Like cocoa, coffee is one of the world's most popular luxury foods. The ever-increasing demand over the past decades has meant that cultivation methods are changing in order to be able to supply enough coffee. However, different farming methods have different impacts on the environment depending on where and how the coffee is grown.

 

Coffee is a tropical plant that can only grow and bear fruit optimally under the right environmental conditions. The right amount of rain, sun and wind are just as important as the quality of the soil and the temperature.

The coffee plant needs between 1500 and 3000 millimetres of rainfall a year. The ideal temperature varies depending on the type of plant, but none of the coffee plant species can tolerate frost. Robusta coffee tolerates hotter temperatures than Arabica coffee, for example.

In traditional coffee cultivation, coffee was grown in the shade of trees, but this method is rather slow because the berries take a long time to ripen. Therefore, in recent decades, people have switched to growing coffee in the sun, so that the berries ripen faster and can be harvested more quickly.

Shade cultivation of coffee is much more environmentally friendly, because growing coffee plants in the shade provides shelter and food for animals, especially birds. Furthermore, the soil remains fertile for longer, which means that less fertiliser, fewer herbicides and pesticides need to be used. The trees protect the coffee plants from the weather and provide a more optimal microclimate. Because it is cooler and wetter in the shade, less moisture evaporates and the coffee plants need less watering.

Sun-cultivated coffee causes drastic ecological effects, such as destruction of biotopes, reduced soil quality, increased erosion, pollution with pesticides and general pollution. Furthermore, the workers on the coffee plantations work under harsher conditions due to the heat and the exposure to pesticides.

Many Latin American countries, but not all, prefer the traditional shade cultivation of coffee. This much more environmentally friendly method contributes significantly to protecting against climate change. Many coffee plantations practice both shade cultivation and sun cultivation, but if the coffee package does not explicitly advertise that it was grown in an environmentally friendly way, it most likely comes from sun cultivation, which is still predominantly used.