A Brief Look at Mass Farming and the Environment

A plantation in Costa Rica, South America

As stated in the previous post, world coffee prices have been on the increase in recent years.  According to Wikipedia, higher rates of consumption in China, India and Russia, together with lower harvests worldwide, have led to prices that have more than doubled since 2005. In 2009, Brazil was the world leader in coffee production, followed by Vietnam and Columbia. The vast majority of this coffee is produced using mechanized agricultural methods, and is considered by many advocates to be harmful to the environment.

According to Wikipedia, a number of classifications are used to describe coffee produced in accordance with certain environmental standards. Bird Friendly or Shade-Grown coffee is a term employed for coffee that is grown in areas where there is a natural canopy of trees that shelters coffee plants as well as providing a suitable habitat for other plants and animals. In many such places, the trees used to protect the plants are fruit trees. These fruit trees often provide additional income to the small landholder as well as providing an additional source of food.

Organic coffee is produced under strict certification guidelines, and is grown without the use of harmful pesticides. According to Wikipedia, coffee is grown with more pesticides than any other product, and is especially prevalent in the large industrialized plantations.  To some extent, increased competition has led to a greater incidence of pesticides, as output of coffee is increased in the short term as a result.

The development of mass farming techniques first took place in the 1970s and 1980s, and was called the Green Revolution. During this period, the US Agency for International Development contributed 80 million dollars to plantations in South America in order to shift to "modern" farming techniques. These plantations changed their farming methods from shade grown to "sun grown" coffee. Sun grown coffee requires the cutting down of large numbers of trees, leading to widespread deforestation, as well as degradation of the soil and water from pesticides.

The 1990s saw a further expansion of Brazil's coffee plantations. This decade also witnessed the entry of Vietnam into the market following the lifting of the United States' trade embargo against the Southeast Asian nation. The more efficient Vietnamese were soon putting pressure on such countries as Brazil, Nicaragua and Ethiopia. Lower Vietnamese prices were undercutting many small landholders in other countries, forcing these farmers to sell their coffee at prices lower than the cost of production, forcing many small farmers out of business and causing them to leave home and move to slums in the big cities.