SHARON Nelson is no coffee industry neophyte. After all, Nelson has been working with coffee co-operative groups in Jamaica from the 1990s, giving them technological and consultancy support.

Last year Nelson, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) College of Business and Management, began research on climate change’s impact on Blue Mountain Coffee. Her findings so far are not encouraging.

According to Nelson, the global weather phenomenon is resulting in a reduction in the quantity of coffee being produced here.

“Currently we have blends of imports, and there is piracy taking place as well because there is not enough quantity to meet the demand,” Nelson told a special sitting of the Jamaica Observer Press Club last Wednesday on the UTech campus in Papine, St Andrew.

The Press Club was held in advance of the university’s Research, Technology and Innovation Day set for this Thursday.

Being held under the theme ‘Research and Innovation in Action’, the event, UTech said, will showcase cutting-edge innovation and applied research being undertaken by faculty, staff and students across its three colleges and five faculties, and which can significantly impact areas of national and regional development.

Nelson is scheduled to present findings of her study, titled ‘The Other Green Gold: The Impact of Climate Change on Blue Mountain Coffee’, During Research Day.

Included in the study is data showing a steady decline in the value of coffee exports over a five-year period.

In 2009, Nelson said, Jamaica earned US$33.8 million from coffee exports. The following year, the figure dropped to US$19.1 million, sliding further to US$18.3 million in 2011, then dipping to US$13.7 million in 2012, after which it moved up to US$16.3 million in 2013.

While Nelson is not blaming climate change solely for the decline, she is firm in her view that it is a major contributor to the problem.

“If we look at Hurricane Ivan and Hurricane Gilbert we see where millions of dollars in damage was effected in terms of destruction of infrastructure, destruction of trees, etc, and small farmers in particular have not been able to recover from this,” Nelson told the Observer Press Club.

Hurricane Ivan, which sideswiped Jamaica’s south coast in September 2004, resulted in the coffee industry losing an estimated $475.7 million in export earnings, according to an assessment done for the Jamaican Government by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

In September 1988 Hurricane Gilbert devastated Jamaica, destroying nearly three-quarters of the island’s coffee fields and factories in the process.

“Anything that upsets the ecological balance can be detrimental to not just the blooming but the ripening and hence the final product of the coffee,” Nelson argued.

In addition to severe storms, Nelson pointed to increases in temperature and coffee leaf rust disease that have been affecting coffee production in Jamaica.

The upshot, she noted, is the difficulty coffee farmers are now experiencing in insuring their crop.

That difficulty was confirmed by Delano Franklyn, chairman of the Coffee Industry Board, in an interview with the Sunday Observer on Friday.

Noting that the coffee industry, which was once run by the State, is now largely privatised, Franklyn said the issue now is who would have the responsibility of taking out insurance for the farmers, and who would pay the premiums.

“It’s an expensive venture,” he admitted. “An insurance company will now have to sit down and do the actuarial work, meaning the amount of acreage that is in production, the number of farmers who are involved and the risk that will be involved, both in terms of diseases, as well as change of climate, and then that insurance company would work out a quotation.”

Until then, coffee farmers will continue operating at a risk, and many of them, Nelson noted, while aware of the environmental changes affecting their crop, have not attributed them to global warming.

According to Nelson, she hopes that her research will highlight the need for effective policies to preserve the quality of Blue Mountain Coffee.

“We need to treat the area in the Blue Mountains as a special area, in the same way that we would treat the south coast and implement preservation, conservation and adaptation measures,” she said.

“The farmers need to have their land issues addressed, so that they can have security of tenure so that they will be able to implement measures that are favourable ecologically, and may be able to adjust to climate change,” Nelson added.

“Wealth awaits us in terms of what we do with Blue Mountain Coffee. The world cannot have enough of our speciality coffee and we should do everything to promote it and produce large volumes,” she argued.