Starbucks sustainability chief Jim Hanna has expressed his concerns that the world coffee supply is under serious threat due to climate change.
Hanna said the coffee giant has been pushing the U.S. government to act on the matter with little effect. Hanna added that farmers were already seeing the effects of a changing climate, with severe hurricanes and more resistant bugs reducing crop yields.
"What we are really seeing as a company as we look 10, 20, 30 years down the road – if conditions continue as they are – is a potentially significant risk to our supply chain, which is the Arabica coffee bean," Hanna told The Guardian in a telephone interview.
Hanna said the company's suppliers, who are mainly in Central America, were already experiencing changing rainfall patterns and more severe pest infestations with even well-established farms seeing a drop in crop yield.
"Even in very well established coffee plantations and farms, we are hearing more and more stories of impacts."
This warning follows on from another earlier this month when new research from the the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture warned it would be too hot to grow chocolate in much of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world’s main producers, by 2050.
Hanna will brief members of Congress on climate change and coffee at an event sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists this week. Starbucks are part of a business coalition that is trying to push Congress and the Obama administration to act on climate change, without much success.