Coffee Glut Brews Crisis For Farmers, Wildlife

By John Roach
for National Geographic News

April 24, 2003

For many people a coffee crisis occurs when there are no beans left in
the kitchen to brew a pot of the morning elixir, forcing a half-awake
stumble to the nearest coffee shop on a quest for a jolt of caffeine.

On a global scale the crisis is the opposite: There are too many beans.

The glut is causing unemployment and economic jitters among coffee farmers, and increased threats to the land and wildlife where coffee is grown, according to conservationists and industry analysts.

"Most attribute the coffee crisis to a rapid expansion of production worldwide, but especially in Vietnam and Indonesia during the 1990s," said Tim O'Brien, a researcher with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society who is currently working in Bogor, Indonesia.

The coffee industry employs an estimated 25 million people worldwide and coffee is the world's second most valuable commodity behind petroleum.

In the United States, the world's leading coffee importer, per capita consumption is 9 pounds (4.2 kilograms) each year, according to the International Coffee Organization (ICO), a London-based regulatory group.

Coffee Crisis

Since the 1990s, global coffee production has been rising at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent but consumption has only increased at 1.5 percent, according to the ICO. As a result, wholesale coffee prices are at their lowest levels in 100 years. In the 1980s, a pound of standard-grade coffee sold for around US $1.20. Today a pound sells for about $0.50, which is not enough to cover the costs of production in much of the world.

"With low prices, farmers tend to reduce inputs and take less care of the trees. In some cases this means that it is easier to cut down forest for plantations rather than care for existing ones. Nevertheless, I consider that in most countries low prices discourage new plantings," said Néstor Osorio, executive director of the ICO.

The long term impact of the current imbalance in supply and demand on the coffee industry is of particular concern to Robert Nelson, president of the National Coffee Association of USA, an industry trade group based in New York.

"We are absolutely suffering from an imbalance of supply and demand which has lasted for several years. There is economic suffering and social dislocation and in some cases environmental degradation in producing countries," he said. "As result this particular situation lasting for a few years, there is now a threat to the supply of coffee to consuming nations."

Nelson says that if the supply and demand imbalance is not remedied, obtaining the amounts of coffees in the range of qualities and varieties consumers demand will become more difficult, because many of the producers will go out of business, causing their fields to degrade to a point where it is difficult to get them back to production.

Liam Brody, a program coordinator for Oxfam America in Boston, which is promoting the trade of coffee at fair market prices as part of the solution to the coffee crisis, said hundreds of thousands of coffee farmers in Africa and Central and South America have lost their jobs as farmland is converted to other agricultural uses such as livestock grazing or the cultivation of illicit drugs.

"There is a pretty magnificent intersect between the price farmers are paid and their ability to be good stewards of the environment," said Brody.

Other farmers in Central and South America have converted their high-quality, shade-grown coffee plantations to lower quality sun-grown varieties in order to remain competitive. "While this may seem a reasonable idea at first, one must remember that in many parts of Central America shade-cover coffee farms are practically the only forest cover remaining," said O'Brien.

Indonesian Java

O'Brien and Margaret Kinnaird report in the April 25 issue of Science on the impact of the coffee crisis on farmers and the environment in Indonesia.

Of particular concern in Indonesia, say the researchers, is the increasing amount of coffee planted in and around the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park on the island of Sumatra. The plantations are putting pressure on the island's last protected lowland forests and populations of Sumatran tigers, rhinoceroses, and elephants.

The researchers say that better agricultural practices and a reduction in production are needed for local farmers and conservation. "If we do not act soon, our next cup of java may have the bitter taste of extinction," O'Brien and Kinnaird conclude in their paper.

Indonesia is the world's fourth largest producer of coffee and the second largest producer of robusta after Vietnam. Robusta is the hardiest of the coffee species and commonly found in inexpensive instant coffees and flavored coffees.

Unlike arabica coffee, which accounts for over 70 percent of world production according to the ICO, robusta is easier to harvest because it ripens and remains on the branch. It is also more disease-resistant, requires less maintenance, and usually has a higher yield than arabica, said O'Brien.

In Lampung province of Indonesia, the country's core coffee growing region, the area planted in coffee increased by 28 percent between 1996 and 2001, according to the researchers' study. In the same time period, yield declined by 25 percent.

The decreasing yield is thought to be a combination of a lack of quality seeds available for the farmers and less willingness and ability of the farmers to pay for fertilizer and pesticides. The low price their coffee fetches in the marketplace leaves the farmers with less money to spend.

"Most farmers in the world are facing a very similar crisis," said Brody. "Most tend to be the most marginal folks in society, and tend not to have lots of skills and training."

Without skills and training, which activists say is the responsibility of consumers, governments, and corporations to provide, farmers overcome the lower prices and yields by cutting down forests to plant more coffee. O'Brien and Kinnaird say this response threatens the large animals that call the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park home.

According to an earlier study led by Kinnaird, Sumatran tigers, rhinoceroses, and elephants avoid forest edges by nearly 2 miles (3 kilometers). As a result these animals are disproportionately affected by deforestation, since their preferred habitat shrinks more rapidly than the forest as a whole.

"Edges are dangerous places for large animals and the edge forest is an unfriendly forest where the likelihood of encountering humans, snares, and traps increases," said O'Brien. "And that means the chance of mortality increases, so as the secure habitat disappears, the wildlife are left with only the edge forest and their risk of mortality increases."

Solutions Brewing

Conservationists and industry analysts say that resolving the coffee crisis will require creative efforts by both the coffee growers and the coffee drinkers.

Growers need to plant other crops than just coffee and when they grow coffee, they need to grow higher quality beans. Better beans fetch higher prices on the market, thus reducing the acreage required for the crop and bringing the farmers more money.

"The International Coffee Organization has encouraged the production of higher quality and less quantity of robusta coffee, but this is a slow process," said Osorio. "Unfortunately, some coffee roasters seek out low price coffee and give prices priority."

Wildlife conservationists O'Brien and Kinnaird say that enforcement of protected areas needs to be improved in regions where coffee production conflicts with biodiversity conservation, such as Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park. Outside the park boundaries, they advocate crop diversification assistance programs.

Nelson of the National Coffee Association says in addition to diversification and other aid programs for the coffee growers that the organization supports, attention needs to be focused on increasing coffee consumption. The association promotes increased consumption in the U.S. market as well as increased consumption in coffee producing nations such as El Salvador.

On an individual level, Brody suggests coffee drinkers purchase only beans that meet Fair Trade certification criteria, which are widely available in supermarkets and specialty coffee shops. The coffee certifies that farmers were paid at least US $1.26 per pound and $1.41 if the coffee is also certified organic.

"Consumer action really has a significant impact," he said. "Together people can change the world one cup at a time."