Coffee and Tropical Rain Forests
Will we lose them both?
PART ONE.
The industrialization of agriculture.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge.
Biodiversity.
Tropical Rain Forests.
Human rights.
Indigenous people.
Illegal immigration driven by economics.
Second only to oil as the largest commodity traded in the world.
On what do all of these topics converge?
Coffee.
Rain forests are the second most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, second only to coral reefs. They could hold a cure for cancer, or answers to questions we do not even know enough to ask. Yet, we destroy them with wild abandon for short term gain, or worse, we think we are doing something useful. As Robert Merton warned:
. . . purposeful actions to attempt to change a complex system will often produce unintended consequences.
----Robert Merton (1936)1
Coffee is the beverage of choice in the morning for millions of people around the globe. In the Western Hemisphere, Mexico, Central and South America are our coffee producing regions, also in tropical forest regions. Where once this co-existence of coffee bushes and tropical rainforests was idyllic; global governance destroyed it with a “better” plan and we are still reeling from the devastation that has followed. This is the story.
Coffee has been grown by indigenous people in Mexico, Central and South America since it was introduced by Spain. Originating in Ethiopia,2 coffee arrived in the Americas, brought by the Dutch to New York (1678) then to South American (1718).3 In 1796, it came to colonial Mexico through the port of Veracruz as a cash crop, and soon literally took root.4 Although it was not indigenous to the region, the coffee bushes soon adapted to the shade of the rain forest and slopes of the hillsides for optimum production of the most flavorful coffee beans. It was not until after the Revolution during the Reform period (1854-1876) that Benito Juarez, the Mexican President, took colonial lands and redistributed them for coffee production, but the property went to large and often corrupt land holders.5 Indigenous people and mestizos became the equivalent of slaves on coffee plantations. Then the Land Revolution of 1910 for the first time acknowledged that indigenous lands (mostly in Chiapas and Oaxaca) must be recognized and it was memorialized in Art. 27 of the Constitution of 1917.6
With this new land ownership, Indigenous people used these tracts of land for small coffee farms. Coffee grows well in this tropical rain forest environment and a large number of indigenous people of Mexico live in the tropical rain forest region (Chiapas and Oaxaca and Veracruz), the the Tzeltal, the Tzotzil, the Chol, the Zoque, and the Tojolabal in Chiapas7 and the Zapotecs in Oaxaca.8 So coffee farms became traditional indigenous businesses in adapting to colonization. Knowledge of how to grow the best coffee beans accumulated as traditional knowledge among the families.
But the World Economic Report 1950-51 called for “some kind of international action designed to bring about an adequate international flow of capital to underdeveloped countries”9 and for new mechanisms for stabilizing the demand and price of primary commodities traded internationally. This was based on an economic model of industrialized agriculture found to have been used successfully in the United States, so the United Nations seized on the model to be applied to coffee, a commodity that had global trade appeal and impact and raise the standard of living for Mexico.10 The decision to industrialize coffee production was intended to bring more economic prosperity and economic and political stability to Latin America in a time of political instability. Those small farms producing flavorful, shade-grown coffee beans, would be replaced by the tasteless (by comparison) industrialized coffee bean.
Dominating and Conquering the Environment in the Name of Industrialization
Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.
― Chief Luther Standing Bear (1933)
While the indigenous people of Mexico had developed traditional ecological knowledge in farming coffee, they found the best balance of conditions for both the rain forest and the coffee bushes to thrive, although it took human skill and time to care for each plant in random placement in the forest. This balance of farming with the forest was an approach that outsiders saw as inefficient and a waste of resources.
To industrialize the coffee industry in Mexico, this project required the development of coffee trees (they look like bushes, but are called, “trees”) that grow in bright sun, requiring these to be grown outside the normal habitat of shady tropical forests. Instead, they would be grown in large, agricultural operations of industrialized farming that had been so successful in the United States. These coffee trees could be planted in long rows that could be exposed to maximum sun for maximum growth and greater coffee production and coffee trade, leading to this intended economic stability.
This new coffee “tree” that could sustain bright, open sun without shade, be planted in rows in open sunlight, and eliminate damp-loving fungus, like coffee rot, was developed. Coffee leaf rot is a fungus that could wipe out a country’s coffee industry, which happened to Sri Lanka in the 1870s and 1880s,11 and it was reasoned at the time that a tree that grew in the sun would be less likely to be susceptible to fungal diseases in the damp, shade of the tropical rain forest.
In order to pursue this vision of industrialized coffee, trees had to be planted in open rows, requiring vast amounts of tropical rain forest to be clearcut, resulting in massive losses of tropical rainforest in Latin America, funded by the United States. Today, 30-40% of the more than 6.5 million acres of coffee plantations in Latin America, and about half of the coffee producing area, have been converted to sun, technified coffee production with clear cutting.12 By any measure this has reduced dramatically the biodiversity that relies on tropical rain forest habitat,13 as well as destroying trees which serve as carbon sinks for sequestering carbon dioxide which is produced from our worldwide burning of fossil fuels. A New York Times article in 1990 reported the findings of a World Bank study:
''Because of the rapid pace of deforestation,'' the rain forest, the Lacandona jungle in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, has already been ''reduced to the minimum size essential for the integrity of its ecosystem,'' a recent World Bank study concluded. Scientists estimate that 60 percent of the lush but fragile forest, which in 1940 covered 5,000 square miles, making it the size of Connecticut, has been lost since 1970. More than 1,500 square miles was lost in the last decade.14
In addition to the damage to the environment through these policies, a humanitarian crisis was triggered. Small farms were eliminated in favor of large agricultural operations in all but the most remote and indigenous areas of Latin America. Many areas of Chiapas, the southernmost province of Mexico, for example, maintained traditional coffee farming operations throughout this movement.15 At least one-third of the population of Chiapas is indigenous people. In 1989-2001, coffee prices plummeted on the worldwide market 70%, and small farmers were driven into bankruptcy. In the search for better economic climates, many of these displaced farmers began to immigrate across the U.S.-Mexico border. In one notable event on May 30, 2001, seven Mexican coffee farmer immigrants from the Veracruz region of Mexico, the major coffee-producing region of Mexico hit hard by the industrialization period, were found dead in the desert in Yuma, Arizona. These seven individuals were representative of the exodus of 70% of residents from the coffee producing regions who had fled to the United States for better economic conditions.16
Some farmers, who maintained traditional, shade-grown coffee farms and who survived the coffee market crash, stayed and endured the decade of destructive policies. The 1990s brought a resurgence in a consumer desire for small farm, shade grown coffees due to their taste. These indigenous farmers recovered and were able to ask premium prices for their coffee, as more demand evolved for shade-grown coffees.
The global leaders’ intention of bringing economic stability to the region underestimated the possibility that corruption could cause the collapse of coffee prices when the Mexico Coffee Institute, IMECAFE created in 1956, to distribute resources to coffee farmers collapsed from its own corruption two decades later. Displacement of indigenous farmers with the industrialization of coffee processes and the decline of employment might have been averted. The destruction of the tropical rain forests of Mexico traded immediate industrialized farming gain for long term tropical forest resources that could hold a cure for cancer, in the biodiverse ecosystem. Failing to consider the environmental and social impact of this policy was a major flaw in the planning for coffee industrialization.
Tropical Rain Forests hold most of Earth’s Biodiversity
The tropical rain forest areas of the earth are special climate and ecosystem combinations that are home to 75% of the biodiversity of life on earth. When rain forests are cleared, the life that lives within it, is diminished or erased. As Albert Einstein purportedly said, the first intelligent rule of tinkering is that you never throw away any of the parts; paraphrased by Aldo Leopold, who developed the western environmental ethic, saying, “[T]o keep every cog and wheel, is the first rule of intelligent tinkering.” 17 This first rule has not slowed the tinkering with the complex tropical rain forest system, losing dozens of species each day from the destruction of the rain forests. Every day, 135 species become extinct due to rain forest destruction, globally.18 Interestingly, most of the Earth’s biodiversity hotspots are where coffee is grown. Latin America produces fifty percent of the world’s coffee19 where at least fifty percent of the world’s tropical rain forests exist.
World view of biodiversity hotspots (orange) with coffee-growing regions (yellow).20
Globally, we have 46% less forested area over the past 10,000 years, and that deforestation rate has increased to the present, but slowed in the last decade. Most of deforestation is due to agriculture, including coffee industrialization. The loss of tropical rainforest has doubled in the last 15 years, and projections are that all tropical rain forests will be gone by the end of this century.21
Loss of forests to agricultural land.22
In a recent study, it was found that the reduction in tropical rainforests destroys the rain cycle that is critical to maintaining the complex and highly biodiverse ecosystem. When the rain cycle begins to fail, it affects the hydrologic cycle of the entire region beyond the tropical rain forest ecosystem.23
Loss of Coffee Growing Lands
By 2050, projections are that there will be a reduction of suitable coffee growing lands by 50%.24 The most recent IPCC report shows that in any of the three climate scenarios, optimal coffee growing will be reduced to almost nothing.
The Inter-American Development Bank graphic, shows the projected areas where coffee can no longer be grown, with the most unsuitable areas in red. The coffee growing region of Mexico has significant red status in 2050.25
The global governance interventions into a delicate ecosystem without adequate consideration of the unintended consequences has proved catastrophic. These policies of the 1950s set in motion the destruction of a globally important natural resource that serves as a carbon sequestration center for carbon dioxide, serves as habitat for the world’s biodiversity, and maintains the hydrologic cycle in the region. Now we could stand to lose both coffee and tropical rain forests.
What we are doing to repair this damage, the missteps and the future steps will be the focus of “Coffee and Tropical Rain Forests, Part Two,” next week.
R Merton, ‘The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action’ (1936) 1 American Sociological Review 894.
https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/History-of-Coffee
https://scribblerscoffee.com/blogs/news/the-history-of-coffee-part-3-the-americas
Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Rural Sustentable y la Soberanía Alimentaria (CEDRSSA) (2018) Oportunidades para la agricultura en México: La estevia. Poder Legislativo Federal Cámara de Diputados. CDMX, México, 13 p. http://www.cedrssa.gob.mx/files/b/13/92Estevia.pdf (visited May 5, 2022).
The Reform period defined at https://www.britannica.com/event/La-Reforma (visited May 5, 2022).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Mexico
https://indigenousmexico.org/chiapas/chiapas-forever-indigenous/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Oaxaca
United Nations Development Program, “Environmental Outlook GEO4” p.167 (2007) at https://na.unep.net/atlas/datlas/sites/default/files/GEO-4_Report_Full_en.pdf
United Nations Development Program, “Environmental Outlook GEO4” p.167 (2007) at https://na.unep.net/atlas/datlas/sites/default/files/GEO-4_Report_Full_en.pdf
Smithsonian Institute website, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/MigratoryBirds/Coffee/Slideshow/default.cfm?slide=0
Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, University of California Press (2007), footnote 8, page 137, quoting, Perfecto, Ivette, et. al., “Shade Coffee: A Disappearing Refuge for Biodiversity,” BioScience 46, no. 8(1996): 598-608.
Perfecto, I., Rice, R., Greenberg, R., and Van der Voort, M. (1996). Shade coffee: A disappearing refuge for biodiversity. BioScience 46: 598–608.
Larry Rohter, “Tropical Rain Forest in Mexico is Facing Destruction over the Decade,” The New York Times, July 10, 1990 at https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/10/science/tropical-rain-forest-in-mexico-is-facing-destruction-in-decade.html .
Maria Elena and Martinez-Torres, Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers, Ohio University Press (2006), p. 126.
https://www.academia.edu/8634338/_Dying_for_a_Cup_of_Coffee_Migrant_Deaths_in_the_US-Mexico_Border_Region_in_a_Neoliberal_Age_Geopolitics_Vol._12_No._2_2007_228-247
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac 190 (1949), paraphrasing the quote, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-daily-destruction/
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-top-coffee-producing-countries/
Hardner and Rice, “Rethinking Green Consumerism,” Scientific American (May 2002) at https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/wp-content/uploads/archive/documents/Doc_241.pdf
https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state-of-the-planet/when-will-the-rainforests-be-gone
UN FAO Foresty Report https://fra-data.fao.org/WO/assessment/fra2020/ (visited May 11, 2022).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05690-1
https://www.iadb.org/en/improvinglives/most-unexpected-effect-climate-change
https://www.iadb.org/en/improvinglives/most-unexpected-effect-climate-change