A new report from Australia’s Climate Institute says coffee production worldwide is in danger because of climate change. It cites a study that says “hotter weather and changes in rainfall patterns are projected to cut the area suitable for coffee in half by 2050.”
.. “Coffee depends on a lot of water,” says Perseu Perdoná, an agronomist with the local coffee cooperative. And coffee plants are already sensitive to temperature. “Climate change is happening,” he tells me, “we can see it. Add to that deforestation, which means the ground can’t retain water when it rains.”
He fears that in the near future, unless something drastically changes, coffee will disappear from this region.
.. “The rivers have run dry,” he says. “Even in the city, we have water rationing — one day we have water, one day we don’t. We never expected this.”
Insider’s Account of How Graft Fed Brazil’s Political Crisis
The senator’s accounts of colossal bribes, back-room oil deals and desperate cover-ups — pieced together from interviews, leaked intercepts of telephone conversations and court filings — offer a rare glimpse into how a leftist party that rose to power vowing to stamp out the corruption of a privileged political elite ended up embracing its predecessors’ practices. His testimony has accelerated Brazil’s political crisis, in which fearful rulers are masterminding power grabs, secretly recording each other and preparing for the day that they, too, might find themselves on the wrong side of an early-morning police raid.
.. prosecutors discovered a scheme inside the national oil company, Petrobras: Contractors had paid nearly $3 billion in bribes to executives who in turn channeled money into the campaigns of parties in Brazil’s governing coalition.
Brazil’s Digital Backlash
Online tools like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are used not only to express opinions; they are an affordable alternative to exorbitantly priced Brazilian telecom providers. One recent study in Brazil found that WhatsApp was used by 93 percent of those surveyed who had Internet access.
A Silver Lining to Brazil’s Troubles
Compounding the economic problems, many a result simply of poor economic stewardship, a huge corruption scandal has swept up both Brazilian politicians and a number of prominent businesspeople. The scandal centers on the country’s biggest company, Petrobras, whose success had been an object of real pride during the go-go years.
Although the details are complicated, as its core the scandal is “an old-fashioned kickback scheme,” as The Times’s David Segal put it in a fine story last month — a kickback scheme that has been estimated at a staggering $2 billion.
Politicians and members of the business elite alike have been arrested. The country’s president, Dilma Rousseff, who was the chairwoman of Petrobras while much of the scheme was taking place
.. For all the pain Brazilians are going through right now, its democracy and its judicial institutions are working.