Growing Environmental Threats Caused by Coffee a Concern: Study

Can coffee constitute a threat to the environment? The answer to that question is a resounding yes.

According to a web site produced by The Independent, a British newspaper, a global coffee crisis caused by the overproduction of coffee combined with a slump in wholesale coffee prices has recently taken place. The newspaper cites a study published in Science as saying that the crisis is already having "a devastating impact on some of the world's poorest communities and the Earth's endangered wildlife."

Coffee farmers throughout the world are being "forced into poverty" by falling prices. Many of these farmers are trying to maintain their income by increasing the production of cheaper varieties of coffee at the expense of the environment. Some of the rarest animals in the world, including tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, gibbons and orangutans on the Indonesian island of Sumatra are being threatened by the rise in coffee production. Indonesia is the fourth largest coffee producer in the world and about 70 per cent of their coffee is produced near a national park that harbors many important examples of endangered wildlife.

Coffee production since the 1990s has increased at an annual rate of 3.6 per cent, but yearly consumption has only increased only by about 1.5 per cent. Some coffee producers are responding by expanding into precious rain forest in an effort to produce cheaper coffee.

The International Coffee Organization in London said that in 2001 Britain imported 167,000 bags (10,000 tonnes) of coffee from Indonesia, most of it robusta coffee destined to be made into instant coffee.

One answer to this problem is for consumers to drink more fair trade, eco-friendly coffee, which pays a higher price to the farmers and encourages them to employ sustainable farming methods.

Dr. Timothy O'Brien, who is with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, is advocating new international trade agreements that will keep coffee prices above poverty levels. "The free market, free for all (model) seen in the past decade is not the model to follow. We need new trade agreements to stabilize prices and we all need to be prepared to spend a little more for coffee."

We will be discussing more environmentally related questions on the subject of coffee in future blogs.