Carmen Alvarez looks down at a five-year-old coffee plant and frowns. She points to the wide brown spots afflicting some of the leaves and says "Ashes are good for [dealing with] the plagues."
Mrs. Alvarez and her husband Francisco Mamani have been working with coffee plants near Bolivia's Amboro National Park for 30 years.
In that time, they've had their fair share of environmental setbacks.
Coffee has always been a fragile plant that requires specific microclimates to thrive. Controlling fungal diseases and pests are just part of the job.
Most growers within the world's "coffee belt" nations are well-versed in dealing with these problems—every season brings a different challenge.
As one of the most traded commodities in the world, the global coffee market was valued at $138 billion last year, according to Expert Market Research. FairTrade says the industry employs roughly 125 million people in at least 70 countries.
In the United States, coffee represents 2.2 million jobs and creates more than $100 billion in wage revenue, according to the National Coffee Association.
Mrs. Alvarez said both the wet and dry seasons are becoming less predictable, most noticeably since a few years ago. Consequently, infestations and diseases affecting coffee are now becoming harder to predict and more difficult to mitigate.
The Alvarez family, which runs both a plantation and the coffee roasting company Buenavisteno, isn't alone.
The increasing struggle to bring in a healthy crop of coffee "cherries" is part of a larger pattern affecting the world's producers.
As weather and seasons become more erratic, diseases have become more widespread, threatening the future of growers everywhere.
The fungal disease known in the industry as coffee leaf rust is one of the primary blights that affects coffee—particularly the Arabica strains—and spreads like a pathogen.
The dreaded coffee leaf rust was detected for the first time in Saudi Arabia, a country that had harbored one of the few remaining coffee regions free of the disease, according to a study published in January.
The presence of coffee leaf rust was observed for the first time in August 2023 on plantations in the mountainous Fyfa district.
The area lies within the heart of Saudi Arabia's coffee production region in Jazan.
The United States imports 200,000 60-kilogram (132-pound) bags of roast and ground coffee per year from the Middle Eastern nation, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Due to the compounding effect of increased disease and insects, along with shifting weather patterns, one study in the journal "Science" estimates that 60 percent of all coffee species are at risk of extinction.
However, this isn't the first time scientists have identified coffee as being at risk of extinction due to evolving and shifting climates. One study from 2012 noted that wild Arabica strains—known for having the best taste—could be extinct "well before" the end of this century.
Currently, the United States consumes 1.62 billion pounds of coffee per year, according to data compiled by Cafely. 
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