JulieCraves

Retail and specialty roasters

National Geographic Terra Firma coffee

(Note: As of 2013 it appears that this coffee has been discontinued.)

The National Geographic Society is getting into the coffee business. They are rolling out a line of specialty-grade coffees called “Terra Firma.” They are all be single-origin coffees, from six countries: Brazil, Ethiopia, Sumatra, Kenya, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Net proceeds from Terra Firma coffee will support programs of the Society. Initially, it will only be available in the U.S., to both retail and food service users.

It’s not shade coffee
According to their press release, this coffee is “crafted to emphasize environmental and cultural sustainability in coffee-farming communities.” Further motivation apparently stemmed from results of a survey NatGeo contracted which indicated “being environmentally friendly” influenced the purchasing decisions of a majority of American. Yet although the coffees will be Fair Trade certified, none are certified organic or shade grown (Rainforest Alliance or Smithsonian Bird-Friendly). You’ll have to wait for one of those; there are plans to release an organic or Rainforest Alliance certified coffee in the future.

With all of Nat Geo’s emphasis on the environment, not to mention their long commitment to science, the lack of organic and/or shade certification for the Terra Firma coffees is bound to stick in the craw of educated consumers. The press release states that Fair Trade certification “guarantees…environmental stewardship,” which it does not.

On the plus side, at least we know who is roasting their coffee.
The Terra Firma coffee will be sourced and roasted by the Brazilian firm Café Bom Dia. Americans perhaps best know them as the source of the coffee sold at Sam’s Club and WalMart under the Member’s Mark and Marques de Paiva brands.

Since I last wrote about Café Bom Dia, their web site has had an overhaul and there is additional information about their sustainability efforts, which are certainly the most impressive of any of the large coffee roasters. Their main roasting facility is in Varginha, Minas Gerias, Brazil, where the roasters run on biomass (“sustainably forested eucalyptus” and wood from coffee trees taken out of production). This facility has zero net carbon emissions and is certified CarbonNeutral. This is where the Terra Firma coffee will be roasted.

Specific sources
Café Bom Dia owns and manages farms in Brazil, but also has a network of 4800 producers in all the Terra Firma countries of origin except for Kenya, which will be a new relationship for Café Bom Dia. Because large plantations and family-owned farms do not qualify for Fair Trade status, the Brazilian beans will not come from Café om Dia farms, but from Fair Trade cooperatives in southern Minas Gerias. The specific sources for the beans from other origins will depend on harvests and availability — the usual criteria for large-volume efforts that depend on a particular flavor profile and price point. I was told by that for this initial line of Fair Trade coffees, source cooperatives will not be chosen specifically for their environmental practices.

National Geographic drops the ball
I obviously have a preference for (and encourage people to seek out) coffee in which the specific origins — and therefore growing methods — can be easily traced and explored. In my opinion, the problem with the Terra Firma coffee isn’t that NatGeo partnered with Café Bom Dia. In fact, I commend Café Bom Dia for always being responsive and straightforward with me, and for what I believe to be a more sincere effort to run an eco-friendly business than any other large roaster. Café Bom Dia can and does source organic and Rainforest Alliance certified coffees — it’s what they sell at Sam’s Clubs and WalMart, where their Rainforest Alliance coffees are even 100% certified beans. What is remarkable is National Geographic did not choose these sustainable coffees for their initial offerings.

In preparing this post, I first wrote to Café  Bom Dia with questions about this choice. Café Bom Dia provided much of the information above, including the fact that organic or RA certified selections were planned for the future. I followed up with NatGeo specifically asking about the choice not to initially include more eco-friendly selections. Here is their reply:

While you do raise some interesting questions, we have to defer to Café Bom Dia on the finer points of their coffee production methods.

In keeping with our mission to “inspire people to care about the planet,” we do our best to promote sustainability through our mission-oriented projects, editorial endeavors and licensed products. There are many factors that are taken into account when choosing a new partner: we chose Café Bom Dia because of the company’s commitment to sustainability and its pedigree as a certified Fair Trade supplier.

In recent years, NatGeo has licensed their brand on a wide range of disparate products, including digital music, apparel, and home furniture. Given the serious impacts of coffee growing on the environment, coffee seems like a better fit than many of the other items that display the NatGeo logo. It presents a fantastic educational opportunity — the power of National Geographic to inform consumers about coffee sustainability issues is tremendous. The Society has 8.5 million members, but its reach and respect go far beyond those numbers. It would have sent a strong message if they had chosen to market and promote certified, eco-friendly coffees. Actually, the fact that they did not sends an equally strong one.

Research on coffee growing

Coffee-related deforestation in Sumatra

Three decades of deforestation in southwest Sumatra: effects of coffee prices, law enforcement and rural poverty. 2009. D. L. A. Gaveau, M. Linkie, Suyadi, P. Levang, and N. Leader-Williams. Biological Conservation 142:597-605 .

I’ve written in the past about Sumatra’s problems with illegal coffee growing, particularly in Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park. A 2007 World Wildlife Fund investigation revealed that the robusta coffee grown illegally in the park was threatening the integrity of tiger, elephant, and rhino habitat and was purchased by such large companies as Kraft and Nestlé. A year later, I posted an update that noted Nestlé was still buying coffee originating in the park.

This study revisited this on-going situation, examining how deforestation can be curbed by law enforcement efforts, and how deforestation rates are driven by coffee prices.

Over the last 34 years, the main driver of deforestation in and around the park has been production of low-grade robusta coffee, the kind used in cheap grocery store blends and instant brands. In 2005, more than 85% of the forested areas in the park that had been converted to agriculture was planted with coffee, and the yield was a remarkable 4% of Indonesia’s entire annual robusta production.

The was a complex interplay of changing laws, local coffee prices tied to currency valuation, and low wages in the coffee-growing regions that drove the coffee-related deforestation, nicely analyzed by the authors. Active law enforcement did curtail the encroachment in the park in the 1980s. It has rebounded since the late 1990s; the departure of President Suharto has seen a decline in the emphasis on law enforcement, and a change in the governing philosophy towards conservation and rural workers, explain the authors.

The authors did not give a lot of cause for optimism that the coffee-related deforestation can be easily addressed. For example, eco-certification has been suggested to help provide premiums to farmers that grow coffee outside of the park under sustainable guidelines. But according to the authors, buyers and roasters are unwilling to manage the costs of certification. I doubt that the premiums wouldn’t be sufficient to discourage farming inside park boundaries (consumers would be unwilling to absorb additional costs for low-quality robusta).

Ultimately the authors suggested that prohibiting local use of the park would have to be reconsidered, including, perhaps, some type of sustainable-use policy and community conservation projects.

Photo of a Sumatran Tiger by g-na under a Creative Commons license.

Certifications / Organic coffee

Organic certifiers incorporating shade criteria

At least two organizations providing coffee certification services have incorporated shade criteria into their organic certification standards. Here is a bit about them, and some pros and cons.

Although requirements for organic labeling are usually established by national governments, independent agencies are licensed to provide inspection and certification services to producers. Two such organizations are OCIA International and Certimex (which operates only in Mexico). Both of these certifiers have personnel who are also trained in shade certification, because they are authorized by Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center to perform inspection for their Bird-Friendly certification. (Rainforest Alliance uses Sustainable Farm Certification, Intl., their own subsidiary).

Certimex

Certimex is using shade criteria as a requirement for organic certification.Great idea, except that the criteria is vague and undefined (“should grow under diversified shade” [1]). There is nothing wrong per se about adding in this type of wording, and anything that encourages some sort of shade preservation or restoration is a positive move. However,it offers no concrete assurance that compliance (which isn’t measurable) really does anything to preserve shade or biodiversity. We’ll have to see were Certimex goes with this.

OCIA

OCIA offers a separate certification for organic/shade coffee. The standards are more specific and provide quantifiable benchmarks that are similar to, but not as broad, as Smithsonian Bird-Friendly and Rainforest Alliance. They were, in fact, developed in cooperation with Smithsonian. I was able to obtain the 2008 OCIA International Certification Standards. Here are the ones specific to shade:

  • Rustic or traditional polyculture encouraged.
  • 40% canopy cover required.
  • Not more than 20% of shade trees can be non-native species.
  • Not more than 50% of the canopy can be made up of Inga species.
  • Shade must comprise at least ten tree species that are not Inga, Erythrina, Gliricidia sepium, or Grevillea robusta [Erythrina and Gliricidia are deciduous; they lose
    their leaves during the dry season (our winter), at a time when canopy
    cover is extremely important for both migrant and resident birds.  Grevillea robusta is not native to Latin America].
  • A single species of Inga cannot comprise greater than 50% of the trees in the production are.

These criteria, along with others for vegetation management and the organic criteria themselves, are quantifiable habitat-targeted criteria, not the sort of general or intangible environmental standards used by Fair Trade or Utz Certified.

The future of combined environmental criteria

Integrating shade criteria into existing organic criteria to create an “organic +” category is something that has been discussed for quite some time as an option to help achieve some sort of “environmental seal” for coffee [2,3]. In that sense, the OCIA standards are a positive move.

On the other hand, unless there is coordination among organic certifiers to use uniform (and scientifically sound/biologically relevant) standards, this runs the risk of just adding another label to a bag of coffee, creating consumer confusion, fatigue, or even distrust. In this case, so far as I know, OCIA is not actually adding another label or designation to the coffee. This is problematic to me. A roaster could legitimately market this coffee as shade-grown, but a consumer would have little or no clue as to what standards are being met, since there is no designation or explanation on the OCIA web site.

Ultimately, an “eco-friendly” type of seal that incorporates organic and shade standards will also somehow have to be regionally sensitive. In some regions of Latin America, coffee is grown at high altitudes where clouds provide shade and additional tree cover would be counter-productive, or is grown in areas (like the Brazilian cerrado) that wasn’t forested to begin with. Standards for preservation of native habitat in these areas would be more appropriate. Even in forested areas, different parts of the world will require different shade criteria.

[1] Dietsch, T., and S. M.. Philpott. 2008. Linking consumers to sustainability: incorporating science into eco-friendly certification. Globalizations 5:247-258.

[2] Commission for Environmental Cooperation and TerraChoice Environmental Services. 2004. Environmental and other labeling of coffee, the role of mutual recognition, supporting cooperative action. Sustainable Commodity Initiative, International Institute for Sustainable Development and United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

[3] Rice, P. and J. McLean. 1999. Sustainable Coffee at the Crossroads. Consumer’s Choice Council.

Birds and other biodiversity / Know Your Coffee Birds series

Know your coffee birds: Emerald Toucanet

The Emerald Toucanet (Aulacorhynchus prasinus) is the most widely distributed member of the toucan family. It can be found from Mexico through Central America south to Bolivia. As might be expected for a species with such as broad geographic range, there are many subspecies — at least 17. They vary by throat color, facial pattern, and the color and pattern of the bill. Some researchers believe that some of these may actually be separate species, with perhaps four different species in Central America, and at least three in South America.

Emerald Toucanets are, as the name implies, smaller than toucans, at a little over a foot long. The sexes look alike, although males have slightly larger bills than females. Nobody is positive why this difference exists, as one study discovered it is not related to differences in diet or foraging (which is often the case when both sexes share territories year round). These toucanets nest in well-concealed tree hollows, and live in small flocks in the non-breeding season. They are found in open woodlands, including shade coffee plantations, from around 900 to over 3000 meters.

While they eat big insects and small lizards, fruit forms a large part of the diet of Emerald Toucanets. Therefore they are important dispersers of the seeds of tropical trees and shrubs. They have large feeding territories, so they encounter many species of trees, up to 47 at one Costa Rican study site alone. Although they are the smallest members of the toucan family, they’ll even consume large-seeded fruits, repeatedly regurgitating and reswallowing a fruit until the seed separates from the pulp and can be discarded. For the most part, seeds pass through the digestive system, though, and it’s been determined that those have a higher germination rate than seeds that merely drop to the ground in the fruit. All these factors make Emerald Toucanets an integral part of tropical forest ecosystems.

Because this species favors open forest habitats and forages in the mid-canopy, shade coffee farms are suitable habitat for them — and likely quite important in regions where other deforestation is high. Counter Culture Coffee chose the Emerald Toucanet for the new label of its Cafe San Ramon coffee because it is found at one of the main suppliers of these beans: Finca Esperanza Verde in the Matagalpa region of Nicaragua. In fact, when Counter Culture was redesigning the label and asked for a recommendation, I suggested this species (and the subspecies on the label is the correct one!). Just to keep myself honest, I’ll will be at Finca Esperanza Verde this week doing some bird surveys and bird banding, and hope to see a few Emerald Toucanets in the process.

Credits and references

Top photo of a “Blue-throated” Emerald Toucanet in Costa Rica by Laura Erickson; used with permission. Middle photo of the nominate form of Emerald Toucanet, in Honduras, by Brian Gratwicke, under a Creative Commons license.

Puebla-Olivares, F., E. Bonaccorso, A. E. de los Monteros, K. E. Omland, J. E. Llorente-Bousquets, A. T. Peterson, and A. G.
Navarro-Siguenza. 2008. Speciation in the Emerald Toucanet (Aulacorhynchus prasinus) complex. Auk 125:39-50.  For an excellent discussion of this paper and the taxonomy of Emerald Toucanets, see Nick Sly’s blog posts on the topic.

Riley, C. M. and K. G. Smith. 1992. Sexual dimorphism and foraging behavior of Emerald Toucanets Aulacorhynchus prasinus in Costa Rica. Ornis Scandinavica 23:459-466.

Wenny, D. May 2000. Seed dispersal, seed predation, and seedling recruitment of a newtropical montane tree. Ecological Monographs / Ecological Society of America, 70 (2): 331-351.

Wheelwright, N. T. 1991. How long do fruit-eating birds stay in the plants where they feed? Biotropica 23:29-40.

Wagner, H. O. 1944. Notes on the life history of the Emerald Toucanet. Wilson Bulletin 56:65-76.