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April 2007 |
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Sustainable Coffee Harnesses Consumer Power for Conservation Coffee is the world’s largest commodity market, and after petroleum, the second largest globally traded commodity. A GEF-UNDP project aims to transform the way in which coffee companies obtain their supplies and in doing so, conserve vital biodiversity. It seeks to tap into the enormous power of the environmentally and ethically aware consumer to promote biodiversity-friendly and sustainable coffee farming in South American countries. Working with Rainforest Alliance, world leaders in certified products, the project has the potential to shift as much as $ 4.5 billion of corporate finance from nonsustainable to sustainable practices over the project’s its lifetime. It aims to double certified coffee’s share of the market from 5 to 10 percent and link market forces and conservation issues. Implemented by UNDP, the $ 94.25 million project (including a GEF contribution of $12.64 million) will bring together major coffee traders, roasters, and specialty importers in six Latin American coffee-producing countries—Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru—to ensure the survival of traditional shade-grown coffee farming in a region containing some of the world’s most biodiverse, and threatened, ecosystems. Traditional coffee farms are extremely eco-friendly, leaving areas of native forest untouched to shade cultivation and barely disturbing local flora and fauna. However, market forces, including competition from new growers in Asia, are causing massive job losses in the coffee industry, reducing export earnings, and forcing small producers to leave their traditional, diverse coffee farms, which are then converted to intensely managed full-sun or minimal shade monoculture with a corresponding heavy loss of biodiversity. The project scored an early success this year when McDonald’s announced that all 1,200 McDonald’s restaurants in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which sell more than 143,000 cups of coffee a day, would exclusively sell coffee made from Rainforest Alliance Certified (RAC) beans. McDonald’s will extend this commitment to all its European outlets during 2007. Kraft Foods, Caribou Coffee, Lavazza, Proctor and Gamble, Drie Mollen, and others already endorse RAC coffee. The project is designed to help the existing certification system grow beyond a niche initiative, and reach a “tipping point” where it will expand without external donor financing. Project targets include increasing the number of certified hectares more than 15 times, from 93,000 hectares in 2005 to 1.5 million hectares in 2013. This will be made up of a million hectares of productive land (10 percent of the world’s productive coffee area), and an additional 500,000 hectares of conservation areas set aside on RAC certified coffee farms. On the demand side, the project seeks to increase the annual volume of RAC coffee sold from a baseline of 30,000 metric tons to 500,000 metric tons, or 10 percent of the total global market. Certified coffee will be sold in 200,000 to 300,000 retail outlets, increasing from a baseline of 20,000 outlets. The sustainable coffee project will build on Rainforest Alliance‘s experience with the SmartWood program, an accredited forestry certification scheme. In turn the lessons learned in the six project countries will be shared with Belize, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico who already participate in RAC coffee programs and with those who join the scheme. Within a few years the certification program will expand throughout Africa and Asia, covering all major coffee origins. Lessons learned in the project will also be applicable to other crops, which have their own Rainforest Alliance certification programs, including bananas, cacao, pineapple, ferns, and citrus fruits.
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