Who amongst us considers the banana or a cup of coffee as exotic today?

Both have become so ubiquitous in our lifestyle that we tend to forget these once exotic foods travel several thousand miles to grace our table.  With rising gas prices, many of us will soon begin to reconsider our second cup of coffee or even adding bananas to the list of daily fruit.

As Dan Koeppel's Op-Ed piece in the NY Times notes, because of the politics involved, it is much cheaper to eat bananas over our homegrown fruits.  

But, rising gas prices notwithstanding, the banana and our cup of coffee could lose its readily available status because of global warming and monoculture farming practices.

Banana cultivation is extremely labor intensive and in the countries where it is grown, it is a major and often the only source of employment.  With global warming expected to boost the prevelance of crop disease world wide, countries that employ monoculture farming practices to provide cheap and plenty of food for our table, will be affected first.

In next decade or so, Koeppel's article mentions a virulent fungus is expected to decimate the Cavendish, the only type of banana grown in the thousands of acres of our South and Central American food bowl. In the meantime, Cavendish producers do not seem to have invested in preserving this variety or researching others varieties that grow in Asia
and Africa.

Like bananas, coffee has become so much a part of our lifestyle that we, who are the biggest consumers of the world's supply, forget our favorite brew made from the Arabica bean is imported from Central America.  Again, with rising gas prices and farming practices that will be severely impacted by global warming, Americans may soon find their favorite brew harder to swallow.  

A UN report says a 2°C  rise in temperatures and extreme changes in weather patterns will create instability in coffee production worldwide, affecting not just consumers but also many of the 25 million people who work the plantations worldwide.

Climate changes have already affected the Robusta bean grown in Africa.  In 2007, crop production in Uganda was affected by drought and inappropriate rainfall.  A 2°C rise will decimate plantations in this and the neighboring countries of Kenya and Tanzania and the Robusta bean variety would  "essentially disappear".

Coffee grows naturally in the shade, in a complex nutrient dense ecosystem that provides the necessary protection from pests, soil erosion and high winds. 

To meet the increase in demand in the 1970s, producers began to clear several thousand acres of trees in Central and South America and plant coffee in the sun.  While this permitted trees to grow faster and made mechanized harvesting possible, canopy loss has resulted in a tremendous loss of biodiversity. To counteract this loss, sun cultivators extensively use chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have polluted the water table in the countries where our coffee is grown.

While global warming may potentially open up higher altitudes in countries like Costa Rica, scientists warn current sun coffee plantations will become more susceptible to new types of diseases and pests.  

The best way to preserve existing coffee plantations according to shade growers will be to return to shade coffee, a practice that some Ugandan farmers are finding hard.  Traditional methods are forcing them to move to other crops because, "the people have destroyed all the trees for timber...(and because) we just use our hands...the process is
slow".

What does this mean? As we consider moving back to local home grown produce, how will this impact those who have solely depended thus far on our wants?  It's a conundrum.