This week I’ve been thinking about coffee. Our household coffee consumption has rocketed in recent years: I’m drinking more of it and Rebecca has joined me since a conversion experience in Italy a couple of years back. As with many of the exotic imported foods we consider staples, it can be hard to remember that coffee beans are grown in real places by real people. We try to do our best for the latter by choosing Fairtrade, or at the very least brands with comparable established relationships with their growers. What about the places the beans are grown and the wildlife which inhabits them? A nicely made video dropped into my inbox from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology this week, reminding me of the benefits of shade-grown coffee in the Americas, especially for new world warbler species (I was going to embed the video here but it’s a private link and I can’t get it to work – try clicking here).
When we’re in the States I see the phrase shade grown on labels fairly often, but a quick survey of the labels in our local Waitrose suggests it is rarely if ever used here. In fact I think I’ve only seen shade grown used by the RSPB. Do other UK suppliers source fewer beans from the Americas? That doesn’t seem likely, and there are plenty of single origin varieties on offer from Colombia, Peru, Mexico, etc which make no mention of growing method. Or perhaps because the warblers in question are not ‘our’ warblers are we simply less bothered about them? That would seem a shame.
Our standard coffee purchase is a Waitrose own-brand. There’s some information on provenance on the Waitrose website, but most of it is unhelpfully vague, for example ‘we receive assurances over the methods used and quality produced’. But since they also say ‘we are proud that our own-label coffee beans come from defined sources’ Waitrose should be able to tell me exactly where in the world the beans we buy come from, and give us some more information about the estates on which they are grown. I’ll write to them and see what happens. In the meantime I’d also like to find out:
- Where genuinely shade grown coffee is sold in the UK. I’ll report back here.
- Whether growing style (shade vs full sun) is as much of an issue for birds and other wildlife in other parts of the world, e.g. central Africa. I would guess not so much where coffee plantations have not replaced rainforest, but I don’t know.
I’ve just found this helpful blog by Derek Thomas (always google your questions before writing a speculative blog post!) from a few years back which gives some answers, but it will nonetheless be interesting to see whether anybody at Waitrose has encountered the bird friendly coffee concept since that time, and figure out which new brands on sale in the UK are supporting this. For now, here’s an American warbler. Not a long-range migrant and so not a species likely to turn up in a coffee plantation – but it is the only one I’ve managed to get a few seconds footage of!
Chris Foster 