Perhaps I can add a little to the current discussion of shade-grown coffee. In 2000, I was a part of a team that did a reconnaissance in Guatemala with the object of ginning up an investigation into the biodiversity implications of coffee culture. Alas, the program never materialized, but there are plenty of others that have. Interested readers can find them on the web with any of the standard search engines. What follows is the result of a mere seven days of field work and is not meant to be the last word, or even a very highly educated word, but merely a general sketch of the situation.
Coffee is very sun-sensitive. Too little or too much sun reduces the yield. There are four main forms of coffee culture in Central America: rustic, multiculture, shade, and sun. The four forms of culture manage the sunlight sensitivity problem in different ways. Rustic coffee culture is the traditional method. The understory of the forest is cut down and coffee is planted under the tall trees. This form of culture gives a park-like environment that is very pleasant to work in. Rustic culture mimics primary forest to a certain extent. We believe that the basic diversity of bird species in rustic culture is about as great as that of primary forest. In multiculture coffee, many of the big trees are cut down as well. In their place, fruit trees are planted to provide additional produce from the land. Bird diversity in multiculture plantations is significantly lower than in rustic plantations, but still provides a nice variety of bird life. Often, one finds fincas where some tracts are in rustic culture and some are in multiculture. These two techniques seem to coexist fairly well. Shade coffee is grown in plantations where _all_ of the big trees have been cleared and replaced by smaller, faster growing trees, usually all of the same species. These trees are managed aggressively to provide precisely the right amount of shade. The trees are removed and replaced when they grow to a certain size. The wood produced by all this arboriculture is an important benefit to the workers on the finca, for whom it is usually their sole fuel. The diversity of bird life in these plantations is much lower than in either of the two previous types of culture. Sun-cultured coffee is grown in fields from whom all the trees have been stripped. Sun coffee plantations are virtually devoid of birds. The effects of excess sunlight are managed by the application of chemicals. Sun coffee plantations are very neat and susceptible to mechanized agriculture. They are virtually devoid of birds. Sun coffee gives somewhat higher yields, but demands heavy upfront expenditures for chemicals. This has had the effect of changing coffee culture to a debtor economy. Growers must borrow money at the beginning of each season and hope the crop is good enough to pay off the loans. As usual, the issues are not as clear-cut as they seem at first. Strictly speaking, supporting "shade coffee" does not necessarily contribute to conservation of bird diversity in mesoamerica. If it contributes to converting rustic and multiculture plantations to shade coffee culture (in the sense used above), the effect is actually counterproductive to the stated aims. Cheers, Bob . Robert D. Powell Congress Farm Research Institute Wilmington, Ohio, USA [email protected] Ludere cum sacris
