Tuesday, 8 Jan 2002
SEATTLE, Wash.
It seems like two weeks of holiday vacation is prompting a backlash; my schedule book has filled up quickly. Seattle Audubon is one of seven organizations funded by the same foundation to promote shade-grown coffee, and in the last few months, the various groups have been keeping in close contact. Meeting with campaign partners and keeping up on the minutia of the coffee trade takes more time than I often care to admit.
Fortunately, I also spend a lot of time talking to the public -- college students, other activists, supermarket shoppers -- about songbirds and coffee. In my slide presentations, I try to explain the impact coffee has on the environment in Latin America, a process I recently got to witness firsthand.
Last July, I spent a month in Nicaragua and Costa Rica visiting shade coffee farms, talking to farmers, and taking pictures. Flying in, the airplane-eye view of the deep green mountains of Central America was incredible. Once on the ground in Nicaragua, however, the reality of life in one of the poorest nations in the Western hemisphere was as oppressive as the blanket of humidity that hangs over the capitol city of Managua. Three years ago, Hurricane Mitch dumped a couple of feet of rain on the already-struggling country, killing thousands, washing away tons of topsoil, and further impoverishing small farmers. Now the recent drop in world coffee prices has made the economic situation even worse. Things have gotten so bad, a taxi driver told me, that people were fleeing to the U.S. because they could no longer make a living farming. In other words, people would rather risk dying in the desert than stay in Nicaragua.
Up in the mountains of Nicaragua, the temperature cooled off and it was easier to imagine a more promising future for the nation's farmers. One of my first stops was Selva Negra, a sustainable coffee plantation that produces shade-grown coffee and other agricultural products and welcomes tourists. Meaning "black forest," Selva Negra was established by descendents of the original German settlers who introduced coffee farming to Nicaragua a century ago. Touring the plantation, I could hear the screeching of howler monkeys in the near-pristine forest and see toucans perched on the railings of outbuildings.
At Selva Negra, coffee is grown under a modified shade canopy, meaning that the forest is actively managed to allow enough sunlight for the plants. It's a labor-intensive process, but it produces some of the highest-quality beans in Nicaragua. The entire plantation is designed to mimic natural systems and reduce pollution. Selva Negra produces its own fertilizer from the pulp of the coffee cherry and uses captured methane gas from the decomposition of other wastes to power cooking stoves, nearly eliminating the need for wood as a fuel source.
Crumbly soil on a sun coffee plantation.
Photo: Bill Bradlee, Seattle Audubon Society.
Down the road, however, a sun plantation demonstrated the stark contrast between the two styles of coffee farming. The farmers there told me the people at Selva Negra were crazy. The number of plants per acre increases nearly three-fold under full sun, they said. But when I reached down, the soil was dry, not at all like the moist compost at Selva Negra. There were virtually no birds. Without the overstory and the fauna that live there, insects are a constant problem. This plantation was hardly sustainable; without fertilizers and pesticides, the plants would die. And in Central America, pesticides are applied with less regulation and less regard for worker safety than in the U.S. As late as 1990, Costa Rica permitted the use of chlordane, a highly persistent insecticide banned in the United States.
The workers on the sun plantation couldn't understand why anyone would give up the yields made possible by full-sun farming. But they also didn't understand that they'd painted themselves into a corner. Dependent on expensive chemicals, they would have difficulty weathering the steep drop in coffee prices.
Back in the U.S., when I tell people about my trip and show them the slides, they start to get it. After the presentation, they can visualize the worker who picked the 100 beans that went into their cup of coffee. And they can see how their choice of which kind of coffee to drink affects the future of developing countries like Nicaragua.
Comments
View as Flat