I am interested in knowing if people drink certified coffee, why they drink it, if they trust the certifications and what other type of information might they be interested in seeing/knowing about coffee growing practices… about social, environmental, quality standards.. and everything else

Coffee, certification, and consumers

For the past several years, coffee countries have been in crisis. Farmers have been facing twenty-year lows in pricing for the past three years, from a high in the early nineties of over $2.255/lb., to the current $.43/lb. This crisis causes farmers to abandon their land and migrate toward urban areas to find menial work, or to illegally immigrate to more financially stable countries. It tempts some farmers to replace their coffee trees with coca, which draws them and their families into servitude to drug cartels, and forces them to destroy the fertility of their land.

For other farmers, the low prices create incentives to opt for industrialized, high-quantity production of low-quality coffee hybrids that grow in full sun and depend on high-chemical inputs and mechanized harvesting. With this agricultural shift has come massive deforestation, and population decline of migratory birds and other key species (see "Shades of Shade," page 22).

This crisis can also spark uprisings and civil wars in these financially and politically unstable countries, forcing the consumer countries (predominantly the US and the European Union) to use military force to stabilize them.

Fair Trade, shade grown, and certified organic programs were created in part to counteract these effects of the commodities market. The terms have become buzzwords for coffee drinkers around the world.

In the specialty coffee industry today there is much controversy about the virtues of the various forms of certification: the verifiability of organic; the economic viability of shade grown; the ability of Fair Trade to improve the coffee producer’s lot.

To make sense of this discussion the consumer needs to understand these terms as well as the consequences of the low value that is currently placed on intensely handcrafted high-quality coffee.

It’s All in the Details

Shade Grown and Bird Friendly

This designation (see page 22) ensures that multiple species have habitat, and that dwindling tropical rainforests are preserved. But shade grown coffee is not necessarily organic and does not necessarily address socio-economic issues.

Fair Trade

Fair Trade addresses primarily the price points at which coffee is sold and traded on the world commodity market. Coffee, like oil, pork bellies, and frozen concentrated orange juice, is traded on a market based on speculation and futures.

Fair Trade ensures a "floor" price that allows farmers to make minimum profits in low markets. Fair Trade farmers receive a guaranteed minimum of $1.26 for nonorganic coffees and $1.41 for certified organic coffees. Like shade grown and certified organic coffee, Fair Trade is a work in progress and not a panacea for the present crisis.

The Fair Trade program’s limitation is that only cooperatives democratically operated along detailed guidelines laid down by Transfair USA (the certifying agency in the US) can apply. However, many traditional coffee farms are not co-ops. They can be privately owned or run in a tribal or communal setting. Such structures may produce premium coffee using strict environmental guidelines, pay decent wages, and provide humane working conditions for their workers, but they cannot earn the Fair Trade label and premium. Despite claims to the contrary by Transfair USA, its guidelines do not adequately address issues surrounding the environment, biodiversity, species preservation, or whether or not the coffee trees come from genetically modified rootstocks.

Certified Organic

Organic farming is more about relationships than simply "chemical-free" farming. The checks and balances that result from an organic system come from the interaction of a wide variety of life-forms that run the gamut from bacteria and rhizomes below the ground, to pollinators and flowers above the ground, to bears crapping in the woods on the ground.

Organic certification ensures that the coffee is grown without the common pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides used on coffee, many of which are banned in the US. Buyers of certified organic coffees offer a premium to farmers (around 40 cents above the commodities market). Even when world coffee markets are low, as they are now, certified organic farmers are still able to make a profit.

The purchase of certified organic coffee allows small farms to compete against larger coffee interests. In many Third World countries, the division of wealth is unevenly distributed (a few wealthy, many poor, and almost no middle class). Organic certification, similar to the Fair Trade system, helps to close the gap. (In order to be sold internationally as organically certified, the local certifier within the country of origin must be certified by IFOAM, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. This is also true for American products sold abroad as organic.)

The fly in this ointment is that certified organic coffee commands different prices in different geographic locations. For example, an organic farmer in Costa Rica or Sumatra may use the same growing practices and produce the same quality of coffee as organic farmers in Mexico, Peru, or Bolivia. But because the Costa Rican and Sumatran yields are so much smaller, their coffees will generally receive premiums far above the organic Fair Trade floor price. Mexico and Peru are the two largest organic coffee producers in the world, so the size of the yield automatically forces the price down.