March 2010

Certifications / Rainforest Alliance

Rainforest Alliance announces growth in certified coffee

In December, I reported on the 2008 global market statistics for Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC)  Bird-Friendly-certified coffee. For the 2007-2008 crop year, 2700 metric tons (6 million pounds) of Bird-Friendly certified coffee was produced. This certification is at the farm level, with 1400 farms and 5000 ha (12,000 acres) under certification.

At the time, comparable numbers for Rainforest Alliance (RA)-certified coffee for 2008 totaled 62,296 metric tons (137 million pounds), up from around 40,000 metric tons (89 million pounds) in late 2007. As of late 2007, RA had 200,000 ha of coffee on nearly 17,000 farms.

Farmers typically receive a price premium of 5 to 10 cents per pound of Bird-Friendly-certified coffee on top of the premium they receive from their organic certification (a requirement for Bird-Friendly certification).

RA has announced figures for 2009. Production of RA-certified coffee was 168,114 metric tones (370 million pounds), an increase of 36% from 2008.  As of December 2009, there were 27,610 Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee farms around the world with 305,383 ha (754,618 acres) of land under certification (not all in production…this represents all the land on certified farms). I believe this represents 22 countries. Nine were added this year including India, Kenya, Uganda, the United States, Vietnam and Zambia.

Note that production volumes do not mean all the coffee grown under certified conditions was sold as such. Certified coffee may be blended with non-certified coffee, or the buyer may be interested in other attributes besides the certification and purchases it without intending to market it as certified, to give just a couple of examples.

However, RA indicated that their sales of certified beans grew by 41% in 2009, and that since 2003, the supply of RA-certified coffee has grown by an average of 64% annually with sales increasing by an average of 77% a year over the same period.

RA states that farmers receive an average price premium of $0.11 per pound of coffee.

Retail and specialty roasters / Starbucks

Starbucks news

Some recent sustainability-related news regarding Starbucks:

  • Starbucks has a new Conservation International-branded loyalty card. Every time a customer uses a CI Starbucks card from now through the end of 2010, five cents will go to Conservation International for forest preservation. Starbucks cards are re-loadable cards used for purchases at their stores; registered cards earn rewards. These cards are only available in U.S. stores, but I presume that, like other cards, can be used at any store worldwide.Conservation International has been partnered with Starbucks for over a decade. They worked together to develop Starbucks’ Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices coffee sourcing guidelines and created a funding mechanism to address climate change in coffee growing regions. You can read more about their project that led to Starbucks Organic Shade Grown Mexico coffee variety here. CI’s Charity Navigator profile here.
  • Starbucks has become a sponsor of the Betacup challenge, which is looking for a way to reduce the waste from the 58 million paper coffee cups that are thrown away annually. The company will furnish the $20,000 of prize money. Small potatoes for Starbucks, but they have their own cup-related initiatives (see below) and cups are not a huge part of the company’s environmental footprint. Starbucks has already committed to making all of its cups recyclable or reusable in the next five years (including their plastic beverage cups), part of a suite of sustainability issues in their Shared Planet program. After all, it’s up to the consumer to reuse, recycle, or bring their own mug.
  • A Starbucks store in France won a sustainable retail design award. This store was the first international store that went for LEED-certification, indicating building sustainability. The company plans to have all its new stores LEED-certified. It also has a LEED-certified roasting facility, and the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle is the oldest and largest building to get LEED certification.

Starbucks cup photo by Josh Semans under a Creative Commons License.

Coffee news and miscellany

Another endangered coffee relative

The genus Coffea has over 100 species other than the two commonly cultivated ones, Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (robusta). New species are still being described, and over 70% of the species in this genus are threatened with extinction. There are other close relatives to Coffea, some of which are also extremely rare.

In honor of 2010 being the International Year of Biodiversity, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is featuring a different endangered species every day. This week one of the species was a coffee relative.

Café marron (Ramosmania rodriguesii) exists in the wild as a single plant on the island of Rodrigues, part of the Mauritius islands in the southwest Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. It is surrounded by four fences. Cuttings are being propagated for a re-introduction program on to a nature reserve — the only hope in an island nation which has been nearly completely deforested. Success is not guaranteed, however. Not only is the in-vitro propagation process difficult, it sounds like the species faces problems even if it were to be re-established. The species account at the web site of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (UK), which is leading the conservation effort, notes,

“As with much of Rodrigues’ native vegetation, it was probably a combination of introduced herbivores, invasive alien plants and habitat loss that devastated the Café marron population. Indeed, goats had reduced the remaining wild specimen to a small, half-eaten shrub when it was first discovered. Owing to the unprecedented level of scientific interest that surrounded the little plant in the aftermath of its re-discovery [in 1980], local people became convinced of the plant’s medicinal properties. Consequently, there was a period before the erection of multiple fences and even the installation of a guard, when people were intent on removing branches, twigs and leaves from the hapless plant.”

There is only one other species in the genus Ramosmania and it is also critically endangered.

Virtual hat tip to the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

Certifications / Retail and specialty roasters / Smithsonian Bird-Friendly

Certified Bird-Friendly coffee

I have a rotating list of recommended coffee roasters and retailers at the bottom of this page. They are all sources of sustainably-grown coffee, with online ordering available. These roasters have been chosen based on criteria which I’ve outlined in this post. Many of them carry certified organic, Rainforest Alliance, or Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) Bird-Friendly® (BF) coffee, some do not. There are many reasons why coffee from farms with excellent environmental practices are not certified, and why many coffee roasters cannot afford to carry only certified coffees.

However, I understand some consumers prefer to buy only certified coffee. SMBC has the strongest shade/biodiversity criteria by far, so I have compiled this list of online sources of Bird Friendly® (BF)-certified coffee. I tried to find sources that regularly offered at least two varieties of BF-certified coffee, but remember that coffee is seasonal and there are not many certified farms, so availability may fluctuate. Be sure to check that the offering says it is BF-certified.

You can search for a retailer on the SMBC web site, and you can also verify that the source/farm listed is really a BF-certified farm with a look-up on the SMBC web site.