CI and Starbucks
Our decade-long partnership with Starbucksis expanding beyondthe coffee farm to protect rich, surrounding landscapes. It is the first of its kind to recognize the protection of forests as a solution to climate change.
Conservation Beyond the Farm, In Your Cup
True to the company’s history of trailblazing environmental business solutions, Starbucks is announcing the next phase of its 10-year partnership with CI and will be the first corporation of its caliber to promote the protection of forests as a solution to climate change. That deserves a tall skinny latte.
Since 1998, CI and Starbucks have demonstrated through green production standards and ethical sourcing that a multibillion-dollar corporation can help protect plants and animals and support local economies. You might recognize this work in Starbucks’ Shade Grown Mexico brand.
Now we are taking our conservation partnership beyond the farm to the biologically rich landscapes that surround and nurture the most important coffee-growing regions in the world – the majority of which occur in the biodiversity hotspots.
Protecting forests is at the heart ofthis relationship and is an essential first response to climate change. Few people realize that more than 20% of all carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning and clearing of forests – more than from all of the world’s cars, trucks, SUVs, and trains combined. Through this partnership, Starbucks will invest in and support local coffee growers and their communities who help keep forests intact, both on and off the farm in Mexico, Indonesia, and other key coffee-growing regions, providing tangible benefits to local and global communities.
In the words of Howard Schultz, the chairman and CEO of Starbucks: "This renewed relationship with CI will deepen our customers’ confidence that every cup of coffee they purchase is responsibly grown, ethically traded, and proudly served."
Go on. Get a refill.
Mexico
Mexico is among the most diverse countries on Earth, with the greatest variety of mammals in Central America. Rapid growth in the area, poor land use strategies, and demand for natural resources by a largey impoverished population threaten Mexico's biological wealth.
Coffee producers in the state of Chiapas live and work on some of the most pristine remaining land, wherethreatened animals like the maroon-fronted parrot, quetzals,and jaguars survive. And fishermenwho maketheir living on the Gulf of California share space with nearly 900 species of fish and 34 marine mammal species -- among them isthe Critically Endangered vaquita, one of the most threatened porpoises on the planet.
The stakes are high. Now is the time for Mexico to make sustainable economic decisions that benefit people and wildlife at the same time.
As farmers face pressure to expand their businesses in the face of shrinking crop yields and booming populations, they need to make choices that keep the ecological integrity of the biosphere intact. As fishing and shrimp fleets in the Gulf of California catch roughly half of all seafood consumed in the country, they need to take care not to undermine their own livelihoods by making poor choices that impact the ecosystems that provide their bounty.
Mexico’s land and waters are fragile, but Mexico’s people can save them from collapse. To do so, Mexico is already taking action. A 2002 law prohibits large ships that trawl the ocean floor from entering certain protected areas of Mexico's waters. Mexico's president Felipe Calderon recently extended those protections by designating an additional 400,000 hectares of marine protected areas in 2007.
Forests Are a Solution to Climate Change
More than 20% of allcarbon dioxideemissionscome from the burning and clearning of forests. Protecting forests – part of nature's brilliant operating system – is an essential first response to climate change.
Coffee Comes from the Biodiversity Hotspots
Starbucks' coffee-growing regions are home to the richest and most unique biodiversity on the planet. These regions are also the most vulnerable to climate change. We know them as the hotspots.
TheHistory of Our Partnership
Since 1998, we havepioneered responsible coffee production practices, with fair compensation and safe working conditions for farmers,to demonstrate that a company can help protect biodiversity through shade-grown coffee.
What Is Shade-Grown Coffee?
Coffee beans naturally thrive beneath a tropical forest canopy – not on clear-cut land that’s exposed to the sun – and so can the farmers who grow them.
What Is Shade-Grown Coffee?
March 19, 2008
By Mark Ingebretsen
If you’re a coffee lover, you have thousands of varieties to choose from. But one choice in particular – opting for shade-grown – can help save the planet.
Here's a little-known fact: Coffee plants originally evolved to thrive beneath the lush canopy oftropical forests, not in sun-exposed fields.
Small-scale coffee growers have long benefited from shaded farms. When sown in the shade of healthy forests, coffee plants require relatively little care and can coexist with fruit trees and other shade-tolerant crop-yielding plants – potentially a diversified income source for farmers.
For coffee connoisseurs, the taste of shade-grown coffee often better reflects the delicate nuances of the region where it is grown, in much the same way prized wines exhibit the unique characteristics of their vineyards.
READ MORE: Today coffee is grown in 16 of the world's 34 biodiversity hotspots.
But what we love most about shade-grown coffee is that it's the product of healthy, intact forests that are crucial in our fight to stabilize climate change and home to important plant and animal species.
Despite this, more than 40 percent of the shaded coffee fields in Mexico and Central America have been converted into sun-exposed plantations, their once-nurturing forest canopies destroyed in the process. In the 1960s, scientists began tweaking coffee plants so they could withstand sunlight and produce more beans. Thus relief agencies, hoping to raise the income of farmers, encouraged the switch from shade-grown to sun-tolerant varieties. Governments soon also joined the push.
But plantation-style coffee growing has produced consequences that few anticipated. Open fields of coffee plants sap nutrients from the soil, increase erosion and are dependent on chemical fertilizers. In a fast-developing world that consumes2.5 billion cups of coffee daily, these practices pose a grave danger to the world’s tropical forests and to our global climate.
The wholesale burning and clearing of forests in tropical regions today produces roughly 20 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change– that's twice the amount created by all the planet’s cars, trucks, SUVs, and trains.
By contrast, healthy forests extract carbon from the atmosphere, effectively using it as the basic material of their limbs and leaves. This fundamental natural process helps moderate climate change by balancing out carbon emissions. Healthy forests also combat erosion, help provide safe drinking water – which more than 1 in 6 human beings lack – and preserve untold plant species that local communities rely on for food, medicine, and shelter.
Fortunately, these facts are not lost on conservationists and some pioneering members of the multi-billion-dollar coffee industry. Understanding the benefits of preserving forests and the important role shade-grown coffee farms play in doing just that, Starbucks Corp. has worked with CI since 1998 to halt and eventually reverse years of unsound coffee-growing practices. The fruits of that relationship continue to be positive. Together with Starbucks, we've given farmers incentives to adopt sustainable growing practices and dependable, fair prices for their products.
NEWS: Starbucks is announcing the next phase of its 10-year partnership with CI.
Call it enlightened self interest or maybe even a partnership made in heaven. It’s certainly a partnership that grows stronger each time consumers opt to fill their cups with coffee that's grown in the shade.
Starbucks
What does a conservation organization have in common with a coffee corporation? Plenty, when you consider that most of the world’s key coffee-growing regions are the same areas where biological diversity is richest and most threatened – places we call the biodiversity hotspots. Today, threats to these landscapes and the natural resources within them – like coffee beans – are exacerbated by climate change, as rising global temperatures alter soil, rain, and other conditions.
The History
As far back as 1998, we saw Starbucks as a natural partner to our work. The company sources its premium coffee from the very regions we work to preserve, including the small coffee farms in Chiapas, Mexico. At the time, many Chiapas farmers were already practicing the eco-friendly method of growing coffee in the shade of healthy forests. And their farms formed a natural protective buffer around some of the region’s most valuable habitats.
In particular, they bordered El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve, a 300,000-acre Eden that’s home to wildcats, tapir, monkeys, and untold other species, all coexisting within the rich flora of cloud and rain forests.
Starbucks was quick to see the importance of protecting El Triunfo and similar areas worldwide that bordered prized coffee-growing farms. Together, we launched a three-year program encouraging coffee growers in Chiapas to continue their sustainable farming practices. In return, they received technical assistance from CI's field staff and Starbucks became a dependable buyer of the farmers' beans.
That initial collaboration quickly proved successful. Within a year, the number of farmers taking part in the Chiapas project increased by 30 percent. Some of them doubled their sales, and their average incomes jumped by 40 percent. At the same time, U.S. consumers enthusiastically embraced a new Starbucks brand: Shade Grown Mexico. In the years since, we have continued to work closely with Starbucks and community farmers in other parts of the world.
In 2003, CI and Starbucks joined forces again to design Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices – a set of environmentally, socially, and economically responsible coffee buying guidelines to drive all Starbucks purchases and support conservation at a new scale. They also further the company's commitment to making a positive difference in the lives of farmers and their communities.
By 2007, Starbucks was purchasing 60 percent of its coffee from suppliers who subscribe to C.A.F.E. Practices guidelines.
Soon after the launch of C.A.F.E. Practices, CI and Starbucks worked to increase conservation capacity in the field through one of our innovative funding mechanisms – Verde Ventures. In 2004, Starbucks provided a $2.5 million direct loan to help capitalize this fund, which helps provide direct access to affordable credit for small-scale coffee producers.
The Newest Chapter
In March 2008, Starbucks and CI launched a renewed five-year agreement to address the most important issue facing our world today – global climate change. The same forests that produce the world’s best coffee and sustain millions of farmers also extract and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide. In fact, when they're destroyed, these forests release dangerous greenhouse gas into our atmosphere.
Healthy, productive forests are in everyone’s best interest, and they’re at the heart of this renewed partnership. In addition to shade-grown coffee, Starbucks and CI are now investing in and supporting communities across coffee-growing landscapeswho engage in climate-friendly activities, including protecting existing forests and helping to restore degraded landscapes.
This next phase in our partnership with Starbucks will move beyond the coffee farm to surrounding landscapes, including private and government lands, to promote mutually beneficial forest conservation and the sequestration of carbon.
"The alliance between Starbucks and Conservation International is an important step in reducing emissions from deforestation, which accounts for 20 percent of all the carbon released into the atmosphere – double the world’s cars, trucks, and trains combined," said Peter Seligmann, Chairman and CEO of CI."Our partnership engages one of the great corporations, their customers and coffee farmers in this battle against climate change.By stepping up this partnership we have aligned our existing work and success to address the most pressing issue of our time."
Learn more about CI and Starbucks or visit the Starbucks website.