The following is a guest article by Xandra Grieme.
As I held the coffee leaf in my hands, I felt useless. After long days of trekking through the Honduran jungles, I was tired. My feet had carried me to places that only ATVs or horses could reach—to the remotest mountain villages of the region.
I was there to meet with farmers and government officials to help create a plan in the wake of hurricanes Eta and Iota. The forests had been demolished, and reforestation was paramount if the already faltering infrastructure was to stabilize. I was there to help create a plan, to bring hope.
But as I sat there, holding that sickly coffee leaf, hope was the last thing I felt.
“This is a disease,” I said in Spanish. “It’s a type of rust. This is very hard to heal.”
The farmers looked back at me intently. We were gathered in a drafty shack that had been thrown together at the crest of a hill. The timber was reclaimed from fallen trees—there were plenty. Outside, the droning buzz of the jungle cut the silence. Every now and then, a gust of wind reached in between the planks of wood to rudely toss my neat stack of papers as if to say, “This is all a very silly business, isn’t it? You think you can really help these people?”
I looked out at the faces. Men tanned and thinned by decades of hard labor in the elements. Men who slept on the floors of mud dwellings. Even the young ones had wrinkles.
But the eyes shone brightly. There was still hope here. These people were hard to knock down—harder to knock down than the trees of their forest home—harder certainly to topple than I was.
As it turned out, I had far more to learn from these humble people than they had to learn from me, even after years of research and writing restoration plans. In the days I spent with these villagers, my perspective on coffee began to change drastically. This article is a product of those revelations. I hope to explain how I’ve changed my habits around coffee consumption—and invite you to do the same.
Coffee in American Culture
First, let’s pause to consider the significance of coffee in our culture.
When wanting to connect with someone, we usually say, “Let’s get coffee sometime.” Business deals are often done in coffee houses where the atmosphere is genial, trendy, and easygoing. My first meeting with the man who became my husband occurred in a coffee shop. Some of the best evangelism I’ve ever done has been one-on-one over a cup of coffee.
Coffee is to Americans what gasoline is to automobiles. Americans consume 170 billion cups of coffee per year, more than any other nation. Our decisions about coffee have a huge impact on the industry. Consider three key areas: economy, ecology, and ethics.
Economic Implications
Methods used in coffee plantations have changed drastically to make production more efficient. These changes were precipitated by the fact that most of the coffee we drink is grown in Latin America, but the coffee plant is indigenous to Africa and thus doesn’t always thrive in foreign tropical climes. In a traditional coffee plantation, plants are grown in a wild tropical forest, or in a mixed forest with other cultivated trees and shrubs.
When traditional coffee plantations in Brazil began yielding plants with the dreaded leaf rust Hemileia vastatrix in the 1970’s, disaster seemed imminent. The spores of the same rust halted coffee production in Sri Lanka and India for a time, gravely impacting coffee trade in those regions. In response, the traditional coffee plantation was left behind, and a new era of “technologically-advanced plantations” began. These plantations slashed and burned the hillside, growing only a sun-loving and rust-resistant coffee varietal.
The new plantations produced 5 times more per hectare than traditional methods. Higher yields required less land per ton produced. Yet, because land was not taken out of production to compensate, annual harvests glutted markets. Prices plummeted. In the early 1990’s, 28 major coffee-growing nations signed the Coffee Retention Plan, by which members agreed to withhold 20 percent of their coffee, hoping to save the market.
Today, the “techno-plantation” method is preferred by the industry, but it still poses serious economic problems. Prices remain low, reducing or erasing profits. International management continues in hopes of keeping surplus coffee off the market.
Ecological Implications
Traditional coffee plantations are amazing, and it pains a conservationist like me to watch them going extinct. In traditional plantations, as many as 25 species of tree grow in the same plot, including bananas, citrus, guava, firewood, and timber.
One census of a traditional coffee plantation revealed 561 trees per hectare, so basically the coffee was growing under a tightly packed forest. In the traditional method, sometimes called the “shade-grown method,” each coffee plant is pruned carefully and deliberately to let more light penetrate to yam plants at its base. Corn or beans, which need more light, can be planted under younger coffee trees.
Traditional coffee plantations are by no means wilderness, but they preserve up to 70% of the biodiversity of wild tropical forests. When many forests were being burned in Puerto Rico, these traditional plantations saved many rare orchid species from extinction and minimized the loss of birds. In fact, managed-for-coffee forests in Tamaulipas contain over 300 species of plants, not to mention birds, snakes, bats, and mammals. One diversity study showed that bugs in the plantation were equal in abundance and diversity to those in untouched habitats!
Another key factor in shade-grown coffee is soil composition. Not only does growing coffee under an existing canopy protect the plants from storms and pests, but also trees physically hold soil in place, often reintroducing nitrogen into the ground. Fallen leaves contribute to a healthy layer of mulch, preserving coffee plants throughout fluctuating weather conditions.
In the techno-plantation method, all trees are cut down, all other plants are ripped out, fertilizer is pumped into the soil to raise productivity, and pesticides are sprayed over the rows of plants. Remember how traditional coffee plantation supports 70% of the biodiversity found in the wild? Techno-coffee plantations support only 5%! Even when land once occupied by a techno-plantation is restored, it never becomes fully wild again—79% of biodiversity does not regenerate in such landscapes.
Mercifully, “shade-grown coffee” is available at most grocery stores, but it’s a bit more expensive and doesn’t always follow the traditional agroforestry method that supports so much wildlife.
Ethical Implications
The vast majority—99.5 percent—of coffee Americans drink is produced outside the United States. Our coffee choices affect people all over the world. We’ve seen how decisions to favor techno-plantation coffee have affected farmers and foreign economies, but there is more to the story. During another stint in Honduras, I glimpsed the effects of coffee consumerism on some vulnerable people.
I had been invited to lecture on environmentalism and ecological philosophy to several universities. I stayed with the organizers. They lived in a tiny, two-bedroom home without running water and often without electricity. Since they had four children, the family took it upon themselves to build a little house for me at the back of their property, next to where their animals were kept. The house was made from wooden crates that motorcycles had been shipped in.
Every morning, I was awakened by the bleating of goats eager to be milked. As I got to know the family, I asked why they kept so many goats. They explained that the goats were for the “Coffee Boys.” The goats produced milk, which was made into cheese for the boys. Eventually, we all went up into the mountains together to meet with these Coffee Boys. From then on, between speaking engagements, I went as often as possible.
These little boys, most orphans, captured my heart. Tania Steer, the wife of the family with whom I stayed, told me, “These children have no hopes or dreams, so we help them to hope and dream for the future.” We brought the boys clothes, food, and milk, and some friends back in America helped me buy and ship soccer balls. Now Paul and Tania teach them to play soccer, give them a nourishing meal, and teach them reading and writing. Many of these Coffee Boys are putting their faith in Jesus and finding hope in Him.
Despite overall reductions in child labor in Latin America, children like these continue picking coffee in the forest. They have little or no time for education and are undernourished. The children I met often ate leftover (delicious!) red coffee fruits.
While it’s not always easy or convenient to find shade-grown coffee, shade-grown products are almost always fair-trade certified, making it more likely that the coffee we drink was harvested humanely. None of us should contribute to forced child labor in coffee-growing nations.
Conclusion: A Call to Love, and Some Practical Actions
Coffee consumption in the United States affects far more than we can imagine or perceive, from the economies of entire nation-states to declining biodiversity of rainforests to the wellbeing of vulnerable orphans. As Americans we should consider our coffee habits with intentionality and caution. As Christians, we are held to an even higher standard.
The Bible instructs followers of God to love our neighbors (Mark 12:31; Luke 6:32). The Psalms exhort us to “defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed” (Psalm 82:3). Coffee-orphans walking barefoot over rugged terrain day after day are largely forgotten and unknown, but God sees and knows them. They are precious in His sight. He cares about their wellbeing, and so should we.
We also know that the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it (Psalm 32:1). Therefore, needless destruction of forests grieves our Father’s heart. It should grieve us as well.
As Christian coffee consumers, we have a unique opportunity to be salt and light, to look different from others in our coffee consumption. By preferring shade-grown coffee, we can help bolster farmers committed to preserving their forests. If you are interested in purchasing shade-grown, fair-trade certified coffee, here are some affordable (and tasty) options:
Birds and Beans
Thanksgiving
Volcanica
If you would like to give financially to the soccer school supporting orphan Coffee Boys, visit https://www.missionsdoor.org/missionary/steer-paul-and-tania/.
How do Christians take our coffee? Perhaps with sugar, perhaps with cream, but always, we hope, with love for our fellow creatures and neighbors.
Xandra Grieme is a biologist, speaker, and author of Forty Answers from Nature: What We Can Learn about God, Life and Ourselves from Studying the Natural World. She is active in personal evangelism and apologetics.
