December 2007

Coffee and the environment / Corporate coffee

Habitat still destroyed for cheap corporate coffee

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post discussing a World Wildlife Fund report revealing that robusta coffee was being illegally grown in southern Sumatra, with most being purchased by large coffee producers such as Kraft and Nestlè (press release here, full PDF here). That report focused on coffee being grown inside Indonesia’s Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in Lampung province.

Earlier this week, ABC News carried a report on the plight of wild elephants in Sumatra. The story updated the situation at Bukit Barisan, and reported that only 4 elephants out of 60 still survive there. ABC said:

The national park is a protected forest, but a lot of it has been burned and cleared to grow Robusta coffee beans. These beans are commonly used in Europe and North America to make instant coffee.

Nestlè, which makes Nescafe, buys coffee from the region — 40 percent of it from local traders.

A Nestlè spokesman told ABC News, “It might come — we have no way of  knowing — from illegal sources. Law enforcement is not our task.”

In a follow-up post, I provided and update, in which Nestlè admitted the “difficulty of determining the precise origin” of its coffee. The company promised a year ago to increase the scrutiny of its Indonesian sources to make sure it didn’t buy illegally grown beans and launch an effort to clean up its supply chain.

If Nestlè hasn’t bothered to clean up its act, there’s a good reason: consumers are not penalizing them for their poor behavior. For the first nine months of 2007, since the first reports about the illegal coffee came to light, the Nestlè division that includes Nescafe and other coffees grew 10%, with sales — just in this division — of over US$11 billion.  It’s not just Nestlè, Kraft’s North American beverage division also posted a 5.3% gain in net revenues in the third quarter of 2007.

As long as people buy these coffees, they will continue to be produced, no matter how much habitat and wildlife gets destroyed, or how many growers become impoverished. The large multinational corporations that bring us our dirt cheap coffee are motivated by profits. Do you buy this coffee? What motivates you?

Photo of robusta coffee growing in the sun in southern Sumatra, from Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

Coffee news and miscellany

Five great charitable donations related to sustainable coffee

Looking for a holiday gift idea related to sustainable coffee? Here are my five top picks of where to direct your charitable giving. These organizations either directly help coffee farmers or their communities, or support bird research in coffee growing areas. Happy holidays.

  1. Coffee Kids — International non-profit organization established to improve the quality of life for children and families who live in coffee-growing communities. Now operating under a larger foundation.
  2. Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center — Establishing criteria and certifying Bird-Friendly coffee is not the only function of the SMBC. They have many other very important and worthwhile research projects. The donation form directs funds to the parent organization, Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
  3. MoSI — Sponsor a bird banding station in the tropics. The Institute of Bird Populations (IBP) coordinates a series of bird research stations across the American tropics, many of which are on or near coffee farms. They provide absolutely vital information on how birds use these habitats in areas where this kind of research is still uncommon and underfunded. MoSi comes from the Spanish “Monitoreo de Sobrevivencia Invernal” or Monitoring Overwintering Survival. You can support the research either by joining IBP at various membership levels, or adopt an entire station for only $300.
  4. TechnoServe — This organization helps people in developing countries launch and build businesses that create income, opportunity, and economic growth. They have an entire agriculture sector that has done solid work specifically on coffee projects, often working with farmers and co-ops, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries.

Coffee and the environment / Corporate coffee

Tim Hortons coffee and the environment

If you are Canadian or live in a U.S. border state, you know Tim Hortons. This coffee and donut/fast food shop completely dominates the carry-out coffee market in Canada, with over 2,700 locations serving around 3 million cups of coffee a day, leaving Starbucks a distant second. Tim Hortons is such a Canadian cultural icon that there is even a store in Kandahar, Afghanistan, serving Canadian troops. There are also 345 stores in the U.S. with a goal of 500 by the end of 2008. Tim Hortons was acquired by Wendy’s International in 1995, but divested and spun it off late in 2006, so Tim Hortons is once again an independent company.

Is Tim Hortons coffee sustainable?

The coffee
The one-sentence summary is this: Tim Hortons does not sell organic coffee, does not sell Fair Trade coffee, and does not disclose the source of its green beans.

On their web site, the company explains, “we decided against buying fair trade coffee” and instead developed a program that works directly with the growers. This program, initiated in 2005, is called the Sustainable Coffee Partnership, and is implemented and managed by the outside organization EDE Consulting, of the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Hamburg, Germany. The Partnership will focus on three-year projects. These will provide technical assistance and investment in infrastructure to improve productivity and quality, aid in crop diversification (such as bananas), address the needs of families, and emphasize  “the need to respect and
protect the environment.”

The 2006 Tim Hortons annual report notes that part of the purpose of the Sustainable Coffee Partnership is to “fight against poverty among the people who provide one of the Company’s most important products, and to play a meaningful role in providing for the future supply of quality green coffee.” Therefore, the sites of the projects presumably give an indication of where Tim Hortons sources some its coffee. The first project was in Guatemala, with 750 producers in the communities of Zacapa, Chiquimula and Jutiapa near the Honduran border. Other projects are with 200 producers in Colombia in northern Huila, and in Brazil.

Colombia and Brazil are two of the biggest producers of technified “sun” coffee in the world, but there is no information on how much coffee they source from which countries or how it is grown. Their annual report merely says they have “many suppliers and alternate suppliers for coffee.”


Waste
I found that one couldn’t research Tim Hortons without coming across a lot of material on the ubiquity of disposable Tim Hortons coffee cups. They evidently paper Canada. An article in Macleans quoted a Sierra Club representative who said, “The Tim Hortons cup is easily the No. 1 recognizable item of litter in the country.” One often-cited statistic is that 22% of the litter in the province of Nova Scotia was from Tim Hortons.

Of course, it’s not really the company’s fault if people don’t properly dispose of their, and the company has started some anti-litter campaigns. Nonetheless, Tim Hortons cups contain no recycled material and are not recyclable. The company objected to a proposed tax on non-recyclable cups in Toronto, saying “We’re not a waste-management company. Our product is very price-sensitive.” They have recycling at some of their locations, but I’m unclear on whether it includes the cups. Tim Hortons apparently also offers a discount for bringing your own mug, but this customer (scroll to the bottom) discovered that the employee used a paper cup to fill the customer’s mug. I have had this happen myself on more than one occasion at different establishments, although not Tim Hortons.

Updated addition: Tim Hortons also objects to having its drive-through lanes be subjected to an anti-idling ordinance in Ontario.

Frankly, I’m not impressed with the sustainability efforts of Tim Hortons, or their products.

Photo of store by Thiesen.
Photo of cup in gutter by Kevin Steele.