My Coffee Confliction

By Emily Arendsen

This week has been coffee themed, which has been great for me because I am one of the millions of Americans that drink coffee daily. It has been eye-opening, answering questions that I didn’t even know I had about the coffee production process and the steps it takes to get coffee to the consumer. It has also taught me about the social issues that coffee production, the way it is currently done, compounds.

We visited a shade-grown coffee farm, ran by Don Roberto in the Puntarenas province of Costa Rica. Here we had the opportunity to hear his perspectives on what coffee-growing is like. Don Roberto has a very special coffee farm because of his beliefs on forest conservation and high-quality coffee. He uses his farm as a source of income, a source of food and a protected area for wildlife. The shade-giving banana and bean plants that he cultivates function to give shade to make higher quality coffee and also produce food for his family. The bean plants also function as fertilizers because the bacteria that live in their roots put nitrogen into the ground in a form that plants can use. Don Roberto believes in producing quality coffee without harming the environment, so he doesn’t use pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. Instead, he lets the leaves that fall from the trees stay on the ground and decompose under his coffee plants as a natural fertilizer. He has small rows of grass that keep fallen leaves from blowing away so he can use them as fertilizer. He does not grow coffee on all of his property because he isn’t capable of tending to that many trees and he wants to conserve the forests, and the shade plants that are over his coffee plants also provide habitat for wildlife. As a person studying ecology, it was inspiring to see conservation and farming intersecting in such a positive way.

            Don Roberto also faces many challenges in his coffee-production process. He works with a co-op in order to be able to sell coffee from a small farm because it is difficult to grow coffee independently in Costa Rica. This is because a coffee grower needs a brand in order to be able to export coffee. Receiving a brand is an expensive and time-consuming process that small farmers can’t afford. Since Don Roberto sells his coffee to the co-op, he does not get to negotiate the price and his co-op does not incentivize organic farming practices that yield high-quality beans. His co-op simply reduces the price that they will pay to the producer if they present the co-op with unviable beans. According to the movie Black Gold, there are about six middlemen involved in the exportation process, leading to the large disparity between the price the consumer pays for coffee and the price the producer receives.

            After thinking about the social issues that occur because of large-scale coffee production and the system that is the status quo for producing coffee, it has become apparent to me that consumers’ buying habits need to change, including my own. Buying Fair-Trade Certified coffee helps to fight poverty by improving the wages that the producers receive and reducing middle-men that increase the final price that the consumer pays without regard for how little the producer was paid.