Index Table of contents

The Changing Climate for Sustainable Coffee

P. S. BAKER

CABI E-UK, Bakeham Lane, Egham, Surrey TW20 9TY, UK

SUMMARY

There is growing evidence that climate change is affecting coffee production; the lower limit
for growing coffee has risen visibly in some countries, the proportion of Robusta to Arabica is
increasing in others and reports of extreme weather encountered by coffee farmers are
becoming common.

Climate change poses a severe challenge to our current concepts of sustainable coffee
production. Over the past two decades various sustainable schemes have arisen to provide the
consumer with ethical and environmentally friendly products. These schemes however were
designed and instigated before the threat of climate change became apparent and this
presentation argues that a major rethink is now required if they are to cope with rapidly
changing conditions in the field. There are two main reasons – scale and time:

 Scale: the farm is the unit of certification, but various environmental challenges can only
be partially combatted at the farm level. Certifications do not deal with wider problems
such as depletion of ground water (e.g. Vietnam), erosion and landslides (e.g. Uganda),
proliferation of diseases (much of Africa) and deforestation (e.g. Latin America and SE
Asia).

 Time: over the past ten years certified coffee has grown from 1% of global sales to 10%.
But during that period, volume of coffee produced has increased by more than this, with
much of the extra supply coming from newly planted land, some of it recently deforested.

Thus the current commercial trends in sustainability are too small and too slow to cope with
the level of change now becoming apparent in many coffee countries. A shift away from
farm-scale towards landscape-scale issues that identify and remedy major limiting factors to
production now needs to be considered. Standards cannot provide comprehensive solutions
that accommodate the wide range of local and varying threats to production and livelihoods
that coffee farmers are increasingly facing. This means defining limits for what standards can
reasonably achieve and establishing roles and modalities for other stakeholders to ensure
effective and long-term support for hard-pressed farmers.

INTRODUCTION

Are sustainability standards working? That is, are they delivering long-term sustainability for
global coffee – in the sense that stakeholders (farmers through to consumers) can have some
confidence that the various threats to coffee farmers’ livelihoods are being fully addressed?

This is not an easy question to answer. There is no denying that sustainable certifications have
had a major impact on the coffee industry. Over the last 15 years they have grown from a tiny
industry niche – less than 1% of global production – to a position where they now account for

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about 8% or more of sales But what impact has this growth had on the range of complex
issues that encompass the concept of sustainability?

There are two categories of questions that need to be asked about standards’ effectiveness:

 Do they deliver improvements in sustainability according to their own criteria?

 Are they coping with the major global threats to sustainability that are getting steadily
worse due to (inter alia) population pressure and climate change?

This presentation deals with these two questions, especially in regard to the increasing reality
of climate change that now is starting to severely test the concepts of sustainability. So we
start here by looking at the first question:

DO SUSTAINABLE CERTIFICATIONS DELIVER SUSTAINABILITY

ACCORDING TO THEIR RESPECTIVE CODES?

Sustainability is usually divided into three broad categories – environmental, social and
economic. A recent major review of standards states the following:

“It is difficult to firmly attribute observed sustainability impacts to certain practices, and thus
to determine whether standards systems are achieving their intended objectives.’ ‘The effects
of standards on yield and quality are variable and difficult to attribute to the standard per se,
since most study designs are confounded by possible differences in preexisting conditions.”

In the case of coffee, we have evidence that standards do have positive effects. Thus in Costa
Rica, organic certification improves coffee growers’ environmental performance by
significantly reducing chemical input use and increasing adoption of some environmentally
friendly management practices. Advantages also accrue to Peruvian Fair Trade cooperatives,
though differences can be quite subtle. Likewise for Mexican Fair Trade coffee advantages
are measurable but often quite small.

Others however conclude that ‘benefits for producers remain unclear’, or even, in the case of
Nicaraguan Fair Trade producers, farmers failed to increase per hectare profits or per capita
incomes and that over a period of ten years, organic certified producers became relatively
poorer than their conventional neighbours.

There are rather few comprehensive studies of the environmental effects of certified coffee.
One of the most detailed found no significant differences between farms participating in
organic and/or Fair trade certification programs and uncertified farms in terms of shade
management or species richness of ants and birds.

As one recent review of sustainable standards concluded:

“The overall conclusion […] it is hard to draw firm conclusions, and that there is little
evidence to support strong inference that certification schemes do impact on sustainability in
a positive way”.

Yet another review found a number of weaknesses in the existing literature on the
sustainability of coffee production which focuses exclusively on narrow measures of
sustainability such as the presence of shade and the use of small, non-random samples that do
not control for confounding factors. As that review indicates, the central difficulty of all
studies to date is the ‘counterfactual’ problem – i.e. they are all essentially post hoc studies
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that deal with a self-selected group (farmers who have decided to joint certification schemes)
that are then retrospectively compared to farmers who have not joined the schemes.

Hence from a strict scientific viewpoint, the evidence for sustainable standards delivering
significant and reliable improvements, even according to their own criteria, is far from
compelling. It seems very likely that some aspects of sustainability are improved by
certification in some cases, but this does not constitute measurable and significant progress in
environmental, social or economic improvement at scale.

A major unanswered question is whether the entirety of sustainable farms constitutes more
than the sum of their parts. Ecological theory, in the shape of the species-area law for
instance, would militate against many small parcels of coffee land having significant overall
impact on species survival. Another question is whether the total cost of sustainable
certifications (a very large but unknown sum borne mostly by farmers and consumers) is
money well spent.

It is to these broader issues of sustainability and coffee’s global significance and value that
this paper now turns as it examines other aspects of sustainability that have not been well
addressed by sustainable certifications.

COFFEE AND GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY

There are a number of serious global challenges that face humanity, caused primarily by
increasing human populations and the pollution they create. These include climate change
itself as well as growing water shortages through intensive groundwater extraction, water
pollution, energy shortages, biodiversity declines, soil erosion, and pests and diseases, both
indigenous and invasive. Many of these have become noticeably more problematic over the
past decade or so and coffee production could variously be both a cause and a victim of these
changes. The substance of this presentation is that the coffee industry can only claim it is
serious about sustainability if it is addressing these fundamental issues: hence through its
current focus on farm-by-farm certification (a micromanagement or ‘micro-sustainability’
approach) it is not addressing global concerns (a ‘macro-sustainability’ approach) that may
well be more important.

So how acute are the problems? The simple answer is that we do not know because we cannot
quantify them; the necessary mechanisms are not in place to provide accurate data and few
coffee scientists or sustainability professionals are concerned about them. Because of limited
space, the following only briefly covers some of the issues that need addressing.

Land use and land use change

Basic data about the amount of land dedicated to coffee production is uncertain. The area can
be estimated from FAOSTAT, which shows a decline since 1990, even though during this
period global production has risen by over 50% (Figure 1). We know that production has risen
sharply in a few countries and fallen in others. Through inspection of national production
figures it is certain that a substantial proportion of increases must have come from extending
the growing area of coffee. There have also been productivity increases in some countries
such as Brazil but the extent of this contribution cannot account for more than a fraction of
global increases. It seems likely that:

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 National reporting of total coffee land area is in some/many cases inaccurate.
 Total land-flux of coffee (i.e. amount entering and leaving coffee production) is rising
due to abandonment of coffee production at low altitudes due to global warming and
occupation of new land to supply increasing demand.

Accurate data on these issues is urgently needed if we are first to describe coffee’s changing
global footprint and then seek the most cost-effective ways of maintaining maximum
sustainability.

Figure 1. Global coffee production since 1990. a) tonnage (www.ICO.org data); b) area
(FAOSTAT)

Deforestation and carbon

Scientific data is scant but there are enough press and unpublished reports to suggest that
there are substantial plantings of coffee on recently deforested land. The yearly accrual of this
new land is likely to be of the same order of magnitude as any certification of newly shaded
coffee lands. Because the biodiversity and carbon lost from deforestation is greater than can
be replaced by shade coffee, it seems almost certain that coffee is becoming less sustainable at
the global level in regard to biodiversity and carbon footprints.

Research is needed to assess coffee’s global carbon footprint and determine where the greatest
fluxes of carbon (release and sequestration) are occurring. Only when that data is available
could an effective plan be made to reduce carbon footprint. I.e., it may well be more cost-
effective to concentrate on reducing carbon losses (through restricting deforestation and
increasing per hectare productivity) than by encouraging many small local carbon
sequestration projects that will have little overall impact on climate change. Lifecycle analysis
is currently used by the coffee industry to assess carbon footprint, but such analysis is limited
to the visible coffee chain and does not take into account land use change. Such limitations
need to be addressed in the future to more accurately reflect full carbon fluxes.

Research is also needed to assess the long-term effects of certification on enhancement or

protection of biodiversity, as compared with biodiversity loss through deforestation. I.e., it
might be more cost-effective to dedicate premiums from sales of sustainable coffee to protect
or buy forested land than to spend it on shade projects.

Water use

Substantial water pollution occurs through wet processing and there is no evidence that
sustainable certifications have had a significant effect on cleaning up streams and rivers; for

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example, there is no indication that certifiers or any post-hoc evaluators collect water samples
and measure pollution levels during and immediately after the harvesting period.

Irrigation is common in several major coffee countries, including India, Brazil and Vietnam.
In Vietnam there is evidence that farmers are using unsustainably high amounts of
groundwater, yet there seem to be no provisions to assess this in any current sustainable
certification scheme. Indeed the ability of audit regimes to improve sustainable water
management has been seriously questioned with suggestions that over-extraction can only be
addressed through catchment-wide planning initiatives that go far beyond the current
capabilities of sustainable schemes.

Because of increasing global shortages of water in many areas, there is therefore an urgent
need to reassess coffee’s troubled relationship to water and consider large scale means to
reduce pollution and often excessive water wastage. Technology exists that can fix these
issues, but currently sustainable certifications take insufficient steps to evaluate problems and
introduce solutions that have real catchment-scale benefits.

Pests and diseases

These cause substantial but largely un-quantified losses to coffee production that inevitably
increase coffee’s global environmental footprint. Recent upsurges in Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR)
have affected more than 30% of Colombia’s national production. In Africa, Coffee Wilt
Disease (CWD) may have caused more than one billion dollars’ worth of losses to farmers
over the past 20 years. However, there are no attempts by standards setters to limit the spread
of these diseases or their effects on farmers. Hence standards do not attempt to investigate or
improve the effectiveness of quarantine services. Nor have they actively promoted CLR-
resistant varieties that could have ameliorated serious outbreaks in Central America and
Colombia in recent years.

Major erosion and landslides

Landslides have caused the deaths of hundreds of coffee farmers and their families over the
past five years. Because of increasingly intensive rainfall, erosion problems will get worse.
Many of the major events give prior signals of failure, but cannot be tackled at the farm level,
i.e. through farm-level certification. This is a classic landscape-level issue that requires a
different approach to sustainability.

Biodiversity

There is no credible evidence that sustainable certifications are having material effects on
protecting biodiversity and endangered species. Indeed, one of the original reasons to promote
shade coffee – to protect neotropical bird migrants whose over-wintering habitats were
threatened by intensified coffee – was overstated. More recent work found that the abundance
of birds recorded in the N. American Breeding Bird Survey decreased by up to 18% between
1966 and 2005. But on disaggregating this data the abundance of US and Canadian resident
species was found to decrease by 30%, and that of migrants within the US and Canada
decreased by 19%. By contrast, neotropical migrants increased by up to 20%. It is evident
from this and studies referred to previously, that coffee’s relationship to biodiversity is much
more complex than originally assumed. Moreover, even though un-shaded coffee supports
less biodiversity than shaded coffee, climatic strictures (e.g. increasing humidity leading to
increasing fungal diseases) mean that re-shading is not a serious agronomic option and the
alternative – turning coffee lands into pasture – is a much worse option.
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Global impact of sustainable certifications

Without better quality data it is difficult to assess the global impact of coffee production and
because of this, any ameliorating impact of sustainable certifications is likewise difficult to
evaluate. The available data however would suggest that the overall impact of certifications
on global coffee is still small. We know that over the past 15 years, certifications of all types
have risen to about 18% of world production of which about a half is actually sold as such.
But during this time, coffee production has expanded by more than 20% - so there is actually
more uncertified coffee than there was when certifications started. And because we do not
know the total flux of coffee lands, we are unable to calculate the total land use change caused
by coffee during that time.

Scale and time

To play a significant role in global sustainability, standards will need to be adopted widely
within a relatively short time-frame – i.e. substantially faster than the rate of new coffee land
expansion. In order to achieve this they would have to roll-out a simple set of universal codes.
However as a recent study points out, “attempts to reduce the management issues of complex
landscape-level processes to a supply chain compliance checklist will do little to address
critical sustainability issues in producing regions”. The argument is that supply chain audit
regimes are fundamentally ill-suited to the requirements of natural resource management,
which are socially and ecologically embedded within local landscapes in diverse and intricate
ways. This view is echoed from a new and masterly treatise on standards which questions the
validity of globally mandated standards. Indeed to build standards that are fair, equitable and
effective, a principal recommendation is to allocate the responsibilities for policy formation
and implementation to the lowest level of governance possible. This means that local
knowledge, customs and norms take precedence over that from some larger geographic area
unless there is a compelling reason why this should not be the case. In the case of coffee
standards therefore, if they are to be effective, they need to be tailored to local needs and
conditions, i.e. a problem-oriented focus which militates against a universal standard regime.

CONCLUSIONS

Coffee is a complex business. It is a component of many systems –climate, land use, water,
carbon and nutrient cycles, biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as trade and
geopolitical systems. Many of these systems are undergoing fundamental change, with
population pressure as the ultimate driver. It is therefore vital to acknowledge and understand
them and how they interact to affect the coffee industry. Standards aim to codify behaviour of
the coffee system – this is a noble undertaking but to date they have been highly partial and
limited in what they have managed to achieve. The main contention here is that standards
have failed to take a fully scientific approach to deal with the inherent complexity of
interacting systems. And there is a danger that the industry will come to rely upon them for
issues of scale for which they were not designed. As such they cannot be expected to do the
‘heavy lifting’ to secure the long-term sustainability of the coffee industry. A more scientific
and fully quantifiable approach to both standards and sustainability is required, drawing on a
range of disciplines and making full use of a systems approach.

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