Climate change brews up trouble for coffee growers

But these schemes focus mostly on farm-level issues without tackling larger scales of space and time. Climate change, however, cannot be adequately addressed at the micro-scale. Farming communities will need watershed-level projects to store water, improve disaster responsiveness and plan for new invasive pests and diseases, for example.

More adaptive, participatory research is needed to find out how best to help farmers, and there should be a greater emphasis on long-term research to develop crop varieties more resistant to climate extremes, pests and diseases. Neither NGOs nor private companies can hope to manage many such activities. And there is an unresolved paradox: sustainability is about imposing order and stability, whereas climate change is about adapting and transforming.

As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it, globalisation is where everything is connected and nobody is in charge. And that highlights the weakness in the neoliberal agenda - global problems such as climate change cannot be solved by the invisible hand of the market.

Taking back control

So we find, towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, that support institutions are weak and fragmented. Numerous standards-setters are competing for scarce donor funds and smaller certification fees, with little concerted response from the private sector.

There is no alternative but for governments to regain more influence over the fate of their agriculture. Brazil has shown the way with extensive modelling, leading to zoning schemes where farmers can obtain cheap credit for planting crops recommended by the models. It is now among the top three exporters for ten global commodities, including coffee.

With all our coffee beans in ever fewer baskets, the risk of price instability increases alongside the mounting risk of regional droughts, diseases and floods.

The coffee industry has been a world leader in advancing the cause of sustainability. Now it should take stock, pat itself on the back, and quickly move on to a concerted response to humanity's greatest challenge: tackling climate change.