A “spotlight” article posted by Asia Nikkei claims climate change is destroying Indonesian coffee crop, a major agricultural export for the country. Fortunately for Indonesian coffee producers and the Indonesian economy, this it flat out false. Amid modest warming over the past century and a half, Indonesia’s coffee production and yields have increased dramatically, regularly setting new records for production.
Fathiya Dahrul, the author of the of the Asia Nikkei story, “Indonesia coffee trade wilts under brunt of climate change,” writes, “[i]n southern Sumatra, the cost of global warming stares Rusi Siruadi in the face as he surveys the stunted trees on his coffee farm.”
“On a plot of land a little bigger than a soccer field, Siruadi expects his robusta bean crop to shrivel by nearly a third from last year’s level once harvesting is wrapped up in late Septemberm,” Dahrul continues. “Robusta beans, often used to manufacture instant coffee, account for 80% to 90% of the crop across Indonesia, one of the world’s top five coffee producers.
“The culprit, Siruadi told Nikkei Asia, is the kind of extreme, erratic rainfall Indonesia has seen since last year,” Dahrul says. “Scientists attribute those weather patterns to human-induced climate change.”
The first clear error in this story is its author attributing a single year’s bad weather to climate change. While this one coffee producer, or even coffee growers across some or all of Indonesia, may have suffered crop losses due to weather in 2026, that, as meteorologist Anthony Watts points out in Climate at a Glance: Weather Vs. Climate, is a symptom of weather, not necessarily indicative of long-term climate change for the region. Farmers have always suffered good and bad years and even, on occasion, multiple good and bad weather years back-to-back, hurting or boosting crop production in the short-term.
To show that a year’s weather is associated with climate change, one would have to find a long-term consistent trend in the type of weather of concern. That is not what we find in Indonesia, however. Indonesia historically has experienced wet and dry monsoon seasons, and this hasn’t changed in recent decades. Indonesian agriculture relies upon the monsoon. Some years are wetter than others and some dryer. But the trend over time is that the monsoons arrive and provide the moisture Indonesia needs for crop production. This has not changed.
And Indonesia’s coffee production trend since 2000 shows substantial growth rather than a decline. Data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that Indonesia’s coffee production and yields have, if anything, benefitted from modestly warmer temperatures, more consistent precipitation, and carbon dioxide fertilization. Specifically, from 2000 through 2024, the last year for which Indonesia has reported agricultural data, supposedly the hottest decades on record:
- Indonesia’s coffee yields increased by approximately 45 percent; and
- Indonesia’s coffee production grew by nearly 46 percent. (See the figure, below)
In fact, Indonesia’s most recent production record was set in 2024, with the previous record having been set in 2021. With just two years of modest declines, Indonesia’s coffee yields increased eight of the past 10 years. In short, whatever the coffee growers interviewed by Asia Nikkei have experienced and may believe, there is no evidence in the data that climate change is causing coffee to “wilt,” or is harming coffee production in general. Anecdotal evidence from interviews with a few growers concerning a single year’s crop output can’t put to lie the long-term data.
Had the mainstream media not been falsely blaming climate change for nearly every bad weather event over the past 30 years, I would wager that if those same farmers had been interviewed during a year of high heat and or erratic rainfall in 1994, for example, they would not have blamed climate change for any resultant crop failures. Rather, they likely would have said it was the vagaries of the weather, representing ups and downs that they had known throughout their years of farming.
In the end, the data suggests that Indonesia’s coffee growers have been benefitting from modest climate change, not suffering. Somehow Asia Nikkei, failed to get the memo. Its writers and fact checkers need to wake up to the existence of real-world long-term data before penning and allowing false stories to be posted about a climate disaster that isn’t in evidence.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
