  Coffee leaf rust is a prevalent botanical disease that causes a worldwide
reduction in coffee supply and its quality, leading to immense economic losses.
While several pandemic intervention policies (PIPs) for tackling this rust
pandemic are commercially available, they seem to provide only partial
epidemiological relief for farmers. In this work, we develop a high-resolution
economical-epidemiological model that captures the rust pandemic's spread in
coffee tree farms and its associated economic impact. Through extensive
simulations for the case of Colombia, a country that consists mostly of
small-size coffee farms and is the second-largest coffee producer in the world,
our results show that it is economically impractical to sustain any profit
without directly tackling the rust pandemic. Furthermore, even in the
hypothetical case where farmers perfectly know their farm's epidemiological
state and the weather in advance, any rust pandemic-related efforts can only
amount to a limited profit of roughly 4% on investment. In the more realistic
case, any rust pandemic-related efforts are expected to result in economic
losses, indicating that major disturbances in the coffee market are
anticipated.
