Posted on 05/18/2021 5:21:54 AM PDT by blam
Brazil, the world’s biggest exporter of coffee, sugar and orange juice, just had a rainy season that brought hardly any rain.
Soils are parched and river levels are low in the nation’s Center-South region, a powerhouse of agricultural output. The drought is so severe that farmers are worried they’ll run out of the water reserves that help keep crops alive over the next several months, the country’s dry season.
Mauricio Pinheiro, 59, started irrigating his arabica-coffee crops in March, two months earlier than normal, after his 53-hectare (131-acre) plantation got less than half of the rain it needed. He’s using so much water for the plants that there isn’t enough left for his home. In order to keep the showers and faucets running, he’s had to search for another well.
“My irrigation reservoir is drying up now -- that usually happens in August,” said Pinheiro, who lives in Pedregulho in the Alta Mogiana region, in Sao Paulo state. “I’m really concerned about running out of water in the coming months.”
The prospect of withering orange trees and coffee plants is coming at a time when agricultural crops are rallying to multiyear highs, which has fanned fears of food inflation. Higher food costs may exacerbate hunger, a problem around the globe that the Covid-19 pandemic has made more acute. Coffee and raw-sugar contracts on the ICE Futures exchange in New York have already touched four-year highs.
If even irrigated areas can’t get enough water, Brazil’s coffee and orange output may decline for a second year in a row. Brazil’s current orange crop shrunk 31% from the previous season, the most in 33 years, and production of arabica coffee, the high-end kind used by chains like Starbucks Corp., is also dropping sharply.
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(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Gas lines were bad, whats coffee lines gonna bring??
Sounds like they are having a drought. Everything’s cyclical. Pardon my ignorance, but I thought that in the US we got our oranges from Florida and California. Maybe if global warming gets going we could get more from North Dakota and Siberia. :D
Yes, lost booze is one thing....but COFFEE!??!
Biden’s Fault!
Plant more orange groves in Florida. The Brazilians have taken over the Orange juice industry b
Guess I should lay in that extra supply of drinking water...
North Dakota here. I have an indoor mini orange tree. I get about 3 oranges off it a year. I’ll sell 1 of them to you for $99.99. Don’t low ball me. I know what I got.
Yes, lost booze is one thing....but COFFEE!??!
**************
Wait until we loose TREES......
>>Pardon my ignorance, but I thought that in the US we got our oranges from Florida and California.
A blight (huanglongbing) originating in China has wiped out 75% of Florida’s orange trees since 2005. It’s starting to spread to California.
Amazon ran dry?.....................
Don’t worry, Folgers has plenty. It’s mountain grown!.............
Beat me to it.
Really!
More water comes out of the Amazon River than does the next 7 largest rivers in the world, combined.
And my hub is bit ching about the 150 litres of water I stored under our house. (He wants to dump them because we are moving)
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