Influential Issues: Coffee

Coffee: the miracle bean that gives a morning buzz! Roughly one hundred million Americans are daily coffee drinkers—even more world-wide! Upwards of one billion pounds of coffee beans are consumed yearly by just America. So, where do all these beans come from? How are they grown?

The answer lies in the cloud forests of tropical countries such as Brazil and Kenya. A cloud forest is a jungle at high altitudes. Instead of getting rain, it is watered by clouds that float through it.

Cloud forests are threat-ened by a variety of things. Many people poach animals for medicine, or animal pelts. Deforestation is a major threat, with estimates of 11/2 acres of rainforest being cut down, per second! 

This Read Howler Monkey
lives in the cloud forests
of the Americas.

Even this nearly 400-pound silverback
gorilla needs your help!

Coffee plantations are a considerable part in this. Many coffee farmers strip a mountainside of its cloud forest in order to plant their coffee trees. Wild coffee trees naturally grow in the shade. When they are planted in the sun, they grow super fast and strip the land of its nutrients! A few years after the coffee trees are planted, the farmer is forced to move to a new lot of cleared cloud forest, because the sun-grown coffee trees suck out all the nutrients from the soil of the first lot.

A tree like this would take a few hundred years to grow back.

The cloud forest can't regrow on an abandoned coffee planation because the coffee trees have stripped the land of its nutrients. It takes a long while before bacteria and fungi have recycled the coffee trees and returned their nutrients to the soil, and even longer for the colossal jungle trees to regrow to their former majesty.

What can you do to help? There is an easy solution to the coffee issue: simply drink shade-grown coffee! Shade-grown coffee is grown in a cloud forest, rather then instead of a cloud forest. This not only allows the animals of the cloud forest to be more-or-less undisturbed, but the more-natural shade-grown coffee tree doesn't suck all the nutrients from the ground. Shade-growing also makes slower growing, which creates a denser, harder bean. Coffee roasters and coffee experts prefer a bean like this, as it makes for even more delicious coffee.

Most coffee shops offer shade-grown coffee. When you're drinking it, be sure to congratulate yourself on the eco-friendly, tastier way of life!