Coffee and the environment

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.

Coffee and the environment

International Day for Biological Diversity

Today is International Day for Biological Diversity and the theme for this year is Biodiversity and Agriculture. The sponsor is the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty initiated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

This year’s theme highlights the importance of sustainable agriculture to the preservation of biodiversity. While agriculture contributes significantly to conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, it has also been a major driver of biodiversity loss primarily through land-use conversion, which is expected to remain the largest cause of biodiversity loss beyond 2010 to at least 2050. Agriculture also contributes to dwindling biodiversity through intensification of agricultural production systems, excessive chemical and water use, nutrient loading, and pollution — all issues relevant to technified sun coffee production.

The Santa Marta Sabrewing (Campylopterus phainopeplus) is an endangered hummingbird that is only found in the Santa Marta mountains of northeast Colombia. In the dry season, it is often found in shade coffee plantations, but the number of shade farms is decreasing, and along with them, birds and other wildlife that depend on them.

This species is included in the recently released 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the authoritative global database of the world’s most vulnerable species. You can help by making a donation to support the IUCN’s conservation efforts, or the work of one of its partners, BirdLife International.

And, as always, drink sustainably-grown coffee.

Coffee and the environment / Corporate coffee

Sara Lee’s "sustainable" coffee

Another one of the Big Four multinational roasters is jumping on the green bandwagon. Sara Lee’s foodservice division is introducing its “Good Origin” line in the U.S. This line of six coffees will UTZ Certified (formerly Utz Kapeh). Sara Lee stated:

“Sustainability is the goal of protecting, preserving and improving the social, economic and environmental states of coffee producing communities. … We’re partnering with UTZ CERTIFIED coffee, the most credible and comprehensive certification program that supports these sustainable goals.”

With this move, Sara Lee says it is showing its commitment to “sustainable quality” by doubling its purchase of sustainable certified coffee to 20,000 tons in 2008.

This represents just a tiny fraction of Sara Lee’s coffee purchases
According to the International Coffee Organization, world production for the years 2002-2006 averaged right around 7 million metric tons per year. Not all is exported from producing countries; the export figure is about 5.3 million metric tons. Although exact market share is considered a “trade secret” and hard to come by, Oxfam indicated that Sara Lee buys about 10% of the coffee on the world market. Even using the lower 5.3 million ton figure, the 20,000 tons of certified coffee Sara Lee plans on purchasing will be less than 4% of their total annual procurement.

The statement that UTZ is the most credible and comprehensive certification program is just false.
The most comprehensive and credible program for “protecting, preserving and improving” the environment is the Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certification, which requires organic certification and has other stringent criteria. I wrote an entire post describing how the UTZ environmental criteria are the weakest of all the major certifications.

The most credible and comprehensive certification program aimed at improving social and economic conditions is Fair Trade. The UTZ certification program has no price minimums or guarantees for producers; it has been criticized as “Fair Trade lite” precisely because big buyers are using it as a cheaper way to tap into the ethical consumer market.

On the bright side
This is not to say UTZ certification isn’t worthwhile. The program emphasizes recordkeeping and traceability. Although the Good Origin blends have indeterminate names like Terrenos Gemelos and Tres Joyas, consumers will be able to input a source code from the front of a coffee bag and go to the Good Origin web site to identify the origin of the coffee. Sort of. You’ll get sent to the one of the UTZ producers pages, which provide general information but not many specifics (especially on growing conditions) for the cooperative or farm.

Nonetheless, that consumers can get even this much information about coffee origins from one of the Big Four is notable. As we learned some time ago, these corporations don’t actually know themselves where all their coffee comes from! Because of the huge volumes of coffee they purchase, they have networks of buyers and middlemen; traceability is a nightmare.

Do I prefer that the Big Four buy at least some coffee from some sort of “sustainable” source? Yes. But I do not believe in supporting corporations that do far more harm than good. It’s like giving a free pass to a drug dealer because he built a health clinic in his hometown, while pushing dope in front of the local school. And why should I reward a company for making a marginal effort at doing what it should be doing, being an ethical, responsible corporate citizen?

As long as consumers demand and continue to buy cheap, mass produced coffee, the Big Four will continue to obtain it from whomever they can. They’ll do the least expensive thing they can — such as buying a tiny fraction of their coffee under a certification scheme that costs them the least amount of money and effort — in order not to lose the consumers that have tried to wake up and smell the evils of unsustainable coffee. Don’t be fooled.

Climate change / Coffee and the environment

Coffee farms and carbon sequestration

In my post, “Why certifying shade coffee is so complex,” I ended with a comment regarding the upside-down nature of shade (or organic) certification. That is, the burden of certification costs are on the producers who are doing the right thing, rather than on the producers who are damaging the environment. Small producers, who are more likely to preserve forests and grow coffee under diverse shade (both of which enhance biodiversity) and are less likely to use chemicals, are the least able to afford certification.

I’ve been ruminating about this ever since, and wondered if some sort of “cap and trade” system might be helpful. What I had in mind were “credits” for forest or habitat preservation and enhancement small eco-friendly farms could “sell” to naughty sun coffee growers. This was inspired by a similar system: carbon credits. So while I let this idea simmer, it’s worthwhile to briefly discuss the role of carbon credits themselves, and their potential to generate income for farmers practicing sustainable agriculture, including shade coffee.

Quick primer on terrestrial carbon sequestration
Trees (and other plants) sequester carbon by removing it from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and incorporating into their tissues. Existing forests are carbon sinks (or ”carbon storage units”) and contain over half of the terrestrial carbon in the world. Carbon remains stored in plant tissues until released, in this case most often by burning and decomposition.  Agroforestry systems, including shade coffee farms, that preserve forest are therefore acting as carbon sinks.

Reforestation also contributes to the sequestration of carbon, although the rate in which carbon is taken up and stored by plants varies among species, as well as where they are grown and if and how they are managed. This means that sun coffee farms converted to shade in which the appropriate tree species are planted and managed have the potential to effectively sequester carbon.

Carbon is also stored in leaf litter and other organic matter in the soil. Sustainable coffee agrosystems frequently rely on fallen leaves from their shade trees as well as the application of coffee skins and other organic matter for soil moisture retention and fertilization, providing another means in which these farms can contribute to carbon sequestration.

How much carbon can coffee farms store?
Although measuring carbon storage is difficult due to the multiple variables involved (even plots in the same region with similar tree species composition can vary in their storage capacity depending on microclimate, soil types, etc.), recent research has revealed some encouraging facts. A few examples:

  • In the tropics, potential carbon sequestration rates for smallholder, sustainable agroforestry systems range from 1.5 to 3.5 megagrams (tonnes) per hectare per year, or 2.1 billion megagrams annually worldwide.
  • It has been estimated that each hectare of sustainable agroforestry in the tropics could potentially offset 5 to 20 ha of deforestation.
  • Models have estimated a 5-year-old coffee farm shaded with two common Latin American tree species (Erythrina poeppigiana and Cordia alliodora) could sequester 5.3 megagrams per hectare.
  • Soil carbon stocks in shade coffee were 60% of that expected in primary forest in Sumatra, versus 45% for sun coffee.
  • In El Salvador, carbon sequestration values for various types of shade coffee management were estimated (in tons per ha per year): 174 for rustic shade to 77 for shade monoculture.
  • A study of carbon stocks in Costa Rican coffee farms calculated aerial (above ground) carbon stocks ranging from 11 megagrams per ha for simple shade (one heavily pruned shade species) to nearly 32 for diverse shade.
  • Using these figures, a farmer with 10 ha in diversified shade coffee could receive a one-time $3000 payment (based on previously carbon transactions for the country), as well as a reduction in expenses from chemical inputs and have timber and fruit for additional income. The payment is over three times greater than would be obtained for the carbon stocks in simple shade coffee systems.

The non-profit TechnoServe is exploring the use of carbon credit trading for promoting sustainable agroforestry, using a Guatemalan coffee cooperative (more here). Small holders in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico, are gaining access to carbon credit funds to pay for sustainable agroforestry there, where a great deal of coffee is grown (more here).

It appears sustainable coffee agroforestry can play a role in helping to mitigate global climate change through carbon sequestration, and in the process also provide additional income and further incentive to growing shade coffee. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing much more about this in the future.

More reading, including sources for the figures above:

  • Smallholder agroforestry projects: Potential for carbon sequestration and poverty alleviation. O. J. Cacho, G. R. Marshall, and M. Milne. 2003.  ESA Working Paper No. 03-06. Agricultural and Development Economics Division, The Food and Agriculture Organizationof the United Nations.
  • Carbon sequestration in tropical and temperate agroforestry systems: a review with examples from Costa Rica and southern Canada. M. Oelbermann, R. P. Voroney, and A. M. Gordon. 2004. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 104: 359-377.
  • Carbon sequestration: An underexploited environmental benefit of agroforestry systems. F. Montagnini and P. K. R. Nair. 2004. Agroforestry Systems 61:281-295.
  • Carbon stock assessment for a forest-to-coffee conversion landscape in Sumber-Jaya (Lampung, Indonesia): from allometric equations to land use change analysis. M. van Noordwijk, S. Rahayu, K. Hairiah, Y. C. Wulan, A. Farida, and. B. Verbist. 2002. Science in China (PDF here).
  • Carbon sequestration in coffee agroforestry plantations of Central America. 21st International Conference on Coffee Science, 2006.
  • Sustainability in the coffee sector: exploring opportunities for international cooperation. U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. 2003. (PDF here)
  • Carbon Storage in Coffee Agroecosystems of Southern Costa Rica: Potential Applications for the Clean Development Mechanism. C. Polzot. 2004. M.S. thesis, York University, Toronto.  Includes excellent cited information on the mechanisms of carbon sequestration in agroforestry systems, and Costa Rica’s Payment for Environmental Services programs.