Issues: Health

Yum! so sweet is the taste of coffee,
more beloved than a thousand kisses,
smoother than muscatel wine.
Coffee -- I must have it,
And someone who wants to please me
ah -- he will just present me with coffee!

--Liesgen's Aria to her father in Bach's Coffee Cantata,
Hush, Don't Chatter (1732)

I. INTRODUCTION

Coffee drinkers historically have had little reason to contemplate the environmental dimensions of their habit. Yet, over the past 15 to 20 years, dramatic changes associated with the ecological, social and economic sustainability of coffee have redefined coffee production in northern Latin America. Only recently has it come to light that the way coffee is produced profoundly affects migratory bird diversity and other ecological indicators of environmental health.

For coffee devoteés in the North, getting a good cup of coffee each morning ranks high on our personal comfort list. Many of us now talk about different coffee blends as wine tasters talk about vintage wines, feeling satisfied that we understand so much about this coveted beverage. But to feel really informed, we should understand some of the changes occurring at the production end of that coffee.

From Colombia to Mexico, an industrial transformation of the coffee sector threatens the traditional coffee agroecosystem through the loss of biodiversity, habitat fragmentation, pesticide poisoning and soil erosion. In the simplest terms, the change is from shade coffee to sun coffee. The region harbors some of the highest levels of biodiversity on the globe -- levels that are maintained to a surprisingly high degree within the traditional coffee system.^[1] Changing the structure and management of this system may spell trouble for the region's overall environmental health, as well as for the economic resilience of small growers and rural communities. Coffee management choices in the future will profoundly affect conservation objectives in countries throughout the hemisphere. One example is El Salvador, where coffee plantations represent about 60 percent of the nation's remaining forested area.^[2]

The transformation involves switching from the traditionally canopy-covered coffee farm with a mixed plant community in the overstory, to a virtual monoculture of coffee that may include moderate to sparse shade cover of a single species, or, in some cases, no shade at all. The path from the shade into the sun is dressed with new fertilizer-responsive varieties of coffee and a list of agro-chemicals. Of the 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres) planted to coffee in Mexico, Colombia, Central America and the Caribbean through the early 1990s, 1.1 million hectares (about 40 percent) have been converted to sun coffee or "technified."^[3] And while the changes have occurred too recently to be evaluated in terms of total impact upon the region, the overall land and food security of small producers will surely be affected by the transformation to more intensified production.

Some countries have embraced the transformation of their coffee sector much more heartily than others (see Table 1 for area figures and sources). Costa Rica and Colombia, for instance, display relatively high levels of technified coffee lands. Although producers in some areas have recently begun to re-introduce and increase shade levels, the overall trend in the past two decades has been one of shade removal or reduction, resulting in landscape transformations with long-term ramifications for conservation and environmental protection.

Interestingly, recent years have seen an increased awareness of the environmental and social links to coffee on the part of producers, marketers and consumers. Producer organizations throughout northern Latin America, usually formed into peasant cooperatives, are beginning to address coffee's environmental aspects by maintaining a mixed shade cover. Marketing strategies based on organic coffee or social justice and fair commodity prices paid to farmers are emerging in many countries. Consumers are now faced with a growing array of coffees produced beneath a variety of systems, but seldom realize the distinction being made. For those consumers concerned with the environmental and social aspects of coffee, there is an interesting -- and vitally important -- story to be told.

In this report, we examine the issues related to the industrialization of the coffee sector in northern Latin America, and connect these seemingly distant changes in agricultural production to the morning ritual played out in hundreds of millions of homes throughout the world. We first establish the importance of coffee to the countries of the region, showing how national economies, agricultural area and wage labor evolved to supply the North's coffee craving. Next, we present the changes that have been reshaping the coffee landscape over the past couple of decades -- changes that seek to bring greater yields and higher income to the rural sector, but that may be doing so at tremendous environmental and social cost to the region in the long-term. The following section presents the environmental dimensions of modern coffee production, identifying concerns that are both local and global in scope, and contrasting the benefits of shade coffee with the damages resulting frequently from sun plantations. Finally, the report recommends actions on the part of policy makers, private sector businesses, consumers, and coffee growers, processors, and roasters to promote a sustainable future for the environment and economy of northern Latin America.

Notes

1. Ivette Perfecto, 1994 Foraging behavior as a determinant of asymmetric competitive interactions between two ant species in a tropical agroecosystem. Ecology 98:184-192; David Nestel, F. Dickschen, and M. Altieri 1993 Diversity patterns of soil macro-coleoptera in Mexican shaded and unshaded coffee agroecosystems: An indication of habitat perturbation, Biodiversity and Conservation 2:70-78; Alejandro Estrada, Rosamond Coates-Estrada, and Dennis Meritt, Jr. 1993 Non-flying mammals and landscape changes in the tropical rain forest of Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, Ecography 17:229-241.

2. Gilberto Amaya H., Appropriate Technology International, personal communication, January 22, 1996.

3. The term "technified" is cumbersome, yet descriptive. It is borrowed directly from the Spanish "tecnificado," a term used throughout the region to explain the modernization of coffee production, a process that results in the elimination or reduction of shade cover, as well as an impoverishment of the species diversity of the shade trees. As we discuss below, technification involves much more than changes in shade level, but the shade issue is central to the conservation properties and potential of coffee.