Birds and other biodiversity / Certifications / Research on coffee growing

Research: Biodiversity, yield, and certification

Perfecto, I., J. Vandermeer, A. Mas, and L. Soto Pinto. 2005.  Biodiversity, yield, and shade coffee certification.  Ecological Economics 54:435-446.

The more complex overstory (and thus shade) in a coffee plantation, the higher the diversity.  However, the more shade, the lower the yield (although the relationship is not strictly linear), as coffee grows best in about 35-60% shade.  Therefore, farmers have to be compensated for the lower yields if they preserve shade and biodiversity.  Since a switch to organic farming typically increases yield, while a switch to more shade-dense farming decreases yield, the premiums paid to farmers for growing certified shade coffee must be higher than those for certified organic coffee.

This paper outlines the factors and decisions that have to be taken into account to determine best way to define certification criteria that will effectively preserve biodiversity while keeping yields high enough so that financial premiums paid to farmers are not so high as to discourage consumption. Of course, not all premiums have to be paid by consumers; aid and conservation organizations can absorb some of the costs.  And the authors seem to agree with others that linking shade-grown certification with Fair Trade and organic certification could be effective as long as the premiums are high enough to offset reductions in yield.

Coffee news and miscellany

NYT article on travel in Colombia's coffee areas

Today’s New York Times travel section had an article on touring Colombia’s Coffee Trail, the area to the west of Bogota known as Eje Cafetero. It talks about how one can stay at various fincas and haciendas, with part of the attraction being seeing how coffee is grown and processed.  Nowhere did it mention anything regarding biodiversity and coffee, or the level of technification of plantations in the area.  A photo of one of the visited plantations, Finca el Balso, showed what appeared to be sun-grown coffee. Colombia has one of the highest percentages of sun coffee, nearly 70%.

The Eje Cafetero region is considered a biodiversity hotspot, and one of the focus areas of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Colombia program. Conservation International has also done work in coffee-growing regions in Colombia, most notably in partnership with Starbucks. 

The article also notes that it’s difficult to get a good cup of coffee in Colombia!

Corporate coffee

The Coffee Crisis

The “coffee crisis” inevitably comes up in any talk of the coffee industry, especially Fair Trade issues. Here’s a summary of what it’s all about.

Prior to 1989, coffee prices were controlled by a cartel, much like OPEC for oil. The International Coffee Agreement (ICA) imposed quotas and controlled prices between major coffee producing and consuming countries. This resulted in fairly stable prices for coffee (known as the “C” price on the commodity market) of between US$1 and $1.50 a pound.

The ICA was renegotiated every five years by member countries. In 1989, the ICA collapsed when it was not renewed. In part this was due to a lack of support by the U.S., which had a great deal of power as the largest importing member nation. The U.S. had less political motivation to help major producing nations. Further, the Reagan administration was strongly free market and opposed the ICA on those grounds. These factors played a key role in the demise of the ICA.

Under the free market, prices plummeted, down to $0.49 per pound in 1992. Remember that this is the commodity price, and the farmers themselves receive only a fraction of the “C” price; in this case far below production costs.

Small farmers are extremely vulnerable to this market volatility. Experiencing up to a 70% drop in their incomes, many were devastated. Many abandoned their land, migrated north, or cleared their land for more profitable crops, including drugs. Child malnutrition climbed.

Although the initial price crash was an immediate response to the disintegration of the ICA, another cause contributed to subsequent crashes and sustained low coffee prices: oversupply. World development banks, promoting export-led development as a way to decrease poverty, funded increased production in many nations, most notably Vietnam. This country increased production over 1100% in the decade beginning in 1991. In addition to the development organizations, multinational corporations played a large role encouraging an increased coffee supply. They are typically known as the “big four” — Nestlé, Proctor & Gamble, Kraft, and Sara Lee (here are the brands these companies owned at the time of this post).

Much of this coffee glut was cheaper robusta beans (Coffea canephora). Because they are bitter and considered low-quality, robusta has historically only been used as filler in blends or in cheap coffee. Now methods have been developed by the large coffee corporations to process green robusta beans to make them more palatable. These companies now use a much higher percentage of robusta in their coffees rather than buying arabica from smaller growers in Latin America, where production costs are much higher than in Vietnam. In this way, the oversupply of robusta also depressed arabica prices.

The big four are making tremendous profits while lowering the quality of the world’s coffee. Over ten years, the profit retained by coffee-producing nations went from about 30 percent of the purchase price to 8 percent.

The investments made by these corporations in the growing of cheap coffee and the development of a process in which to make it drinkable are important factors in precipitating the coffee crisis.  An excellent, highly recommended article from Fortune magazine notes,

“Of course, without a market for cheap, low-grade robusta, there would never have been a coffee boom in Vietnam. And that’s exactly what the Big Four, along with other large European roasters, provided. They took advantage of new steam-cleaning technology to eliminate the coffee’s harsh flavor. They introduced flavored coffee — hazelnut, Irish cream–to disguise robusta’s inferior taste.”

A very good overview of the coffee crisis is over at CoffeeGeek, with recommendations for consumers.  It also touches on another aspect of the crisis, which is that higher quality coffee beans are becoming rarer, because the small farmers that grow it cannot compete and are going out of business.  As the Fortune article says,

“But the short-term economic advantages of robusta are overshadowed by long-term costs — for growers, drinkers, even the Big Four themselves. In the past ten years, as the global coffee market swelled from $30 billion to $70 billion, the revenues of growers have dwindled. Coffee drinkers, meanwhile, have had to contend with declining quality: The java at your local grocery store or deli now contains more robusta, and gourmet purveyors, which rely exclusively on the high-quality arabica growers in Latin America and Africa most damaged by the crisis, are having a tougher time sourcing beans. When quality drops, people tend to drink less coffee.”

The International Coffee Organization has proposed destroying the worst (lowest quality) 5% of the crop, helping to alleviate the surplus.  The big four are opposed to this plan.

More information:

Photo of Colombian coffee farmers by, ironically, Nestlé, under a Creative Commons license.

Certifications / Coffee and the environment

Is promoting shade-grown coffee really a good conservation strategy?

In 2003, a number of important researchers debated the conservation value of promoting shade-grown coffee in the pages of the journal Conservation Biology.

First Rappole et al. [1] wrote that if the result of promoting shade coffee resulted in the conversion of sun coffee to shade coffee, they would have no qualms about the whole shade coffee campaign.  However, they felt that the more likely outcome of the added incentives and profit of an increased demand for shade coffee would be

  • that farmers considering converting from shade to sun coffee would decide not to do so (a good thing),
  • and/or more primary forest would be converted to coffee (a bad thing), albeit shade coffee (still not as good as natural forest).

This conversion of primary forest to coffee would most likely occur, the authors wrote, on slopes that are too steep to grow sun coffee, representing new exploitation of the land. They were especially concerned with higher elevation pine-oak forests, important endangered tropical habitats.  Coffee is one of the only crops that can be grown in these forests, and providing financial incentives through shade coffee promotion might convince farmers to begin cultivation in these areas.  Removal of the oak layer, which presumably would occur even in shade coffee management, would have profound impacts on the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler, a migrant that depends on the oaks in the winter.

In general, the authors felt that endorsing shade coffee plantations as refuges of biodiversity was a “lowering of the bar” in terms of conservation goals.  They argued that diversity only measures numbers of species, which does not tell us anything about how ecologically equivalent two communities may be.  A shade coffee plantation may have 50 open-country species whereas the primary forest may also have 50 species, but they would be forest specialists which would be lost when the area was converted to coffee.  Finally, the authors were concerned that the consumer might not realize there are many variations in the way shade coffee is grown, and not all are good for biodiversity.

Philpott and Dietsch [2] replied, making the point loss of species richness in highly shaded coffee farms is minimal compared to the huge losses from other forms of agriculture. They argue that financial incentives that prevent farmers from converting their farms to sun coffee, cattle pasture, or illegal crops is beneficial.

Primarily, the authors argue for rigorous shade-certification programs to prevent premiums from going to farms that do not truly preserve biodiversity, and strong linkages between organic, shade-grown, and Fair Trade certification.  Further, to discourage conversion of primary forest to coffee, certification could be withheld for new farms, for a specified period, so that farmers are not rewarded for clearing forest.

The original authors [3] came back to say that there were a lot of “ifs” in Philpott and Deitsch’s vision of how shade coffee can advance conservation goals.  They felt certification programs had a long way to go, were uncoordinated, and that the promotion of shade coffee was outstripping certification efforts.  They end by saying that they feel the conservation value of coffee is hypothetical, dependent upon assumptions, especially considering certification, that have yet to be realized.

All the points in the papers are valid.  The lesson to consumers is that we have to be diligent in our choices by purchasing certified Fair Trade, organic, truly shade grown coffee.  Certainly, if we are going to purchase and drink coffee, we won’t be doing the environment any good by buying cheap coffee from a corporate giant that pays little to farmers and buys most of its coffee from sun plantations.

The primary goal of this blog is to continue to keep up with current research on biodiversity in coffee plantations, and current issues and debates on the conservation value of coffee to help consumers make informed choices.

[1] Rappole, J. H., D. I. King, and J. H. Vega Rivera.  2003.  Coffee and conservation.  Conservation Biology 17:334-336.

[2] Philpott, S. M. and T. Dietsch.  2003.  Coffee and conservation: a global context and the value of farmer involvement.  Conservation Biology 17:1844-1846.

[3] Rappole, J. H., D. I. King, and J. H. Vega Rivera.  2003.  Coffee and conservation III: reply to Philpott and Dietsch. Conservation Biology 17: 1847-1849.