Coffee that Eases the Conscience
by David Bray

Home | Agriculture | Coffee | Coffee that Eases the Conscience

Once there was Maxwell House and Folger's and now there are Costa Rican Terrazus and Sumatran Mandhelings, with attributes as baffling to the average consumer as wines. "Full body, very rich, with an array of grace notes modulating from nut and smoke tones through hints of wine in the finish" as one Guatemalan brew was described in the trade magazine Coffee Journal. And now gourmet coffee, in turn, has been invaded by social and environmental themes unimaginable a decade ago, with organic, fair trade, bird-friendly, shade tree, and the catch-all "sustainable" filtering into the coffee bars. Coffee has become the next frontier of conscious consumerism, in the footsteps of dolphin-free tuna and child-labor free clothing.

In this case, consumers are girded by a genuine breakthrough in research on conservation and development, the discovery that traditional small coffee farms, with the tall natural canopy shading an understory of coffee bushes, replicates the structure of the natural forest. For migratory birds and other expressions of biodiversity, this replication serves about as well as the real thing.

As early as 1932, Ludlow Griscom of the American Musuem of Natural History had noted that the density and diversity of bird populations in traditional coffee farms varied little from virgin forest, an observation whose significance was little noted until recent research by Dr. Ivette Perfecto at the University of Michigan and others confirmed and expanded on this finding. As the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) has pointed out, migratory bird censuses over the past several decades are showing alarming declines, with the numbers of birds crossing the Gulf of Mexico each year having decreased by half in a twenty-year span.

Part of this decline is due to the production of "sun coffee"-a high-yielding, hybrid crop that that creates a biological desert. Driven in pat by American foreign assistance, sun coffee destroyed vast coffee forests and their embedded biodiversity in the 1970s and 1980s. As Robert Rice of the SMBC and Justin Ward of the Natural Resources Defense Council have reported, of the 6.9 million acres planted to coffee in northern Latin America, about 40% has been converted to "sun coffee". Sun coffee is a modern capital-intensive, high-yielding, hybrid crop that creates a biological desert. A trend towards sun coffee, driven in part by U.S. foreign assistance, destroyed vast coffee forests and their embedded biodiversity beginning in the mid 1970s.

And there is more at stake than the birds. Small coffee farmers are also an endangered population. In Mexico, today the world's leading producer of organic coffee, most of which is also shade tree, most small farmers are indigenous peoples who make less than a $1000 a year, and whose children frequently die of easily treated diseases. The desperateness is reflected in the fact that the Zapatista rebels in southern Mexico were budding organic coffee farmers who chose another path. Even those farmers who chose organic coffee rather than arms have had to face afflictions of Biblical proportions.

The Mexican forest fires that burned eyes in the southern United States last spring, also destroyed thousands of acres of coffee bushes. After that, antediluvian rains, one-quarter of the average rainfall for the year, fell in five days in Chiapas, killing hundreds of people, leaving 15,000 homeless, and destroying 90,000 hectares of coffee.

But for those organic and shade tree coffee farmers who have been able to escape armed uprisings, fires, and floods, this new market has presented a productive alternative for producers with few options. In the first years of their transition to organic shade-tree coffee, the farmers of one coffee cooperative earned as much as 43% more than their non-organic neighbors, although the price difference has tended to moderate over time. Nonetheless, buying organic, shade-tree, and "bird-friendly" coffee has become an everyday acts of mindful consumerism which can make a difference for both biodiversity and poor peasant farmers, an "array of grace notes" in the international economy.

PLANETA.COM GUIDES

Home | About | Advertise! | Books | Central America | Ecotourism | Headlines
Learn Spanish | Mexico | Media | Site Map | South America | World Travel | Updates