Conservation Guardians of Northwest Illinois

More Field Notes Previous Next

Home  •  Field Notes  • Shade-Grown Coffee

Coffee is for the Birds

Fall 2001 Newsletter

When we think of wildlife habitat, we often think in terms of our forests and prairies, National Parks, river systems and wetlands, and even our own backyard.

We have learned the importance of providing food, water and shelter for our native birds, perhaps we compost and recycle and even help to get laws passed that will aid in protecting endangered species and preserving our natural areas.

We are also aware of the interdependence of living things and the repercussions of human actions throughout the world. An oil-spill off the coast of Alaska can affect the fish and wildlife of an entire continent, a nuclear accident can threaten worldwide health and an alien insect can cause the destruction of thousands, even millions, of trees.

The environment is not just a national concern, it is a global one. Many of our beautiful birds depend for their winter homes on the hospitable environment south of our border: in Mexico, Costa Rica, and other countries in Central and South America.

The ongoing destruction of the rainforests for agriculture has severely limited the natural wintering grounds of these migratory birds, causing what many ornithologists have seen as a lessening of their numbers in North America in the spring and summer.

However, even the rainforests' near disappearance does not necessarily mean the extinction of the indigo bunting or the Baltimore oriole if the people of the Americas are foresighted enough to change their present habits and plan for the future. Many migratory birds have found refuge in what may seem at first to be a surprising place: the coffee plantation.

Coffee, a native of the Old World, was an under story crop in the wild and was at first cultivated as an under story crop as well. Shade trees were planted to protect the plants from sun and hard rains and to reduce the need for weeding. Since they attracted birds that ate harmful insects, the trees also aided in pest control. When their leaves fell, they provided a mulch which helped control erosion and added nutrients to the soil, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers.

The Atlanta Audubon Society lists over thirty species of migratory birds commonly found in traditional, shade coffee plantations, including the ovenbird, wood thrush, and the ruby-throated hummingbird. The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center reports that traditional coffee plantations and similarly managed cacao farms are home to over 150 species of birds.

Even birds that are usually restricted to forest habitats, such as redstarts and yellow-throated vireos, are found on these plantations in significant numbers. In fact, shade coffee plantations, as bird habitats, are second only to virgin forests.

However, in the last twenty years or so, significant changes have occurred in the way coffee is cultivated. It was traditionally grown on small, family-owned farms, but its importance to the economy of Latin America as well as an outbreak of a fungal disease called coffee leaf rust in the '70s produced a demand for sun-tolerant hybrids, meaning more compact plants with higher yields.

But these hybrids cannot support the environment that gives many species of birds their homes. In addition, because of the cost involved in maintaining these plants (they need a variety of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides), they are grown mainly by large-scale growers.

The coffee produced by these larger plantations is usually called "sun coffee" as opposed to the traditional, wildlife-supporting "shade coffee." Unfortunately, there is at present no standard label for "shade coffee" and thus any manufacturer can decide what the term means. In fact, researchers in Mexico have devised five categories of sun/shade plantations in order to describe Latin American coffee farms.

The rarest and least "technified" practice, used mainly by small farms, is called "rustic" or "rusticano" and entails planting coffee in existing forest with little change in vegetation. The most extreme "sun coffee" technique has no shade at all, and the categories in between range from planting diverse shade trees to planting a single "canopy" species to provide shade.

Reduced-shade or "sun coffee" has gained a great deal of ground, literally, in the past two decades. Seventeen percent of Mexican land planted in coffee now produces sun coffee, and in Colombia the amount rises to almost seventy percent.

This environmental change has had a devastating effect on migratory birds. According to the Migratory Bird Center, studies in Colombia and Mexico found a species decrease of 94-97% when coffee was changed from shade to sun. Another study found that where there had been ten common species of migratory birds in shade coffee, there were now only four.

Consequently, the United States and Canada may soon face a quieter spring. From 1980 to 1994 the numbers of migratory birds here have dropped significantly. For example, the North American Breeding Bird Survey shows a decline of two to six percent each year for such birds as the Tennessee warbler, the Cape May warbler and the Baltimore oriole.

Large-scale coffee growers are probably unlikely to change their cultivation practices for love of birds alone. However, even for the plantation owners, sun coffee has many disadvantages.

Although more plants can be grown per hectare, their lifetime is reduced and they must be replaced more often than shade-grown plants. While in shade plantations side-crops can be grown to produce other commodities such as wood or fruit, sun plantations usually can support only the coffee plants themselves, causing farmers to rely totally on a single crop.

Many people find sun coffee more bitter-tasting than coffee from the slower-ripening shade plants. More importantly, the hybrid plants require more irrigation, causing a decrease in the available water supply, and erosion is more prevalent than in shade coffee farms.

Year-round labor is necessary, and the need for pesticides results in toxic run-off, endangering both human and wildlife populations. Coffee is one of the world's most important legal exports (second only to petroleum).

The United States consumes one-third of the world's coffee. An article in the August 1999 Atlantic Monthly quotes Chris Wille of the Rainforest Alliance: "All we have to do is get just a small fraction of North Americans and Europeans to demand shade-grown coffee, and we can push the industry back and save tremendous amounts of habitat."

Several other organizations, notably the Seattle and Atlanta Audubon chapters, are campaigning for shade-grown coffee. The Atlanta chapter has designed an attractive t-shirt with the message, "Drink Shade-Grown Coffee for the Birds." It's available for twelve dollars on their website. You can even order it in Spanish: "Beba Cafe Cultivado en la Sombra Hagalo por las Aves"!

The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center has trademarked the term "bird-friendly" in an attempt to standardize what they see as coffee grown under conditions that provide good bird habitat. Among their requirements are a minimum of ten species of shade trees, a minimum shade cover of 40 percent at noon and maintenance of road and stream buffers to control erosion.

The Rainforest Alliance has instituted a labeling program called ECO-O.K.; the logo is available to coffee companies who pay a licensing fee and pass an auditing procedure that monitors such issues as fair treatment of workers, minimal use of chemicals and conservation of the ecosystem.

Conservation International supports organic coffee farmers in Mexico, and Jennifer Bingham Hull, author of the Atlantic article, writes that Starbucks now offers a shade coffee grown in Chiapas, Mexico. Shade-grown coffees are now marketed by several coffee companies, some of which make donations to the Audubon Society or provide coffee for fundraisers.

A list is available on the Atlanta Audubon website. According to Colleen Yonda, co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Galena and Dubuque, the shade-grown coffee the store had ordered, Song Bird Coffee manufactured by Thanksgiving Coffee Company, has not sold as well as they had hoped.

It is more expensive than ordinary coffee, but, says Yonda, "It tastes wonderful - rich and flavorful. It stands up to any specialty coffee on the market." Most people are simply unaware that the kind of coffee they drink has anything to do with bird habitat.

Bird watching, meanwhile, has become a very popular American pastime. A recent article in the New York Times reports that birders spend more than $25 billion a year on seed, equipment and travel.

If we buy feeders and binoculars so that we can have the pleasure of observing warblers and rose-breasted grosbeaks, surely we should be willing to do something to insure their continued return.

In addition, we would not only be protecting the environment and preserving the health and dignity of farm workers, but as we watch the antics of the birds at our morning feeder, we just might be sipping a tastier cup of coffee.