Twelve years ago, Vincenzo Amata stumbled upon a plot of flowering trees while wandering the Sicilian countryside. Before long, he found a farmer tending the grove. As Amata asked one question after another, the stranger tugged a mango off a tree and offered it to him. He didn’t know it, but his first bite of the bright yellow fruit would change his life. 

“I can still taste it to this day,” Amata said in Italian. The burst of sweet flavor, coupled with its smooth, velvety texture, was unlike anything he’d ever tasted. “I got chills, goosebumps all over my skin, it was so delicious.”

Six months later, Amata left a lifelong career as a clothing salesman to launch his own mango farm. It put him “very out of my element. But I just fell in love with it.” Amata has since grown six popular varieties of the tropical fruit on PapaMango, his 17-acre grove in Messina on the northeastern coast of Sicily. 

As climate change complicates growing the region’s historically emblematic crops, like olives and lemons, Amata is seeing more farmers follow the same path. They are all “already starting to change from lemons to mangoes,” he said.

Rising temperatures, shifting precipitation, and emerging diseases are among the mélange of climate impacts changing what’s grown in breadbaskets around the world. As warming brings significant challenges to agriculture, growers are abandoning crops with dwindling yields or those threatened by pathogens and pests for those better suited to changing local conditions. Producers in pockets of Latin America and Asia are increasingly turning to highly-adaptable and stress-tolerant varieties of quinoa instead of climate-sensitive crops such as coffee. Corn farmers across the Midwest are experimenting with drought-resistant millets, while growers in Sub-Saharan Africa are embracing varieties of sorghum and legumes that require less water than other grains.  

This trend will only accelerate, radically redefining what different regions are known for. Before the end of the century, parts of the United Kingdom, to offer one example, may be forced to swap top commodities such as oats and wheat for everything from soy to chickpeas to grapes.

The mango, that beloved linchpin of cuisines and cultures around the world, typifies this trend. This juicy, flavorful fruit, which outsells most of its tropical counterparts, is grown in some 120 countries. But many leading producers face higher temperatures, greater aridity, and other challenges to raising a crop that requires very specific conditions to thrive. As it grows more popular — global production is expected to reach 65 million metric tons next year — production is beginning to shift to new areas, making the mango a fitting emblem of yet another way climate change is reshaping global agriculture.

Mangoes, which have been cultivated for millennia, are well-adapted to sub-tropical and tropical areas. The trees, which can grow over 100 feet tall, generally favor temperatures in the 70s and tend to be incredibly frost-sensitive. 

Much of Italy enjoys a Mediterranean climate marked by hot summers and mild winters, which provide ideal conditions for sub-tropical fruit. With drought and hotter conditions bringing sharp declines in olive oil and citrus production, many Italian farmers are embracing new crops. This is particularly rife across the south, where olive trees are giving way to a proliferation in money-making mango and avocado trees in Sicily, Puglia and Calabria. 

In 2023, mango crops spanned nearly 3,000 acres throughout Italy, up from 1,235 acres in 2019 and just 24 in 2004, according to agricultural trade data. A mild winter and relatively warm spring led to a bumper crop last year, with Sicilian growers getting as much as 5.50 euros per kilo even as lemon growers earned as little as 1.22 euros. 

“The cost of the mango has gone up, so I’m doing well,” said Amata. He employs three people year-round at PapaMango, where they produce over 100,000 pounds of mangoes every year. “The cost has gone up because the demand is up because of these climate impacts in other places.”

Although India is the world’s leading producer and consumer of the sweet fruit, most of the mangoes found in supermarkets come from Mexico — which provides the bulk of those sold in the US — Brazil, and Peru. The three nations, which together produced nearly 5.5 million metric tons of mangoes, mangosteen, and guava (although botanically unrelated, the tropical fruits are often grouped together in international trade assessments) in 2023, saw production declines last year, a trend driven in no small part by climate change. 

How large a decline remains to be seen, but the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, told Grist that preliminary trade data and industry sources suggest Mexico’s exports dropped 2 percent, while Brazil saw an 8 percent decrease. Exports from Peru plunged a staggering 55 percent. 

Other reports clearly attribute some of these declines to climate change. Drought and water scarcity led to widespread problems with fruit quality and agricultural productivity across Mexico. Excessive rainfall throttled harvests in Brazil, while unusually warm temperatures compounding with the lasting effects from El Niño led to what could be Peru’s worst season in history.

These trends contributed to a 22 percent decrease in the number of mangoes the U.S. imported in the first five months of last year compared to 2023. That led to higher retail prices than the year before. Imports rebounded by late summer and eventually surpassed 2023 levels, bringing down costs, but consumers still paid more for them than in 2023.

Still, global production remained strong because of yield increases elsewhere in the world and the expansion into new growing areas. Worldwide production of mangoes, mangosteen and guava has more than doubled over the past 20 years, a trend the FAO expects to continue.

But those numbers reflect national production around the world and could conceal declines within specific regions, said FAO economist Sabine Altendorf. Mangoes, like most tropical fruits, are typically grown in remote locales where cultivation is highly dependent on rainfall, prone to the effects of increasingly erratic weather, and reliant on less robust transport routes, she said.

“Generally, since mangoes are among the most fragile and perishable agricultural commodities, their production and trade are threatened by a multitude of factors, which can be both related to the effects of climate change and exacerbated by these effects,” said Altendorf, who specializes in global value chains for agricultural products. 

All of these compounding factors “are of dire concern to growers, as they can have devastating effects on crops, putting the livelihoods of smallholder farmers at risk.” 

Flowering mango trees can be found throughout the Mexican state of Chiapas. The country’s southernmost region teems with the wildly popular golden Ataúlfo mango — one of Mexico’s leading mango exports. 

Luis Alberto Sumuano, who was born and raised in a farming family in Tapachula, Chiapas, studies Ataúlfo mango production. An agricultural economist at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, he recently discovered that if Chiapas mango farmers aren’t able to begin harvesting as early as December, to sell their fruit before March, they struggle to see a profit due to market dynamics and lower quality fruit. A box of Ataúlfo mangoes sold to a supplier in January typically earns the grower around $63, but that same box, if sold after March, could bring in as little as $2, he said. 

Although Mexico saw overall production decline partly due to drought, another climate problem plagues farmers in Chiapas, where back-to-back years of increasingly volatile bouts of heavy rainfall have delayed flowering, shifting the entire production cycle. All that precipitation also spurs the spread of pests like the fruit fly and the growth of fungal diseases, all of which are becoming a growing problem as the planet warms. 

“At the same time that you are fighting with the rain, you also have to increase the chemicals to try to reduce the fungus,” he said. “It’s two times more difficult.” 

Sumuano is afraid of what all of this may mean for mango production in southern Mexico. He is beginning to see a steady trickle of growers “leaving the trade” to raise other wares — namely livestock and palm oil — that don’t face the same overt challenges. 

But even as the fruit faces an uncertain future in Chiapas, it is thriving elsewhere in Mexico, underscoring how climate change can reshape agriculture within a relatively small geographic expanse. This is particularly true of Kent mango varieties, primarily grown in the Sinaloa region. The green-hued delicacy made up a 20 percent share of the country’s mango exports to the U.S last year, nearly tripling its share from 2023, according to Empacadoras de Mango de Exportación A.C. data shared with Grist. By contrast, Ataúlfo exports to the U.S. declined, dropping 4.5 percent from 2023. This is in part because not only are some mango varieties more climate-resilient than others, but certain microclimates may be more suited to production, with growers that have adopted practices like developing disease- and pest-resistant cultivated varieties.

It’s a paradox that can be seen unfolding elsewhere. In California, where mangoes have been grown in the southern region since the late 1800s, farmers in central and northern parts of the state are now embracing the fruit. 

Florida is another promising hotspot. Even as warming and disease have eroded the Sunshine State’s citrus production, Alex Salazar said Florida’s budding mango industry has experienced a coinciding boom. He runs Tropical Acres Farms, a seven-acre operation in West Palm Beach, where Salazar and his wife grow and sell fruit and trees. Business has flourished in the last five years — the biggest rate of expansion that they’ve seen since opening in 2011 — as commercial demand for mango trees has increased in California, Arizona, and Texas. 

“Not only is it easier to grow them now because of warmer temperatures and milder winters, but mangoes also don’t require much,” said Salazar. “They don’t require the same nutritional demands as other tropical crops, such as avocados or bananas. There is a certain appeal to people that want to grow something and not have to do all of this overwhelming stuff to make them happy. That counts for a lot for people looking to grow alternative crops.”

Demand has even ramped up in regions that surprised Salazar. “Areas of Florida that were previously too cold to grow mangoes, you can grow mangoes now,” he said. 

Jonathan Crane, tropical fruit crop specialist at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, has also noticed this trend. “People have tried to grow tropical crops like mangoes as far back as the 1800s, but it wasn’t viable in most of the state,” said Crane. In places like Central Florida, that’s no longer the case. Climate change has progressively curbed the frequency of freezing events across the region. “In the past eight years, I’ve been getting contacted more and more by people looking to plant mangoes [there],” he said.

But Crane noted mango farming in the region faces its own challenges. Bouts of excessive heat, destructive hurricanes, and fewer but more erratic freezing events have all negatively impacted the trees’ ability to flower and fruit in the last two years. Yet, none of these factors seem to be slowing the flood of interest in the fledgling industry. 

While the planet continues to warm, more and more people are flocking to cultivate the celebrated fruit in new places. In an era when what farmers grow and how they grow it is in constant flux, the mango is as much a warning sign of the cascading effect of climate change as it is a beacon of resilience.