The climate crisis is killing (and cooling) your chilis
by Benjamin Knight

The climate crisis is already having a measurable effect on the quality of your fruit and veg. In the case of chilis — it's turning down the heat.

Right now, it feels like the weather has turned upside down. I'm writing this huddled in the coolest corner of my un-air-conditioned flat in northern Germany, where the temperature outside is 38 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, in Agadir, Morocco, it's a lovely 24 degrees, with a nice 11-kph breeze too, says Google, just to rub it in. 

That wasn't what it was like in Agadir last September, though. Last autumn was a bad time in the Agadir chili plantations — temperatures blasted 10 whole degrees through the seasonal averages to peak at around 40 degrees for several days straight. "We had real heatwaves, and when they roll through the greenhouses, it stresses the plants a lot," said Reimer-Michael Hand, an independent sales manager working with the Spanish fruit and vegetable company Hortofrutícola Fresss. 

Stressed plants often drop their blossoms early, which means no fruit, and are more susceptible to pests like thrips and whiteflies, which can bring viruses that kill the plants. Stressed plants also produce such poor quality chilis that they can't be sold.

"We lost an entire chili plantation this winter — the plants didn't produce any fruit, so we had them all torn out — four hectares. We lost a lot of money," said Reimer. "The fact that we've had two really disastrous winters in a row has meant that we've had real shortages of some vegetables in European supermarkets."

You just can't tell

But it isn't just the heat of the climate crisis. Just as damaging is unseasonable cold or too much rain. "Then the plants don't produce any blossoms at all," said Reimer. Because it's not the warming that is killing our food supply — it's the unreliability. 

Alexander Hicks knows all about that. With two decades' experience in the chili game, Alexander claims to have cultivated over 2,500 different types in all kinds of projects all over the world. But offering advice on those projects has become harder now because the climate in any given region has, he says, become impossible to predict.

"It used to be that you could factor in certain weather events — so if I thought my field might be flooded, and I could lose 50% of my plants, I could plant an extra 50%, and that would make up for it," said Hicks. "But now it's unpredictable: There's much too much water, or much too little, or it's much too cold or much too hot — and we're seeing that worldwide."

Properly watered and nourished, a chili plant thrives in summer temperatures of between 28 and 32 degrees Celsius — but only if the preceding spring has not been too hot or cold — and that's a whole other problem. "There are just more and more occasional deviations from the norm," said Alexander. "Suddenly the springs are too warm, or too wet, or suddenly, like last spring in Germany, there were suddenly very cold nighttime temperatures. Deviations like that cause the plants to alter their rhythms. That changes all the processes in the chili world." 

And it's not like the extra heat in Europe means we could simply produce all our own chilis here one day. In summer, chilis can of course be grown in northern Europe, but over the winter they would need artificial light and heat — which would create such a massive extra cost that it would make the whole operation both unprofitable and unsustainable. "Climate change would have to get so drastic that it's no longer profitable to import chilis from Africa and Asia, but then it would be too late to really react on a large scale," said Alexander. 

All these extreme climatic fluctuations are also having an effect on the chilis themselves: They impact the size, the appearance, the durability — and the taste. Recent studies have shown that the stress on plants is causing chilis to lose their heat. All of that, in turn, brings massive problems to businesses, as supermarkets will only take chilis of a certain appearance and quality. Plus, the ongoing climatic disaster we're living through means higher costs for plant protection and soil cultivation.

"Economically, that means we make much less revenue, and much less marketable produce," Reimer added. "It's getting worse every year. In really bad cases, we throw away over 50% of the produce. It's got to the stage that we're thinking about not bothering with chilis in Morocco at all."

Even adaptation has its limits

The good news is that while humans may not have experienced a climate like this, the chilis themselves have, because chilis are very old. The first chili peppers are thought to have evolved in what is now South America at least 15 million years ago, though some chili boffins think they may have evolved 50 million years ago and existed elsewhere too.

It's only in the last 6,000 years that humans have been domesticating them. Since then, the chili has conquered the world. While the world's biggest chili-producing countries arecurrently China and India, they are farmed across Indonesia, the Philippines, as well as Central and South America and Africa. 

The problem is that the climate crisis has also conquered the world. "There's no region in the world that is unaffected by climate change," said Alexander. "I was in Cameroon recently, for example, where they normally plant their chilis in the dry season, so they can be watered in the rainy season, but then suddenly it hardly rains at all in the rainy season." 

Can tech save the chili?

There are of course ways to adapt to this new situation: One of the most obvious would bebreeding more resilient chili plants — which wouldn't exactly be a new idea. When it comes to pests, for instance, major seed producers are constantly breeding hardier plants. But the pests adapt too, and the extra heat and dryness of climate change is accelerating this arms race. "The aim is to cultivate plants in the foreseeable future that have higher dryness tolerance, higher heat tolerance," said Reimer. Meanwhile, more and more people are trying to find more lo-fi solutions to protect the plants, such as shades and UV filters. Again, though, the economics gets in the way — all that stuff means extra costs. 

But Hicks wants to sound a positive note: "I do think that the chili is resistant enough for us to maintain the chili market, and we can deploy regenerative agriculture and adapted chilis in time. But there needs to be a fundamental change in the way people think. If we are thinking about technological solutions like that, we should also be thinking about: How can we reduce harvest losses?"

Humanity is currently betting that it can survive in a climate that it has never tried to live in before, and the weather is going haywire, something the world's farmers were the first to notice.