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It’s the start of a new day. You roll out from under the covers, stagger into the kitchen,
and make a cup of the brew that will wake you up and carry you through the morning:
coffee. The liquid that fuels millions around the globe. Offering caffeine and warmth to
early-morning risers and late-night workers alike. There’s little doubt that coffee
is a staple commodity, but all this consumption means it also holds with it ecological consequences.
So today, I’m going to investigate the true cost of coffee by asking two questions: What’s
the environmental impact of growing coffee? And why do we grow it the way we do?
500 billion cups of coffee are consumed globally every year. And in the United States, where
the coffee flows like water, drinkers consume roughly 450 million cups a day. The popularity
of coffee is undeniable. It’s the second most traded commodity next to crude oil. But
there’s something hidden in these massive numbers: a stark split between the geography
of coffee consumers and coffee producers. The countries that import the most coffee,
like the United States, Germany, and France, are primarily situated in Europe and North
America, while the biggest producers are situated in the Global South, with countries like Brazil,
Vietnam, and Colombia exporting the lion’s share of the world’s coffee. Essentially
coffee plantations have sprawled across the majority world to satiate the coffee addiction
of the Global North. So when considering the environmental impact of coffee it’s not
just the visible waste t of unnecessary to-go cups that we need to address, it's also the
impact that stretches back to--and is indeed centered around-- how coffee is grown. So
in very simple terms, there are two ways of cultivating coffee: shade-grown and sun-grown.
Sun grown coffee is just another way to describe the relatively new “technified” or industrial
coffee farming systems. These production methods were kickstarted in the 1970s and 80s by neoliberal
policies championed by the United States Agency for International Development (or USAID) and
the World Bank, which sought to industrialize supply chains to increase yields and drive
down prices. But as many of the coffee growing countries like Colombia and Brazil transitioned
to this new technified way of farming, which relied on chemical resistant and sun-tolerant
coffee strains like Robusta coffee, they began to experience the ecological burdens of this
globalized system. Sun grown coffee relies on large swaths of closely planted crops of
coffee that are then grown without the protection of shade trees, doused in chemical herbicides
and pesticides, and then harvested in one fell swoop using expensive technology, which
is not unlike the monocropping techniques applied to corn and soybeans in the United
States. As a result of technification, smallholder farmers in some cases are forced out of coffee
production altogether, because they’re unable to keep up with the crushing combination of
high input costs of big machinery and the low prices caused by competition with larger
monocrop farms across the globe. This industrialized coffee system can lead to numerous environmental
issues like mountainside erosion, chemical pollution in waterways, soil degradation,
as well as deforestation. Sun grown coffee is one of the most sprayed crops in the world.
This not only causes ecological damage in the form of runoff and species loss, but it
also damages the health of workers at farms where the chemicals are prioritized over safety
equipment. As demonstrated in an article in the Guardian, which revealed that Brazilian
workers often complained of “difficulty breathing, skin rashes and birth defects”
after working with pesticides that were banned in the EU. In a paper on the effects of coffee
production and exports, Professor Kelly Austin concludes that countries that depend on coffee
as a primary export “produce unique and especially harmful patterns [of] deforestation,
hunger, and schooling” especially when compared to other forms of agricultural production.
Essentially, sun-grown coffee farmers are stuck in a system that demands high yields
and low prices at the expense of the environment and the community around them.
But there is an alternative method of growing coffee. In fact, it's how coffee has always
been grown up until recently. Under the protective cover of other trees. Shade-grown cultivation
is the traditional system of growing coffee that prioritizes a biodiverse landscape to
build a healthy habitat for coffee plants. Indeed, coffee plants prefer shade when they
grow in the wild. This type of growing system allows for a much more varied, and ultimately
stable, method of growing coffee. By allowing the coffee plant to thrive in its ideal habitat,
it requires fewer chemicals and mechanized input, and the trees that are intercropped
with coffee not only provide shade, but they have the potential to sequester carbon from
the atmosphere. According to Project Drawdown, which looks at the top 100 solutions to climate
change, if more farmers adopt tree intercropping systems like those used on coffee plantations,
they could potentially sequester 17.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide over the next thirty years.
For context, the United States emitted roughly 6.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent
in 2017. This sequestration happens because intercropped trees on a coffee farm in many
ways mimic forests. As a result, this means they have the added benefit of attracting
a myriad of pest loving birds that act as a natural insecticide for the coffee cherries.
And unlike sun-grow monocultures, clearing forest land for shade grown coffee production
is unnecessary, and as a 2013 study on the effects of traditional coffee systems on deforestation
in Ethiopia shows, shade grown coffee can help slow forest-loss. Alongside all of these
environmental benefits, intercropping with fruit or nut trees means a more diverse harvest
and ultimately a more stable livelihood. Pairing coffee plants with macadamia trees, for example,
means that farmers not only get the yield from coffee plants, but they also can reap
the benefits of macadamia trees. This means that if a coffee crop fails one year, it won’t
necessarily spell disaster. So, yes while overall yields might be a bit lower than a
technified system, shade-grown coffee means more economic security, less mechanization,
and a healthier ecosystem. On top of all of that, the coffee just generally tastes better.
Ultimately, the industrialized system, while good for higher yields (and higher profits
for coffee corporations), has pushed coffee-growing into an environmentally destructive activity.
Shade-grown coffee clearly demonstrates that coffee doesn’t have to damage the soil or
its environment, in fact, traditional coffee growing has been around for hundreds of years.
The important thing here is to recognize where and how this transition to an environmentally
destructive practice is happening. So let’s be clear, this didn’t just happen naturally.
USAID and other global free-market-oriented organizations like the World Bank have created
the conditions for this switch. And the result of transforming local economies of small traditional
farms into larger global economies of industrialized farms is that the coffee that gets consumed
in North America and Europe wreaks environmental destruction in the form of pollution and deforestation
in the Global South. So as the Global North’s addiction to coffee grows, and with it their
demand for cheaper prices, they are essentially exporting the environmental and social consequences
of large scale coffee production onto the majority world. When we looked toward the
environmental impacts of coffee then, the answer is not as simple as just buying single-origin,
shade-grown varieties. That is important and part of the solution, but we also must simultaneously
understand that for more ecologically-sound systems to prosper, they need a global economy
that actively seeks to support and fund them. One that prioritizes environmental health,
communal well being, and quality goods and stands in stark contrast to the current global
capitalist system which seeks high production, low prices, and growth regardless of environmental
and social cost.
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