How to make your morning coffee taste much better

In 1997 UNDP calculated that we Europeans spend more on ice cream each year than it would cost to provide water and sanitation for the world population currently deprived from them. I kept thinking about this and another parallel unfairness while at my favourite coffee shop this morning: I actually spent more on my cafe latte than half the world lives on per day. The farmer who grew the beans probably received less than one-tenth of the price I paid. Nonetheless, coffee is the developing world's most important source of foreign capital, and the world's second most important legal commodity in international trade. It is a crucial source of income for almost 25 million people. Most of these are employed in small-scale labour intensive enterprises.
   Coffee was traditionally grown in mixed plantations in the rainforests with other plants below and above it. Unfortunately, many of the coffee plantations have abandoned the traditional shade grown methods for intensive, "sun-grown" coffee that uses more chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Actually, many of the pesticides that are used in the coffee producing developing countries are banned in the rich countries that consume the most coffee. With the expansion of "sun coffee", the diversity and number of birds, insects, and other organisms in the vicinity of the cultivated area is in most cases drastically reduced.
    Ironically, this loss of biodiversity in intensive farming systems can have negative feedbacks on production due to the loss of natural habitats for pollinating insects. Insect-pollinated bushes yield more and larger beans than plants that are shielded from bees. So, farmers that want to make the most of their coffee harvest should maintain a bit of natural habitat and not spread pesticides about.
    The market for organic and fair-traded coffee is growing, but few coffee shops have adopted this thinking in my hometown. With fair trade, the small coffee farmers are getting a bigger percentage of your coffee dollar. So, skip the "technified" coffee and go for shade-grown and fair-traded instead. More flavour bearing oils due to the slower ripening and no sour aftertaste of mugged and poisoned plantation workers and a damaged natural environment. Your morning fix has never tasted better. That's a promise.

/Dr. Fredrik Moberg, Editor

Monocultures are vulnerable to the effects of for example drought, insect outbreaks, and market failure. Hence, they need large inputs of fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, subsidies, guaranteed loans, disaster relief, and surplus buyouts. Photo: FAO.

Loss of biodiversity
Unfortunately, biological diversity is rapidly decreasing throughout the world's natural systems and fewer and fewer species dominate food production systems. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently stressed that only 150 species, out of the estimated 7,000 to 8,000 that have been used in 10,000 years of agriculture, are cultivated today. Just a little more than ten plant species contribute about 75% of the world's plant-derived calories: bananas, beans, cassava, maize, millets, potatoes, rice, sorghum, soya, sugarcane, sweet potatoes and wheat. Likewise, less than ten species dominate global aquaculture production and almost the entire world consumption of livestock protein comes from poultry, cattle and pigs.
    Indeed the Green Revolution succeeded in drastically increasing the amount of food grown. However, along with this trend towards monoculture agriculture (where only a single crop is grown), the dependence on irrigation, fertilisers, and pesticides also increased worldwide. For example, a leaf fungus called Black Sigatoka (Mycosphaerella fijiensis) cuts yields by 50 percent or more on hundreds of millions of small banana farms across the tropics. Commercial banana plantations keep up production with the aid of fungicides - the most intensive application of chemicals on any major food crop. Now a new strain of another banana fungus, the Panama disease, threatens to make even fungicides useless. The problem is that cultivated banana varieties are seedless, sterile hybrids of the founder species. They can reproduce asexually but crossing them cannot produce new banana varieties that resist the pests.

Reduced use of pesticides and fertilisers
Besides the direct benefits of a diversified agricultural production, farmers also benefit indirectly from biodiversity in many ways. That is, wild animal and plant species - within the farming system and in surrounding habitats - often supply important ecosystem services. These include nutrient cycling, decomposition of organic matter, natural predators which keep pests in check, maintenance of water quality, and pollination (bees, butterflies etc) that help crops to reproduce. In this way biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides improve water use and soil structure as well as reducing the need for fertilisers and pesticides.
    These benefits are fully utilised in so-called agroecosystems, managed ecosystems that are used for agriculture and food collection. Agroecosystems comprise polycultures and mixed systems, including crop-livestock systems (e.g. rice-fish) and agro-forestry (combining timber production with row crops). Traditional agroforestry systems, such as the "shaded" coffee plantations common throughout Central and South America, provide habitat for numerous animals that benefit the farms. A shaded coffee plantation can support up to 180 species of birds that help control insect pests and disperse seeds. However, such traditional agroecosystems are under threat in almost all parts of the world.

Farming and biodiversity effects
Around half of the world's people still live as subsistence or small-scale farmers. Hence, agricultural export commodities represent a major source of foreign income for many poor countries. For example, coffee and cocoa that are mostly grown in developing countries, rank second in importance only to oil in legal international trade. As mentioned above, agricultural systems, when managed properly, can maintain important ecosystem functions, but there is a tendency for biodiversity to become reduced in the wake of modern agriculture. Cocoa and coffee production, for instance, occur mostly in areas identified as biodiversity hotspots and therefore have an impact on biodiversity disproportional to the area of cultivation. The erosion of agricultural biodiversity is also aggravated by deforestation and loss of other natural systems. This leads to losses of wild relatives, important for breeding, and losses of wild foods essential for food provision in times of crisis.
    Moreover, the widespread use of pesticides in monoculture agriculture threatens biodiversity directly by poisoning insects, birds and other organisms, and indirectly by destroying habitats and eliminating the food sources of many organisms. It can also have harmful effects on human health and reproduction.
    The loss of biodiversity in increasingly intensive agricultural systems has started to have negative feedback on production, in for example coffee cultivations. Coffee, earlier considered self-pollinating, has recently been shown to give greatly increased yields where there are abundant pollinating insects. It could explain why coffee yields have fallen in some areas of Africa and Indonesia, where intensive farming has been blamed for destroying natural habitats, where pollinating insects are found.

Risk spreading and resilience
Many poor farmers spread risk by growing many different crops and different varieties of each crop. This helps to protect poor families from biological, climatic and other shocks or stresses. One such example is from Rwanda where local bean varieties provided food security during the civil war. 60% of the harvest was lost during the war. Potato harvests, for example, suffered because the crop had become dominated by three varieties. The supply of these varieties, which required regular access to clean seed, fungicide and fertiliser, dried up in the early days of the war. Bean production, on the other hand, remained relatively stable. Over 1,300 local bean varieties continued to be available through local farmer markets. Rwandan farmers mix the locally adapted bean varieties that they plant so a single pest or disease cannot wipe out the entire harvest.
    Polyculture is also used by farmers in Samoa as a conscious strategy to reduce the risk of a total loss of food supply during cyclones. More than 40 cyclones have been recorded there since 1831. After two major cyclones some ten years ago, the most important cash crops (banana, breadfruit, coconut) were damaged, and less common crops (like yams) became the staple for a rather long period of time. Moreover, the poor often fall back on a wide range of gathered species in times of scarcity if staple crops become unavailable. The Green Revolution, on the other hand, has focused on a few seed varieties adapted to a high response to inorganic fertilisers and chemical pesticides. American ecologists C.S. Holling and Gary Meffe describe the problems of modern agriculture and the loss of biodiversity as follows:

"Plant species diversity in a natural forest converted to a monoculture may go from dozens or hundreds to one dominant, plus whatever weeds can escape the herbicides. Monocultures are notoriously susceptible to the effects of drought, flooding, insect or pathogen outbreaks, and market vagaries. They consequently require large inputs of energy (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation) and often large societal subsidies in the form of price supports, guaranteed loans, disaster relief, and surplus buyouts."

From this point of view, the benefits of monoculture agriculture have often been overestimated at the same time as the benefits of traditional farming have been understated. Comparisons often neglect to calculate the total farm output in terms of other crops (such as rice and fruit trees) and other resources (such as fish in rice fields) in the traditional systems. Moreover, increasing soil infertility, chemical pollution of land and water, pesticide poisoning and growing pest immunity to pesticides - all associated with modern agriculture - are seldom included in such comparisons.

Can organic farming feed the world?
What kind of agriculture do we need to feed the world then? Whereas the green revolution continues, with ever-newer technologies to produce more and cheaper food, another trend is the growth of organic agriculture. Few people suggest that the industrialised parts of the world should go back to farming as it was done a century ago. However, a growing number of scholars argue that current technology- and chemically intensive and corporate-dominated agriculture have failed to feed the hungry. Technology must instead be used more wisely in order to produce more food without harming the environment. This might be achieved by a combination of traditional farming techniques, new farming practices like organic agriculture, and a range of 'green' technologies. Exactly how this is to be done is the greatest challenge for agriculture in the 21st century, especially in developing countries.

Tourism is one of the world's fastest growing economic sectors. Much of the expansion takes place in fragile high biodiversity areas located in poor countries of the South. This can entail negative impacts on the environment and people's livelihoods, but well-managed tourism can contribute to biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction.

In the future, more food must be produced using less water. Squeezing the maximum food from each drop of water is a must to meet the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015. This was concluded in a new Swedish report released at the 12th meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD 12).

The quote:

"I think it is a good educational opportunity, and that we should treat a disaster movie as entertainment and not get upset that it is a distortion. But $125 million on global warming must be a record for publicizing the issue."

Daniel B. Botkin, professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, commenting the new climate change Armageddon blockbuster: "The Day After Tomorrow".

http://www.nature.com/nsu/040510/040510-6.html