The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster

Late in the summer of 2012, while walking his coffee groves on a hillside rising above Santa Ana, El Salvador, Mario Mendoza Corleto noticed something unusual: the leaves on some of his trees were coated with an orange fungus and had begun dropping to the ground. It was “leaf rust,” a form of blight that had pestered coffee farmers in El Salvador since the 1970s. Normally, spraying the trees with fungicide once or twice a year would keep the disease at bay. Not anymore. “This year it was totally different,” Mendoza recounted to me recently. “Spraying didn’t help.”

Illustration: Jordan Moss

As the days wore on, the problem only worsened. By September, many of Corleto’s once-bushy trees stood completely bare. Their green fruit hardened in the sun, never ripening into the candy-red cherries that Mendoza’s workers would pick and process into coffee beans destined for specialty roasters. That year, half of the trees on his family’s 100-year-old farm died. The next year, as Mendoza’s remaining trees continued to struggle, he laid off most of his workers. The harvest was a quarter of its usual size.

What happened to Mario Mendoza Corleto played out all across El Salvador, as well as Honduras and Guatemala: ground zero for the Western hemisphere’s most prized coffees.

Read the Medium story by Elizabeth G. Dunn- “The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster.”

Warnings ignored, but storms and damage can’t be

The warnings have been almost ignored, but the realities can’t be.

Storms continue to roll in over Sydney.

Sydneysiders can vouch for the ferocity of the storms, storms that are now into a record-setting seventh day.

Suggestions, backed by impeccable science, have warned of such storms being a product of climate change, but many, including our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, seem to ignore the facts and cling to observations such as “freak”, “unusual” or even “seasonal”.

The unrelenting reality of the storms prompts such headlines from the ABC as: “NSW storms: Extra volunteers drafted in as seventh straight day of wild weather sets new record”.

Further, the ABC story reports: “As forecasters warn more wild weather could hit eastern New South Wales this week, SES crews from the Hunter, Illawarra and Bathurst regions have joined recovery efforts in Sydney's north and west.”