In Minas Gerais state, rising prices are steering some small-scale farmers from the sustainable practices that can mitigate climate change.
Edson Paes, 53, has single-handedly cultivated 12,000 organic Arabica coffee plants on three hectares of land since he was 14. His life’s work grows in the town of Poço Fundo, southern Minas Gerais. This state in south-eastern Brazil is one of the country’s main coffee growing regions.
In recent years, however, his work has become increasingly difficult because of climate change. He says a drought last year brought 45 days without rain: “The coffee suffered a lot.” Rising temperatures are also taking their toll. On his land, coffee leaves with brownish spots reveal sunscald, a problem linked to temperatures too high for cultivation. “Standing all day under this sun is getting difficult,” Paes tells Dialogue Earth on a hot January afternoon.
Paes is far from alone in facing these challenges. Five consecutive Arabica coffee harvests have been affected by climatic events such as heatwaves, droughts and frosts. A study by Brazil’s Federal University of Itajubá (Unifei) published in 2024 indicates that, as global warming and water stress intensify, between 35% and 75% of the areas in Brazil currently planted with Arabica coffee could become economically unviable by the end of the century.
These climate-related challenges have pushed up prices as the global supply tightens. Even with shipments falling by 20% between 2024 and 2025, Brazil – already the world’s leading coffee producer and exporter – registered record export revenue of USD 15.5 billion last year.
Asia is becoming the new growth centre of the global coffee market, with rising consumption in China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam turning the region into a major force as it shapes demand, café culture and future industry trends.
A region driven by coffee
Coffee “makes everything happen” in Poço Fundo, according to Rosiel de Lima, the town’s mayor. Its 16,000 inhabitants rely on family farming as the driving force of the local economy. Many of the beans are destined for export. Almost all of Paes’s production is sent to Europe, Japan and the US via Coopfam, a cooperative comprising nearly 500 family farmers that is currently seeking authorisation to export to China.
For Coopfam, entering the Chinese market is a strategic growth opportunity beyond its traditional European buyers, which currently absorb more than 90% of its exports. The cooperative sees China’s fast-growing coffee demand as an “infinite potential” market.
Another coffee farmer and member of Coopfam, Lima lost 75% of his crop in a hail storm in 2021. Last year, a drought in the middle of the rainy season reduced the quality of the beans, contributing to a 40% drop in his coffee income.
“Every year there’s some kind of adverse weather: hail, frost, cold winds, drought, rain during flowering, at the wrong time,” explains the mayor.
Many producers are adapting by replacing older plants with varieties that are more productive, and resistant to water stress and disease.
Others, like Paes, are using trees to help protect their crops. He has planted cedar and African mahogany trees to shade his coffee plants. He also practises techniques that improve the soil’s moisture retention, such as applying more fertiliser and keeping the earth between the coffee trees covered by planting grasses and legumes. Confident in this year’s harvest, he holds up a branch laden with beans. But then he adds: “You see a good patch of coffee, but right in front of it, another that has none. It’s not as uniform as it used to be.”
“It’s like this in practically all the plantations in the area,” says Alexander Ferreira, an agricultural engineer and technician at Coopfam.
Over the past four years, producers have spent over BRL 40 million (USD 7.9 million) in federal loans on restoring coffee crops, almost all of it in Minas Gerais state, where climate change is already altering the production calendar and yields. The author of Unifei’s 2024 study, Cássia Gabriele Dias, is a meteorologist and researcher at the university. She explains that droughts have become longer, heat has intensified and rainfall has become more irregular in the state. This affects crucial stages, such as flowering and the formation of coffee beans.
Most of the coffee plantations in Minas Gerais are concentrated at higher altitudes, which, for the time being, mitigates the effects of global warming. “Regions further south, such as southern Minas Gerais, tend to remain more suitable. But they are not free from risks,” Dias tells Dialogue Earth.
Lima says the rise in coffee prices has provided some compensation to producers affected by the climate. According to Ferreira, the price of a 60 kg bag of conventional coffee in early 2025 shot up to more than double the 2023 price.
Organic production suffers
However, the costs of maintaining productivity in the face of climate change are rising, reducing real profits. Rosângela Paiva and her husband, Luis Carlos, are considering installing irrigation to cope with the increasingly frequent periods of heat and drought, particularly between July and October when flowering occurs.
“Producing today is very expensive,” complains Paiva. In Poço Fundo, she cultivates 5.5 hectares for Coopfam’s organic coffee line. Following organic methods, which avoids the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, can increase coffee production costs by up to 30%.
Strong demand has led producers to prioritise quick gains in productivity, thus switching from organic to non-organic farming. At Coopfam, the number of organic members has fallen by almost 60% in two years, to 75 coffee farmers.
Ferreira estimates that organic coffee will once again become more financially advantageous when the supply of beans stabilises in the market, which could happen as early as this harvest. More stable weather conditions this year have led Conab, the government agency responsible for agricultural supply statistics and policies, to forecast a record harvest for 2026: sixty-six million bags, almost half of which will be produced in Minas Gerais. Rosana Mendes and Avair de Oliveira, also based in Poço Fundo, switched from organic to non-organic farming in 2025. They say they apply pesticides to grasses and weeds only, not to the coffee plants. Furthermore, Coopfam’s European Fairtrade certification prohibits or restricts the use of the more potent pesticides, such as glyphosate, which provides a layer of environmental protection even for non-organic crops.
The couple have also replanted their coffee crop with more productive and resilient Arabica varieties – a strategy that has been gaining ground among producers in southern Minas Gerais. With these adaptations, they plan to increase production by 260% by 2027.
“The future of coffee farming is a mystery,” says Mendes. “We are studying and learning every day from the climate, from nature, from the plant itself, to adapt to whatever is necessary.”
The power of trees
To mitigate the adverse impacts of extreme weather, tree-shaded coffee plantations like Paes’s are gaining ground among small-scale producers in southern Minas Gerais. João Ademir Pereira has planted ipê (Tabebuia), pear, cambucá (Plinia edulis) and yellow jabuticaba (Plinia cauliflora) trees on a third of the three hectares he cultivates here. “The trees help balance the climate and soften the sun,” he says.
In the shade, the coffee trees produce a crop every year; without it, they tend to alternate between seasons of high and low yield. For this cycle, Pereira expects to harvest more than 30 bags per hectare, which is in line with the national average. Almost all his harvest is destined for export.
In partnership with German coffee roaster Tchibo, which buys Coopfam coffee, the Minas Gerais Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology (IFMG) is researching ways to control pests. These include the leaf miner, a larva that burrows into the leaves and damages the beans. Irregular rainfall and above-average temperatures encourage its spread, but studies suggest the fruit and flowers of trees planted amongst the coffee plants attract predatory wasps that help control these infestations.
“We need to support small-scale farmers, because they are the most vulnerable to climate change,” says Lêda Gonçalves, an agricultural engineer and lecturer at the institute.
At an altitude of over a thousand metres, the mist and morning dew cool Douglas Lago’s coffee trees in Santa Rita de Caldas, a town neighbouring Poço Fundo. With plans to start exporting, his family has converted three hectares of degraded pasture into a coffee plantation for the new harvest, adding to six hectares already cultivated.
In contrast to tales of drought and extreme heat, Lago’s crop has been threatened by excessive cold. In 2021, a severe frost killed 60% of the family’s 10,000 plants. After replanting, another frost wiped out a further 2,500. “The climate is our biggest challenge,” says Lago.
Lago’s family has planted trees to mitigate these climate impacts. As well as offering protection from the heat, they cushion their coffee crops from hail storms. The family has also increased the density of their coffee plants to reduce water stress, and they keep native bees, which boost the pollination and nutrition of the beans. “If there’s no rain, there’s no water in the bean; if there’s no water in the bean, it doesn’t produce the sugar that coffee needs,” explains Lago.
The results are clear to see. Over the past two harvests, the family has achieved yields twice the national average. Last year, they won the speciality coffee competition organised by the cooperatives of Minas Gerais.
By turning to trees for solutions, coffee farmers like Lago are taking their first steps into agroforestry, a technique that remains largely unexplored in the region. This approach takes inspiration from Arabica’s native environment – the tropical highlands of Ethiopia. While planting trees in coffee plantations can assist in reducing heat and wind, comprehensive agroforestry integrates trees into a more complex system, in which they regulate soil moisture and the flow of water, carbon and nutrients. Agroforestry can create a more stable environment in which to grow coffee.
“Agroforestry is more self-sufficient,” explains Rafael Furtado, a local farmer with a master’s in agroecology and rural development. “It produces more resources than the system requires and relies less on external inputs.”
A study published in 2020 by the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment indicates agroforestry systems can mitigate the effects of extreme weather. Projecting ahead to the year 2050, the study concludes that agroforestry could preserve up to 75% of Brazil’s coffee-growing areas.
When Furtado moved to his two-hectare farm in Poço Fundo four years ago, he inherited a coffee plantation that had relied on pesticides and chemical fertilisers. Since then, he has been eliminating synthetic inputs and developing an agroforestry system.
“My productivity hasn’t been satisfactory so far, but we’ve already achieved a really good quality,” says the farmer.
Furtado is now working to make his agroforestry system economically viable: accessing government credit for family farms; seeking organic certification with a view to exporting; testing new varieties and assessing which crops grown alongside coffee can earn an income, such as bananas, avocados and African mahogany.
The Brazilian government’s Pronaf Agroecologia fund provides up to BRL 250,000 (USD 50,000) per farmer to finance organic or agroecological practices. But as the most recent 12-month data release shows, financing totalled just BRL 10 million across all family farming sectors, from vegetables to cacao and coffee. International sustainable finance remains similarly early-stage: the Chinese agriculture business platform, COFCO International, is running a carbon footprint pilot for Brazilian coffee; Europe’s Rabo Foundation, together with COFCO, has launched a BRL 1.6 million impact-credit line for water resilience in Minas Gerais.
Furtado says coffee agroforestry still has “very low uptake” in Brazil due to a lack of technical knowledge, the need for more complex management, and greater returns in quality than in productivity. Even so, he sees this model as the best solution in the face of growing climate challenges.
“Once there is more research, institutional support and greater experience, it will be far more worthwhile to adopt this more diversified and complex system than to remain in monoculture in a scenario of climate extremes,” he says.
