’s cocoa. The Boss says it’s been harder lately to find the dark cocoa that makes a really good chocolate cake.
The price of cocoa powder and hot chocolate around the world rose 25 per cent in the year to January and cocoa futures are at record levels because West Africa, from where most cocoa comes, has been affected by extreme weather and crop disease. Many of the six million small farmers who tend cacao trees globally face hardship.
It’s hard to disguise a yawn while he’s banging on about all this but he says these little pleasures have been a part of life for centuries and everyone assumes they will be available and cheap for ever.
“In fact, the impact of climate change and interruptions to global trade routes makes them much more fragile than we think, General,” he says. “We shouldn’t take them for granted.”
Nor me, I added. But he wasn’t listening. Woof!
20°C