Are Coffee Farm Certifications Truly Benefiting the Environment?

With the rise of environmentally-conscious consumers, some producers and organizations have risen to the occasion to create certifications for coffee products that meet certain sustainability criteria that promote sustainability in the industry. Some of these are the Smithsonian’s Bird Friendly program, the Rainforest Alliance, USDA Organic, and Fair Trade. Each of these looks to tackle the issue of unsustainability in their own unique ways. Different programs concentrate on different aspects and have different criteria to award for each of their respective certifications. If you want to see some of the differences between certified farms, look at the images below:

The first image shows a Smithsonian certified coffee farm and the second image shows a Rainforest Alliance certified farm. Notice the difference in environments between the pictures.

So, the question is, does certification help the environment? A study done last year by Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan) looked at the effect shade coffee certification programs had on forest degradation. Many studies had been done on these certifications prior to this point but these studies focused mostly on the size of the forest area preserved due to certifications. This study looked to see the effect a shade coffee certification program, in this case, Rainforest Alliance’s certification, had on forest degradation prevention (i.e. maintaining forest quality) in an Ethiopian coffee farm. They also looked at how the certification program helped to prevent forest degradation near the coffee farm. In order to see these effects, they compared a typical coffee farm without certification to their selected certified farms.

A Little About Shade and Sun Coffee

Shade coffee farming is known as the traditional form of coffee production and was the main form of producing coffee until the 1970s. It has been consistently proven that shade coffee farming has important effects on forest conservation and biodiversity protection. Shade coffee farms have even been proven to work as shelters for an amazing amount of biodiversity in many rainforests around the world. Over the last few decades, these have been phased out by most major producers due to the system’s low levels of profits and production compared to sun grown, mass-produced coffee. Shade farming, on average, produces over 2.5 tons per hectare less than their sun counterparts. While production and profits are important factors in any industry, sun-grown coffee comes with costs as well. Sun coffee farms come with increased environmental costs such as deforestation, increased erosion, and chemical runoff.

In order to increase the use of shade farms in the industry certification programs have been created by a wide variety of organizations to promote the use of shade coffee systems. They have accomplished this by incentivizing farmers with the same revenues as sun-grown coffee by selling their coffee at premium prices.

A Quick Note on How Certification Works

The Rainforest Alliance, the certification used for this study, originally used to work primarily with big plantations but has recently moved to work with small-scale farming operations. They have expanded to encourage the shaded coffee system and to encourage coffee producers to move toward more sustainable operations. Their certification criteria include the number of tree species per area, tree height, and tree density found at each farm (if you want to learn more about their criteria you can head over to their website).The Rainforest Alliance also sends auditors to their certified farms each and every year to assure the farms are sticking to their criteria. If not, the farms risk losing their certification and the premium prices that come along with the certification.

So, Does It Work?

Now that enough background information has been given about what shade coffee farms are and how certification works, we move on to the findings of the study. It turns out that, aside from preventing deforestation in coffee farms, certification also conserved forest quality in the selected Ethiopian farms. They found that forest areas within certified farms were completely protected on a year-to-year basis while farms without certifications experienced some degree of forest degradation each year. This meant that certification programs were doing a significant job in protecting both rainforest quantity and quality in coffee farms.

Aside from looking at how rainforest conservation within the certified farms they looked to see how the rainforest in the surrounding areas was maintained. According to the researchers, there had been much debate about whether certification would lead other coffee farmers to take advantage of the nonprotected areas surrounding the protected areas and thus promote rainforest degradation. They believed that certification would not spill over to the surrounding areas and that it would only help the areas of the certified farms. As it turns out, this has not been the case. The researchers found that the areas surrounding certified farms were maintained up to a 100-meter radius. This marked an important finding for certification programs as it not only proved that farmers using the shade system could maintain premium prices but that certification was also influencing nearby farmers to also be sustainable in their own efforts to obtain certifications and premium prices for their coffee.

In the End…

In conclusion, it seems the economic incentives and the rigorous certification criteria provided by Rainforest Alliance pushed producers to conserve their forest coffee areas and the surrounding natural areas. The Alliance’s audit system has also seemed to work effectively as rainforest quality was not only conserved in these farms but also improved in some cases. This helps to make the case that coffee certification programs seem to be effective in promoting sustainable development in coffee farms communities. Nevertheless, this study looked at the effect one certification program, Rainforest Alliance, had in one location, Ethiopia. Work still needs to be done on how different certifications are working and which criteria in these programs have done the best job at promoting rainforest conservation. Further studies need to look at which methods of each certification seems to work best to conserve forest quality and proves to be the most cost-effective.

The findings of this study were published in the online version of World Development in April, 2017.