{"id":336180,"date":"2026-07-17T22:09:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T22:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/336180\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T22:09:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T22:09:30","slug":"why-climate-change-isnt-wiping-out-your-coffee-and-olive-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/336180\/","title":{"rendered":"Why climate change isn\u2019t wiping out your coffee and olive oil"},"content":{"rendered":"

And your olive oil? CNN and Bloomberg wail about a seemingly permanent \u201ccrisis\u201d, with Mediterranean droughts foretelling a future in which an everyday staple vanishes for good.<\/p>\n

The message is unmistakeable: Global warming is coming for your family\u2019s dinner table, and only sweeping climate policy can save it. The message is also wrong. <\/p>\n

Cut through the hype, and food is not only more plentiful but its inflation-adjusted cost also is near historic lows relative to any time since 1900.<\/p>\n

Start with coffee, supposedly on its deathbed. This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record \u2013 more than double the world\u2019s output of 50 years ago. Crops on the brink of extinction don\u2019t deliver record harvests. And despite recent price bumps, the real price of coffee has trended downward since 1960. Adjusted for inflation, coffee this century has cost on average half of what it cost in the past century.<\/p>\n

How do outlets such as The New York Times get it so wrong? By inexcusably ignoring inflation \u2013 comparing coffee prices from the 1970s, expressed in the dollars of that day, with prices expressed in today\u2019s dollars. <\/p>\n

By that standard, everything is at a record high, always.<\/p>\n

Even Nature\u2019s own reporting on coffee undercuts its ominous headline detailing \u201chow scientists are fighting to save it from extinction\u201d. Ethiopia keeps more than 12,000 arabica plants in living gene banks for breeding heat and drought-tolerant varieties. <\/p>\n

\u201cI believe we have enough gene pool to fight climate change,\u201d the Ethiopian plant geneticist leading the effort says. <\/p>\n

Farmers in hotter regions already are switching to hardier coffee species that professional tasters can\u2019t distinguish from fine arabica. That isn\u2019t extinction. It is what agriculture has always been: adaptation and improvement.<\/p>\n

The supposed olive oil crisis collapses under the same scrutiny. According to UN food statistics, global olive oil production has tripled since 1961 and doubled since 1990. Last year and this year, together with the exceptional 2018 harvest, mark record highs for production of olive oil. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted prices have not increased and have even slightly declined since 1990. <\/p>\n

Again, better farming and expanded cultivation <\/a>outweigh any climate effect.<\/p>\n

Food scare stories follow a formula: Take an isolated weather event, attribute it to global warming, skip inflation adjustment and ignore the long-term data. Natural year-to-year swings driven by economics, trade policy and subsidies get repackaged as apocalyptic trends. Rarely mentioned: Much of the real price pressure on food comes from fertiliser and transport costs \u2013 inflated, ironically, by climate policies that raise fossil fuel energy bills for the essentials of farming.<\/p>\n

Never mentioned: the ways climate change helps crops. Carbon dioxide is plant food, which is why commercial growers pump extra carbon dioxide into greenhouses to produce more tomatoes. <\/p>\n

NASA satellites show that the planet has been greening for four decades, meaning the world has added additional leaves with an area equivalent to that of at least two times the Amazon rainforest.<\/p>\n

Climate change, on balance, will hurt agriculture. But its impact is dwarfed by rising productivity. One highly cited study in Nature finds that without any climate change, global food-calorie production will increase 51 per cent between 2010 and 2050. With extreme, unrealistic warming, it still increases by 49 per cent. <\/p>\n

Across all models and scenarios, the difference in calories available per person amounts to one-tenth of 1 per cent.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because humanity keeps getting better at growing food. Cereal production has more than quintupled across the past century while real food prices have more than halved. The Green Revolution of the 1960s turned famine-prone nations into exporters through the widespread adoption of high-yield crop varieties, alongside expanded use of chemical fertilisers and improved irrigation. <\/p>\n

India, once written off as a basket case dependent on food aid, quadrupled its rice production between 1961 and 2023 and is today the world\u2019s largest rice exporter. Daily calorie availability per person has climbed from less than 2200 in 1961 to more than 2900 now. Global undernourishment has plummeted from roughly one in four people in the developing world in the early 1990s to fewer than 10 per cent today.<\/p>\n

The task now is to finish the job. Innovation should extend to under-researched crops such as sorghum, cassava and millet \u2013 staples for two billion people in the developing world that have been largely ignored by commercial breeders. Investment in biotech, precision agriculture and drought-resistant crop varieties will do far more for the world\u2019s poor \u2013 and for your grocery bill \u2013 than any emissions target.<\/p>\n

We can keep feeding more people, better, by doubling down on what actually works: innovation.<\/p>\n

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.<\/p>\n

Read related topics:Climate Change<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And your olive oil? 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