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Three years after the most damaging frost to hit Brazil in half a century, and amid other ongoing weather disasters, growers across the world’s largest producing country are still struggling to recover. Maja Wallengren reports for Global Coffee Report.
Brazilian coffee fields are famous for stretching hundreds of kilometres as far as the eye can see, from the southernmost plains of Paraná through São Paulo state across all directions of Minas Gerais. A state bigger than Madagascar or Kenya, Minas Gerais is home to 50 per cent of the South American giant’s entire crop in an average harvest cycle, and 65 per cent of Brazil’s total Arabica production.
In what growers would describe as a normal harvest cycle, by mid-August trees would be bright green, fully recovered from the stress of the physical harvest and ready for flowering for the next crop which typically starts in the second half of September. But not this year. Instead, over half the plantations are wilted. This includes the majority of branches on which new fruit would normally develop into juicy red cherries carrying beans for the next harvest.
Mass defoliation of both trees and branches is obvious.
It is a sad sight for any coffee lover as these trees will not produce even a fraction of a normal harvest. Further trouble continues. From 11 to 14 August 2024, an intense cold front hit Brazil’s Arabica production and caused new frost damage to farms where early flowering had already begun for the next harvest. The Cerrado Mineiro and Alta Mogiana regions suffered the most damage and Southern Minas reported smaller impact.
“It’s a disaster. There is no other word for our current situation,” Brazilian coffee grower Marcelo Paterno tells Global Coffee Report from his farm in the Campos Altos region in Minas Gerais.
“This past harvest I got less than half of what I normally would get, even in the harvest after the 2021 frost I got more. When you look at these fields, it is very obvious to anyone who knows coffee that the next harvest is going to be even worse.”
Carlos Augusto Rodrigues de Melo is President of Cooxupe, the world’s largest coffee cooperative based in Guaxupé in Southern Minas. He says the initial expectation had been for a 2024 harvest 8 to 10 per cent bigger than 2023, but in the end this volume simply did not materialise.
“To our surprise, because of the climate we have had, not only did the harvest not turn out bigger or even similar to the previous crop in 2023, but at this point we believe the 2024 harvest will end smaller than last year,” de Melo told local press Portal do Agronegócio in early August.
From agronomists to analysts and cooperatives, industry consensus is that the 2024 harvest is expected to end at least 10 per cent below the 2023 harvest. Last May, Brazil’s Agriculture Ministry’s crop supply agency Conab projected the 2024 crop would reach 58.8 million 60-kilogram bags, which would have been up 6.8 per cent on the 55.1 million bags produced in 2023. The reasons for complications towards recovery are all due to weather.
On 19 September, Conab lowered its figure for production in the 2024 harvest by more than 4 million bags to 54.79 million bags. A further downward revision is expected in December.
“We had some recovery from the frost, but in the last two years we have had a very irregular climate, with dry periods during the rainy season and more rain than usual during the dry season,” says Marcelo Vieira, a fourth-generation grower in the Alfenas region of Southern Minas, and Head of the Coffee Department of the Brazilian Rural Society agriculture group.
“This irregular weather affects coffee flowering and the growth of coffee beans, having a negative impact on crop volume. It’s not as bad as the frost we had in 2021, but it has resulted in lower than expected production.”
Even before the flowering for the next harvest started, basic coffee agronomy confirmed the projections that Paterno and hundreds of other growers and agronomists have already made. Drought and excessive dryness have resulted in diminished vegetative growth of branches, which is crucial for a tree to produce high yields of fruit. This, coupled with significant stress to trees that in most parts of Minas Gerais did not receive rain between early April and late September, resulted in “stress flowering”. This occurs in trees with high levels of defoliation in an attempt to survive. They produce flowers to generate new leaves, but in the process deduct potential from the tree to produce fruit for a new coffee crop.
“Here in Alta Mogiana we’ve had many regions where farms went 120 to 130 days without rain. Because of the very prolonged drought there has been a lot of defoliation in the farms,” says Vicente Zotti, an independent coffee and commodity analyst based in the town of Franca.
Following this interview, the drought in Brazil spread to near-all producing regions and rains did not arrive until the end of September.
“This will certainly affect the next harvest because it is clear that the dropping of the leaves is connected with a decrease in the amount of fruit and this will cause a reduction in 2025,” says Zotti.
Jonas Ferraresso, an agronomist who works with growers in northern São Paulo state and operates a small coffee farm of three hectares, agrees, saying the drought and high temperatures have caused a larger obstacle toward recovery.
“The smaller farms damaged by the frost three years ago have mostly recovered, but in other coffee regions that were affected by the frost, warmer regions like Cerrado where it doesn’t rain as much, the stress of the tree has been greater,” Ferraresso says.
Cerrado, which despite its desert-like climate and extreme heat during the Brazilian winter when the new crop is harvested, suffered some of the worst damage during the 2021 frost. Vast areas have never recovered.
At the Alto Cafezal coffee farm, planted in the early 1970s by grower Jose Carlos Grossi, one of the pioneers to embark on coffee production in the Cerrado Mineiro region, over 40 per cent of the total acreage of about 2000 hectares of coffee were severely burned by the frost. Of the 800 hectares damaged, only about 200 have been replanted with coffee. The other 600, or 30 per cent of the total area dedicated to coffee up until the frosts in July 2021, have
been switched to grains crops. Unless coffee prices were to rise “much higher” than current levels, the Grossi family does not plan on planting more coffee.
At the nearby Fazenda Semente, close to the town of Patrocinio where coffee grower Virginia Aguiar lost 90 per cent of her crop due to the frost, a part of the land was also permanently switched to grains like soya and corn. Grains offer farmers up to three crops a year and carry much less financial risk than coffee, which as a perennial crop takes four to five years to fully develop. “Last year I had a relatively good crop in about half the area. After the frost in July 2021, it was a blessing to see the coffee so beautiful again, but few farmers want to commit all our land to coffee today. The risk is too high,” Aguiar says.
The biggest and most damaging frosts in Brazil have always come in pairs, where coffee regions see a repeat of damaging frost during the following years, evident in 1975 and 1978, 1994 and 1995, and 2021 and 2024. Agronomists say this occurs because trees remain weakened from the first big frost attack. Whether those areas have been recovered through pruning or replanted, it leaves affected regions with young coffee that is more damage prone to a new frost, even if the frost is less intense than the prior event.
True to history, many of the same farms and regions that suffered in the 2021 frost also suffered damage in the August 2024 frost, including Aguiar’s farm.
“Of the 90 per cent that was damaged three years ago, I was able to recover 60 per cent through pruning and re-planting, and this area was just starting to come into production. This year my production was down 30 per cent on last year, but now 10 per cent was hit with frost again and I am not sure if I even dare to replant that area again,” Aguiar says.
Adding to the repeat of the 2021 frosts are the core complications of what local analysts and growers refer to as “10 years of significantly higher temperatures” which, combined with lower rainfall, has left most of the Brazilian coffee park with a permanent hydraulic deficit.
“The problem for over five years now is how the coffee regions are hot and dry,” says Marco Antonio Jacob, a Brazilian economist with more than 40 years’ experience working with trade and coffee fundamentals analysis.
Jacob says the flowering for this year’s harvest came too late to allow for the 210 days needed to secure a full maturation of cherries. This affected both quality and resulted in smaller bean size in the 2024 crop because beans were not able to develop fully.
At the same time the Brazil Arabica regions were hit with damaging frost, an unseasonal tropical cyclone passed over the biggest Robusta growing state of Espírito Santo and caused between 15 to 20 per cent of flowers for the next 2025 crop to abort and fall to the ground. Making matters worse for the Robusta harvest, this came following a full year of extreme winds and severe drought that left the coffee park of Espírito Santo so defoliated that production is expected to close down a minimum 30 per cent overall, with many regions reporting losses of 60 per cent or more.
“The 2024 Conilon-Robusta crop, which is now being wrapped up, will be down about 35 per cent on average and the losses to the Arabica crop will not be less than 20 per cent. The big problem facing Brazilian coffee growers over the next few years is the excessive heat,” says Jacob.
Brazil is concluding what will be the fourth consecutive small harvest and already has the local trade and industry preparing for the fifth small harvest in the next 2025/2026 cycle. The pattern of small crops also confirms one of the theories discussed by agronomists in the immediate aftermath of the big frost of 2021: that Bazil may not even see a return to the on-off cycle crops any time soon. For years, a so-called on-cycle crop with high yields consequently left trees across producing regions stressed, and in the following year a smaller off-crop would be produced as trees were recovering. However, with the production structure severely shaken up by the frost and subsequent years of large areas being replanted or renovated outside the regular life cycle of trees, the previous seasonality between smaller and bigger crops has been evened out for now.
“The on-off crop pattern has been less regular than usual in the years since the frost,” says Brazilian Rural Society’s Vieira.
Even if it might be too premature to conclude whether on-cycles – with crops above 60 to 64 million bags – will return, he concedes that the earliest possibility for a bigger crop with any meaningful level of recovery won’t happen until 2026. “I cannot predict numbers, coffee is always a bit unpredictable,” Vieira says.
Following the news of the frost warnings in early August and the subsequent reports of damage, international Arabica prices went through several weeks of extreme volatility. That volatility is likely to increase as the global coffee market in the months and years ahead will have to learn to deal with what is likely to be even more unpredictable crops in Brazil as the growers continue to struggle to recover.
This article was first published in the November/December 2024 edition of Global Coffee Report. Read more HERE.
The post Reality hit: Brazil’s coffee industry still struggling to recover appeared first on Global Coffee Report.
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