July 2008

Corporate coffee

Walmart’s deceptive coffee claim

Walmart claims that if every Walmart shopper bought a bag of Sam’s Choice Rainforest Alliance (RA) certified coffee, it would preserve 135,000 acres of land.

And that’s complete bull.

In researching another article, I came across Walmart’s “Sustainability Substantiation” page. It lists a number of their “earthy-friendly” products, and the supposed impact if every Walmart shopper bought one of that particular item.

The claim for Sam’s Choice Rainforest Alliance (RA) certified coffee is that if every Walmart shopper bought a bag, it would preserve 135,000 acres of land. Here’s how they calculated it:

200,000,000 = the number of Wal-Mart shoppers
0.000675 = acres of land every 12oz bag of Rainforest Alliance certified coffee helps preserve
135,000 = acres of land that 200,000,000 12oz bags of Rainforest Alliance certified coffee helps preserve

The math is correct, but the premise is completely wrong. I don’t know where they got the figure that each bag of coffee “preserves” a fraction of an acre of land, but it really doesn’t matter. The fact is that buying RA certified coffee doesn’t preserve anything. RA doesn’t take a portion of each sale and go out and purchase land and create nature preserves, and coffee farmers don’t take their small extra profit from the sales of certified beans and go purchase land to “preserve” (if anything along these lines, they’d plant more coffee, perhaps clearing land to do so). The land is already “saved,” no matter how many bags of coffee from these farms is purchased.

Further, the majority of the land (or “tropical forest”) this coffee purports to preserve (or “help preserve,” “protect,” or “save” — different terms and calculations are used on the page as well as the web page of the coffee itself), is not pristine forest or forest at all, it’s COFFEE! Some farms do include land set aside for conservation, but the bulk of certified land is planted in coffee under varying degrees of shade. As I write about here all the time, it’s better than sun coffee, but not as good as forest for biodiversity.

The ridiculousness of this claim is illustrated by playing along with Walmart’s math. What if every Walmart shopper bought one bag of Sam’s Choice RA certified coffee once a week for a year, a reasonable level of consumption? That’s 10,400,000,000 bags of coffee, resulting in 7,020,000 acres of land “preserved.”  (Let’s ignore the fact that RA certifies only a million acres of farmland worldwide — including all other crops they certify). The entire country of Brazil, the source of Sam’s Choice coffee, has about 2.3 million hectares (5,681,000 acres) planted in coffee. Look! In less than a year, Walmart shoppers can “preserve” the entire coffee production area of Brazil, the world’s largest producer of coffee!

You get the point.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the purchase of Rainforest Alliance certified coffee, from Walmart or anyplace else. I encourage it!  And arguably Walmart can expose more people to the concept of and issues around sustainable coffee than any other retailer in the world, which is terrific. I appreciate this effort at education, but abhor the obvious implication that each purchase contributes to the creation or true preservation of actual forested land. It’s misleading to consumers and does nothing to help those of us who know better to trust Walmart’s sustainability efforts.

Buying Sam’s Choice RA certified coffee doesn’t “save” or “preserve” land. It can encourage, through higher sales and more profit for the producing farms, other farms to become certified. This should result in improved environmental conditions on these farms, such as the addition of shade trees or upgraded water treatment methods — if the farms needed to make improvements to become certified, versus obtaining certification for existing sound practices.  This is a good thing. Why can’t they just say so?

Coffee regions

Coffee growing in Colombia

Some background
The marketing of Juan Valdez and “fine Colombian coffee” has been so pervasive for so long, if you ask the average consumer where coffee come from, and they may well say “Colombia.” The country produces about 10% of the world’s arabica coffee, second only to Brazil, with the current output around 12 million 60-kg bags. Ninety percent is exported.

Despite this large volume, coffee growing in Colombia is not characterized by huge plantations. Instead, there are nearly 600,000 producers, of which nearly all (96%) grow coffee on small plots of less than 5 ha. Nearly all represented by the National Federation of Coffee Growers (Federacion Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia, or FNC), the creator of Juan Valdez. This organization is extremely strong, and has managed to organize these tens of thousands of small producers, get their beans to mills and central processing points, and deliver fairly uniform, though often mediocre, coffee in large volumes. This is what has made Colombian coffee so popular and ubiquitous with the large corporate roasters.

Therefore, this profusion of many small farms mixing all their crops together has made it difficult to find sustainably-grown Colombian coffee, or coffee of very high quality. This is now changing. The FNC has entered the specialty coffee market. Small roasters are developing direct relationships with individual farmers or small cooperatives, seeking out exceptional lots. Since 2005, Colombia has participated in the Cup of Excellence. These efforts have made it easier for consumers to find great examples of the very pleasing coffees this country can produce.

Shade coffee in Colombia
Various sources [1,2,3] indicate that the proportion of coffee grown under traditional shade ranges from 16 to 40%. That means the bulk of it is grown under full sun, or sparse sun interspersed with other crops such as plantains and bananas. To be fair, there are some high-altitude areas in the country where clouds provide the shade, and planting coffee under a tree canopy would be counter-productive. Some of these farms preserve important forest fragments outside their coffee plots.

Rainforest Alliance now certifies nearly 200 5000 farms in Colombia covering 51,000 ha*. There are only three Bird-Friendly certified producers in Colombia; one is the widely available Mesa de los Santos (but check current producers, as they change when up for renewal). So it can still be a challenge to find eco-friendly, great-tasting Colombian coffee.

Birds and biodiversity in Colombia
A remarkable 1870 bird species are found in Colombia, a fifth of the world’s species in a country eight times smaller than the U.S. and more documented species than any other country on earth. While many species of North American migrants winter closer to home in Central America, a number of species make the long trip to South America. One of the most important is the Cerulean Warbler, which has been discussed in a number of other posts. Other species include American Redstart, Blackburnian Warbler (shown top right), Canada Warbler, Mourning Warbler (bottom right) Swainson’s Thrush, Prothonotary Warbler, Northern Waterthrush, and Bay-breasted Warbler.

In fact, individuals of all those species have been found to return to the exact same wintering areas in Colombia on successive years — including a Mourning Warbler and Swainson’s Thrush to a shade coffee farm in Antioquia. I will add that a Swainson’s Thrush banded at my study site in southern Michigan was found two months later near Bucaramanga, another coffee-growing region. This is amazing!

Birds are just an example of the enormous biodiversity of Colombia. There are 55,000 plant species (a third endemic), 697 amphibians (2nd most in the world), and 517 reptiles. Yet Colombian forests and rich diversity they contain are under threat. One major driver is the illegal farming of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine. Colombia is the world’s largest producer of coca.

Coca/cocaine and the coffee connection
Farmers grow coca because it provides more cash than any other crop. Since 2000, the U.S. has cooperated and helped fund a coca eradication program centered around aerial fumigation with the herbicide glyphosate (RoundUp, made by Monsanto, the folks that gave us Agent Orange). This non-selective herbicide kills all plants, including native species and food crops. Not only does it destroy vegetation, but it has resulted in farmers moving into more remote areas to grow coca, clearing primary forest to do so. Many other adverse environmental and health effects result from this ineffective practice.

When coffee prices dropped in the 1990s, many farmers turned to coca. Encouraging specialty coffee, with its corresponding higher prices and good stewardship of the land, is one tool to help reduce coca production and the deforestation and loss of biodiversity that goes with it. In fact, a recent report noted,

“The head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is urging comprehensive, large-scale and ecologically-friendly agriculture and forestry schemes in coca growing areas, after a new survey shows a ‘marked increase’ in cultivation in the Andean region.”

There are projects in Cauca and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta regions focused on replacing coca with coffee that have met with success. In future posts, we’ll explore the development of specialty coffees in Colombia, and take a look at what’s available and the roasters bringing these coffees to you.

*Updated figures from the 2012 report “Protecting Our Planet“, which outlines Rainforest Alliance’s 25 years of impacts.

[1] COLOMBIA: Working Toward a Sustainable Ecosystem. 2000.- “Ask Juan,” Colombian Specialty Coffees, National Federation of Coffee Growers.

[2] Colombia Coffee Sector Study. 2002. Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Econamico (CEDE) de la Universidad de los Andes. Daniele Giovannucci with Jose Leibovich, Diego Pizano, Gonzalo Paredes, Santiago Montenegro, Hector ArÁ©valo and Panos Varangis.

[3] Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. 2004. Colombia sub-global assessment report. Ecological function assessment in the Colombian Andean coffee region.

Photo of a Blackburnian Warbler by Gavan Watson; photo of Mourning Warbler by yours truly.

Certifications / Climate change / Coffee and the environment / Rainforest Alliance

Rainforest Alliance introduces carbon module

In my post “Coffee farms and carbon sequestration,” I discussed the potential of carbon credits in helping coffee farmers earn extra income, and provided some statistics and references on carbon sequestration on coffee farms in and other tropical agroforestry systems.

As it turns out, Rainforest Alliance (RA) will be adding a carbon module to their certification for farms (coffee, and presumably other crops they certify). This announcement was first made in May at their Sustainable Coffee Breakfast at the SCAA annual conference in Minneapolis. The details are not final, but here is what RA’s Gretchen Ruethling explained to me regarding RA’s past experience and future plans:

We are working with other organizations to help farmers get paid for providing environmental services such as storing carbon and protecting watersheds and biodiversity. The Rainforest Alliance is a registered verifier for leading carbon offset programs including the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance and the Chicago Climate Exchange. We have verified carbon offsets on coffee farms through projects organized by Plan Vivo in Mexico. We verified an ambitious project in Aceh, Indonesia developed by Fauna & Flora International that will reduce deforestation on 750,000 hectares of rainforest. We verified a reforestation project in the highly endangered Atlantic Forest of Brazil as a carbon offset for Jacques Vabre, a coffee brand in France. (That project is managed by a coalition of Brazilian NGOs and led by the Nature Conservancy.)

We are working to offer more incentives to coffee farmers to encourage them to plant more trees. One exciting idea is developing a system that would allow coffee companies to buy carbon from farmers along with their coffee beans — through the existing supply chains. Companies could pay a small carbon premium. In order for this to work, we need a simple, low-cost yet rigorous and highly credible method to estimate the carbon on a coffee farm and verify that it remains year after year. This could be done by auditing the carbon as part of the annual farm inspection by members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network.

I’m thrilled RA is pursuing this concept — it’s a win-win-win situation for the farmer, biodiversity, and the planet.

Certifications

What is the market share of eco-certified coffee?

Certified coffees (organic, Fair Trade, Bird-Friendly, Rainforest Alliance, Utz, and Starbucks C.A.F.E. Practices) make up only about 4% of world green coffee exports, or about 220,000 metric tons. The U.S. is a major importer of various types of certified coffee, which make up nearly 8% of green bean imports. Let’s take a quick look at the market share* and growth of the three certification labels that focus largely on ecological standards: organic, Rainforest Alliance, and Bird-Friendly.

Organic
North America imports around half of the world’s organic coffee. In 2006, this amounted to 30,000 metric tons, a 56% increase over 2005.  In 2007, sales reached $1 billion, with 38,000 metric tons representing a 29% increase from the previous year. Still, organic coffee is less than 3% of the total North American market. Farmers receive about a 20% premium (average $0.24/lb) over the C market commodity price of coffee. Nearly 80% of the Fair Trade coffee sold in the U.S. is also certified organic. All Bird-Friendly coffee (see below) is certifed organic.

Rainforest Alliance
As of late 2007, Rainforest Alliance (RA) had certified over 200,000 ha of coffee on nearly 17,000 farms; total production was around 40,000 metric tons. Their website currently states that 1.3% of the world’s coffee is RA-certified. The U.S. is the largest importer of RA-certified coffee, acquiring just over 40%, while Europe is not far behind. In 2006, RA-certified coffee was less than 1% of the total North American market, about 12,000 metric tons. RA is growing rapidly, with 100% average annual growth the last several years. RA does not specify a price premium, but farmers receive about 10 cents a pound over the C market price.

Bird-Friendly
Bird-Friendly is the shade certification of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC). As of May 2008, it certified 28 producers growing on 7200 ha. Production is less than 3100 metric tons. This is a very small market share, and only a relatively small portion of the total production is sold labeled as Bird-Friendly. In 2006 this was less than 200 metric tons out of 3600 produced. Farmers receive a premium between 5 and 10 cents a pound, on top of the premium for the organic certification (Bird-Friendly coffee must also be certified organic).

The graphic below (click to enlarge) is a shot of a slide from a talk I attended by SMBC’s Robert Rice at the SCAA annual meeting and gives some sense of relative production and overlap in a variety of certified coffees.

As the numbers indicate, though, if there was a circle on the diagram representing mainstream commercial coffee, it would dwarf those of the certified coffees. Sustainable coffees are still a niche market.

What drives the market? Interestingly, a 2001 survey of the North American specialty coffee industry asked coffee business owners to rate the importance of various factors to their buying/selling choices for sustainable coffee. The most important was quality, but next to last was consumer awareness. Author Daniele Giovannucci notes, “This is an interesting indication that consumer demand may not currently be the primary driving force behind the sustainable coffee market. There are indications that the industry itself has played the key role in developing sustainable coffee markets by first providing the supply.”

This doesn’t mean the coffee industry wouldn’t respond to consumer demand; I think it would only enhance market growth in sustainable coffee. Let’s grow those eco-certified coffee circles!

Update: Other more recent data on market share of certified coffees:

*Not all certified coffee gets sold as such – some may be blended with non-certified coffee, the buyer may be interested in other attributes besides the certification and purchases it without intending to market it as certified, or other reasons. The estimated figures are market share of coffee actually sold as certified, not the amount of certified coffee produced under each scheme.

Sources. I had the pleasure of attending a talk by poverty and agriculture expert Daniele Giovannucci at the SCAA meeting. He is the author of the sources of the information used in this post.

Giovannucci, D., Liu, P. and A. Byers. 2008. Adding value: certified coffee trade in North America. In Pascal Liu (ed.). Value-adding Standards in the North American Food Market – Trade Opportunities in Certified Products for Developing Countries. FAO, Rome.

Giovannucci, D. and A. Villalobos. 2007. The State of Organic Coffee: 2007 U.S. Update (PDF). CIMS: San Jose, Costa Rica.

Giovannucci, D. and F. J. Koekoek. 2003. The State of Sustainable Coffee: A study of twelve major markets. International Coffee Organization, International Institute for Sustainable Development and UNCTAD.

Giovannucci, D. 2001. Sustainable Coffee Survey of the North American Specialty Coffee Industry. Working paper commission by The Summit Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, Specialty Coffee Association of America, The World Bank.

Birds and other biodiversity / Know Your Coffee Birds series

Know your coffee birds: Blue-crowned Motmot

I’d like to inaugurate my “Know your coffee birds” series with the bird Coffee & Conservation uses to rate coffees (e.g., a “five star” coffee here is a “five motmot” coffee): the Blue-crowned Motmot (Momotus momota).

Motmots are a family of New World tropical birds related to kingfishers. Like kingfishers, they nest in burrows which they dig themselves into soil cliffs or road cuts; these burrows are five to up to 14 feet long, and winding. Most motmots are medium-sized (robin size or larger), and are sit-and-wait predators of large insects, small reptiles or mammals and similarly sized prey, along with a little fruit.

The Blue-crowned Motmot is the most widely distributed motmot, and is found from Mexico to Argentina in lowland forests, on up to 1300 meters. It’s fairly tolerant of somewhat disturbed habitats, and thus can be found in open woodlands and second-growth forest such as those found on shade coffee plantations.

Blue-crowned Motmots are about 42 cm long (17 in). Like other motmots, they have a unique spatulate tail. When the new tail feathers grow out, they have an appearance like most other long-tailed birds. But a portion of the lower section of the two center feathers have weakly-attached feather barbs, so these barbs fall off the shaft in short order. This creates a bare stretch of feather shaft, with a paddle-shaped tip at the end. There is evidence that male motmots with longer denuded sections are more attractive to females.

This is peculiar enough, but motmots also swing the tail like the pendulum on a clock, generally in the presence of predators. Despite their size, motmots are often difficult to see until they start wagging their tails. Drawing attention to themselves when a predator is near seems counter-intuitive, but this behavior actually serves to deter the types of predators most likely to go for a motmot: those that rely on stealth and ambush. In essence, a motmot is signalling, “Hey, I see you, and you can’t surprise me.” Ambush predators tend to abandon the hunt when they know they’ve been detected.

I’ve seen several species of motmots in the tropics, including Blue-crowned Motmots at Finca Hartmann. They are among my all-time favorite birds, and a fitting mascot for great sustainable coffee.

Look for more profiles of birds found on coffee farms in the coming months. Many will be species that you can find much closer to home.

Murphy, T. G. 2006. Predator-elicited visual signal: why the turquoise-browed motmot wag-displays its racketed tail. Behavioral Ecology 17:547-553.

Murphy, T. G. 2007. Dishonest preemptive pursuit-deterrent signal? Why the turquoise-browed motmot wags its tail before feeding nestlings. Animal Behaviour 73:965-970.

Murphy, T. G. 2007. Racketed tail of the male and female turquoise-browed motmot: male but not female tail length correlates with pairing success, performance, and reproductive success. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 61:911-918.

Photo of a Blue-crowned Motmot via Wikimedia Commons.

Fair and Direct Trade / Retail and specialty roasters

Counter Culture Coffee’s Direct Trade program

Counter Culture Coffee recently launched its Direct Trade program. It is a natural progression from their Source project, and is a robust example of similar models employed by other roasters, most notably Intelligentsia. Counter Culture is a pioneer, however, in that their Direct Trade coffees are certified by a third party (Quality Certification Services, paid for by Counter Culture).

Here are the standards:

  • Fair and sustainable prices. Counter Culture works with each farmer to determine their production costs and begins price negotiations accordingly. This is the beauty of a direct relationship: many farmers really don’t know how to determine or track their productions costs, and therefore accept pricing that may not realize a profit for themselves. A direct relationship like this Counter Culture model is a true partnership, with the roaster assisting the farmers in calculating, forecasting, and streamlining their production costs. The result: farmers make a good living, roasters have reliable sources of great coffee.Currently, CCC pays a minimum of $1.60/lb. for green coffee; this is expected to rise in 2009. There are also quality-based financial incentives paid to growers on top of this (see below), designed to encourage ecologically-responsible cultivation methods and sustained quality improvement over time.
  • Personal and direct communication. Counter Culture visits grower partners on a biennial basis, at minimum. CCC has an entire section on their web site devoted to posts on trips to origin.
  • Exceptional quality. Direct Trade coffees have scored at least 85 on a 100-pt. cup quality scale. The highest quality coffees are rewarded with higher prices paid to the grower.
  • 100% Transparency. All relevant financial information is is available to all parties — growers, buyers, seller, intermediaries, customers — always.

I think this is a superior model to that of Fair Trade certification in a number of ways. First, of course, is that FT certification only applies to small farmers organized into cooperatives, it is not available to family-owned farms or plantations or single producers. Farmers themselves also do not necessarily receive all or a large portion of any price premiums; this is decided by the cooperative. Second, FT pricing does not take into account any differences in cost of production or cost of living in different regions. Third, FT certification does not certify or verify relationships or communications between producers and roasters or retailer, they only certify the financial transactions between them. Finally, FT does not certify, reward, or incorporate quality into their standards.

Some of Counter Culture’s coffees are also Fair Trade certified, but not labeled as such. And not all Counter Culture coffees will be Direct Trade certified, as it takes some time to work with farmers to get to that level. But the sourcing and purchasing philosophy behind Direct Trade at Counter Culture applies to all their coffees. Congratulations to Counter Culture for this progressive move, which I hope is the future of all coffee sourcing!