Home » Blogs » Martina Fürst-Gauss

Shade Grown Coffee

blog | March 18, 2011 - 10:24am | By Martina Fürst-Gauss
Author(s): 
Martina Fürst-Gauss

One of the many things I learned about at the Environmental Film Festival at the Princeton Public Library last January is shade-grown coffee.

Traditionally, all coffee was shade-grown. That means the coffee plants grew under the canopy of the rain forests. Most varieties of coffee are naturally intolerant of direct sunlight and need the sun-filtering shade of the trees for healthy growth.  

Ranking directly after fossil oils, coffee is the second most traded commodity on Earth and the largest U.S. food import. Nearly one billion cups of coffee are consumed every day worldwide, Americans drink about 400 million cups a day. 

With constantly growing demand of coffee during the last decades, hybrid coffee plants were developed in the early 1970s in order to increase this valuable crop. Because these can grow in direct sun, hundreds of thousands of square miles of lush rainforests have been cut down to make way for this fast growing coffee. Today, about 97% of all coffee is grown this way. 

A chain of dramatic side effects was put in motion: 

With the elimination of the rainforest, wildlife habitats dissapeared. Migratory birds that breed in North America but winter in Latin America are affected in particular. According to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), as far as birds are concerned, a decline of up to 90% has resulted. Sun-grown coffee plantations can offer only 10% of the former biodiversity. 

The EDF (Environmental Defense Fund) says that the clearing and burning of tropical forests produce more greenhouse gases annually than all the world’s cars and trucks combined and that 15 % of global warming pollution come from tropical deforestation. Thus our daily cup of coffee clearly has a carbon footprint. 

Furthermore, without the trees the clean and constant water flow is disturbed and soil erosion and loss of nutrients are taking place. Sun-grown coffee plantations need high doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides as the natural balance between useful and harmful creatures has been distroyed. I read that, next to tobacco, conventional coffee is sprayed with more chemicals than any other product consumed by humans (http://eartheasy.com/eat_shadegrown_coffee.htm). As a result, water quality around coffee plantations has decreased tremendously. These circumstances affect the health of the workers. 

Smaller farmer families that could barely afford expensive chemicals and fertilizers stayed with the original growing method. (A Wikipedia graph shows that the salary for workers on coffee farms is only about 5 % of what we pay for a cup of coffee.)Their shade-grown coffee is most often organic and fair trade. As it takes a longer time for that coffee to mature, the sugar content is naturally higher and the flavor better. Unfortunately, only about 3 % of the global coffee production is shade-grown. 

That all could change!

By simply changing our coffee brand and by simply asking that our coffee be grown in the shade of old trees, we can make such a difference! Just try to picture the broad positive impact we would make only by choosing the right coffee. Our choices are a key to the solution of the problems mentioned above. Production follows demand and our requests as customers influence production methods. 

The benefits of choosing shade-grown coffee are many:

Water and soil quality in the growing area are preserved, struggling local farmers obtain better living conditions, sustainability is promoted, and the product we receive is most often organically grown. Most importantly, we help insure the survival and regrowth of the tropical forests and along with them the wildlife that has nowhere else to live. How coffee is grown in Latin America might ultimately affect whether a migratory bird returns to nest around our home every spring or not. The carbon footprint of our daily cup of shade-grown coffee is certainly lower than that of other coffees. Finally, its flavor and quality are undoubtedly better. 

Most of my information came from the film I watched at the Festival. You can download and view it under www.neotropicalbirds.com. This was all the information I needed to switch to shade-grown coffee. I just hope you'll be convinced, too.

These online merchants sell shade-grown coffee:

 These markets sell shade-grown coffee in and around Princeton:

  • Whole Food (regular and decaf)
  • Whole Earth Center(regular; decaf has been out of stock for the last 9 weeks)
  • Small World Coffee (Crispy Hippie, regular)
  • Starbucks (regular)
  • Trader Joe’s (regular) 

Shade-grown production is growing coffee IN the rainforest, not growing coffee INSTEAD of the rainforest. Let’s ask for it!

AttachmentSize
Poster II.jpg190.18 KB

Related Terms:
shade-grown coffee