Drinking Certified Coffee: A Way Out Of The Global Coffee Crisis

A Rainforest Alliance Publication FALL 2001
By Francine Stephens

"Providing livelihoods to farmers in developing countries is a crucial challenge for reducing world poverty. When fairly priced, export crops, such as coffee or cocoa, can help millions of farmers and their families to lift themselves out of poverty."
The Coffee Market -- A Background Study, Oxfam

The Problem

Coffee production is in deep crisis. Coffee farmers worldwide are suffering from low prices, the lowest in 30 years, reports Oxfam in their recent study, Bitter Coffee: How the Poor are Paying for the Slump in Coffee Prices. Producers in developing countries are suffering not just from low prices generated by oversupply, but from an increasingly unequal distribution of the wealth generated by the coffee trade. In fact, out of the $55 billion generated by the sale of coffee, those countries that produce the beans receive only $8 billion (International Coffee Organization).

Overproduction is occurring due to a combination of factors, including new technologies that allow for higher yields, and the overproduction of coffee by developing countries such as Vietnam and the Ivory Coast that have expanded production substantially in the last couple of years. These large quantities of coffee are often being produced at very low grades, inundating the market with low-quality coffee. As a result, small-scale, high-quality producers are losing out on price. Additionally, the processing of coffee beans is often controlled by powerful, multinational corporations, and retail outlets are concentrated into a handful of chains, giving these companies the power to set all the rules.

The consequences can be seen all over Latin America, where tens of thousands of coffee farmers and laborers are migrating to look for alternative work. In Mexico, for example, an estimated 500 families per week are leaving coffee farms and migrating north to earn a living. Increasingly, coffee farms are being sold to ranchers, developers, or rubber plantations, or simply abandoned.

Yet shade-grown coffee and cocoa are the best crops to grow in Latin America, as they mimic the rainforest, providing nearly all the same environmental benefits as real forests -- watershed protection, carbon storage, biodiversity support, and medicinal plants. Shade-grown coffee systems are known to contain over 300 useful species, medicines, foods, construction materials, and forage, and they can provide habitat for approximately 180 bird species as compared to between 20 and 50 birds on sun farms (Seattle Audubon Society). While current trends are having devastating consequences across the coffee-producing world, there is an achievable solution.

The Solution

The Rainforest Alliance works with forward-thinking companies to transform tropical agricultural production. Through a certification process, the Rainforest Alliance encourages coffee growers to implement sustainable production approaches. "Participating in the [Rainforest Alliance] certification program has benefited both our farm's biodiversity and our income, particularly in the face of this severe coffee crisis," said Francisco Aviles, manager of Cooperativa Las Lajas in El Salvador. "We receive a premium for our sustainable coffee and we have significantly reduced our costs through implementing biological controls instead of agrochemical use."

Currently certifying coffee in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica, the Rainforest Alliance and its network of regional partners are educating coffee buyers, roasters, and green consumers on the environmental and social issues surrounding coffee production. The Rainforest Alliance and its partners send out auditors who work with farmers to incorporate better social and environmental conditions over time, in areas such as ecosystem and wildlife conservation, labor practices and community relations, reduction of chemical use, and waste management.

Consumers too have an essential role to play. We now have the choice to act in support of coffee farmers worldwide by purchasing only coffee that has been grown sustainably. "Buying certified coffee is not a short-term solution; it is a complex and long-term solution to putting the power of the marketplace back in our hands," says Christopher London of the Consumer's Choice Council. "As consumers of coffee, we have the power to make the market work for us, to make it reflect our needs and concerns."

High-quality coffee increasingly means certified coffee. Drinking certified coffee is one of the easiest yet most important actions people across the world can take to support conservation and social accountability. For more information on where to purchase Rainforest Alliance and other certified coffees, please visit our Web site at www.rainforest-alliance.org