The study’s authors, led by Shalene Jha of the University of Texas, discovered that right now, a far larger share of the world’s coffee is now being grown in direct sunlight, rather than under the shade of a canopy of trees. You’ve probably heard of the importance of shade grown coffee, but what happens when coffee’s not grown in these ideal conditions? Well, “these full-sun coffee farms are scarcely any different from the large plots of monoculture corn and soybeans that have been vilified by environmentalists over the past several decades,” says Joe Satran of the Huffington Post.
The large trees some coffee is grown under is important to the environment, as it provides a natural habitat for native wildlife, supports soil health and fights erosion, along with other benefits to fruit and firewood. “Our scientists say a certified coffee farm is the next best thing to rainforest,” Chris Wille, the head of sustainable agriculture at Rainforest Alliance, said of shaded farms.
“The expansion of coffee that we’ve seen in the last two decades has largely been in places where coffee is grown in this low-shade, very intensive style, where there are no overstory trees,” Jha said. “And in this manner of production, the coffee really doesn’t last very long, and it really degrades the environment.”
So if it’s better, why have we grown so far away from shaded coffee? Simply put, it’s due to the growth of the coffee industries in Brazil and Vietnam, the first- and second-biggest producers in the world in 2010, according to the study. The researchers found that more than three-quarters of the coffee farmland in those two countries contains no tree cover.
Unfortunately, much of the cheap coffee from chains likely comes from full-sun farms. As the study points out, “The industries in these two countries are dominated by the cultivation of inexpensive, bitter-tasting robusta coffee, which is used to make instant coffee and the bulk ground coffee you might buy in a can at a supermarket.”
Super popular options, like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, typically use beans from arabica coffee plants, a different species from robusta, to make their brews. But while arabica is more likely to be grown in the shade, Jha noted that “much of the world’s arabica is still grown in direct sun, or on partially shaded farms that offer environmental benefits far more modest than fully-shaded farms.”
The study’s authors estimated that “the share of the world’s coffee farms that employ traditional shade-growing methods plummeted from 43 percent to 24 percent between 1996 and 2010 — just as savvy consumers were waking up to the joys of higher-quality coffee. A whopping 41 percent of the coffee farmland contained no shade trees at all in 2010, an all-time high.”
Originally, because coffee plants evolved in the understory of the East African jungle, they were grown only in shade for the first several hundred years of human cultivation. But in the 1970s, the shift to direct sunlight was used in hopes of increasing photosynthesis, preventing disease and to allow greater density of shrub planting. Farmers began cutting down the tree canopies that shaded their shrubs and compensated for the loss of natural insect-killing birds and bats by applying more pesticides.
This strategy helped farms produce much more coffee, especially in Brazil, where coffee is grown in sunned, mechanically tended crop circles. Some (including Jha) argue that “beans grown in direct sunlight taste worse than coffee grown in the shade,” but Dan Cox, president and owner of Coffee Analyst, a coffee testing company in Burlington, Vermont, doesn’t agree. “There is a slight, if at all, perceivable taste difference between shade coffee and non-shade coffee,” he said. “I don’t think the issue with full sun is taste, ultimately — I think it’s biodioversity.”
That’s where Jha and her co-authors come in. They argue that “getting rid of the trees eliminates a crucial habitat for native wildlife, such as tropical birds and monkeys, and makes the land more susceptible to erosion and climate change. And using more chemicals creates still other problems.”
Robert
Rice, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Birds Center and a co-author on the paper, also chimed in. “We know now from decades of high-input industrial agriculture in the U.S. that by shifting away from traditional practices, you lose an incredible amount of topsoil, you contaminate waterways and you make yourself much more vulnerable to changes in weather.”
What do you think,
Care2? Do you take care when buying your coffee?
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