Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora

COFFEE is the world’s most popular beverage—after water—with an estimated 400 billion cups consumed worldwide every year. Over $10 billion in coffee was traded worldwide in 2000—an amount of trade surpassed only by petroleum.
I don’t know about you, but I start my day with a freshly brewed cup—organic, of course.

The Organic Factor

It’s often said that when we buy organic products, we are voting for a clean, environmentally safe agriculture with our dollars. A great example of this is coffee. When we elect to buy organic coffee, we help the impoverished families who grow this beverage in some of the most economically deprived places on earth.

When organically grown within the shade of a rain forest, coffee trees don’t need the chemical fertilizers and insecticides required when coffee is grown conventionally as the single crop on sprawling plantations. The reason is that mammals, insects, fungus, and the many other life forms that inhabit the rain forest create a healthy biodiversity that eliminates or keeps pestiferous insects and fungus at bay—the coffee plants are simply part of the ecosystem, and pesticides and other agricultural chemicals aren’t necessary.

But there’s more. The great diversity of life in the rain forest includes migratory birds that summer in the United States and Canada, and winter in the American tropics. Populations of migratory birds that use the Central and South American rain forests as winter grounds are being seriously depleted by clear-cutting for, among other things, full-sun coffee plantations. This has caused the National Zoo and Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center to encourage us to drink “bird-friendly coffee,” or coffee grown on environmentally sustainable farms.

A healthy, biodiverse ecosystem that includes coffee trees protects not only migratory birds but the entire ecosystem of plants, animals, and even the fertility of the soil and integrity of water supplies. In the tropics, nutrients don’t build up in the soil the way they do in cold winter regions. If a leaf falls to the ground, it does fertilize the soil but the tropical vegetation is so dense that, after decomposing, the nutrients are sucked up by plant roots and used to build trees, vines, and other life forms. In a rainforest, nutrients tend to be stored “upstairs” in plant and animal life rather then in the soil. So, when a rain forest is clear-cut, almost all the nutrients stored in its ecosystem are thus removed. If the land is replanted entirely with coffee trees, it becomes a monoculture of one plant species, and nutrients must be supplied in the form of chemical fertilizers. Because the natural enemies of the coffee pests will have been destroyed along with the rain forest canopy, the pests are free to multiply in plantations consisting entirely of their favorite food, and so pesticides need to be applied and reapplied. Because the shading, sheltering canopy has been removed, groundwater supplies dry up. Nutritionless soil with hardly any organic matter becomes exposed to tropical sunlight and laterizes—a soil scientist’s term for “turns to stone.” When you choose triple certified shade-grown coffee, you’re protecting a valuable ecosystem, including the human beings who live in it and from it.

The world coffee market is now being flooded with cheap, inferior coffee grown in such full-sun plantations around the world, especially Vietnam. This coffee drives prices so low that many small coffee farmers receive less than the cost of production for their beans, which drives them off the land. The land may then be bought by corporations that clear-cut in order to plant full-sun offee plantations. Transfair, a nongovern-ental organization that attempts to provide growers with a fair price for their products, http://www.transfairusa.org or http://www.fairtradecoffee.org ), attempts to pay enough to keep indigenous coffee farmers on the land so they can grow their coffee under the rain forest canopy.  ....read more