Coffee is the second most consumed drink in the world, and it is now behind real changes in how many global brands (large and mid-sized), behave, as they take a position and look after the people who work for them, in the name of a future with enough to go round.
Given everything we have seen in recent years of ecosystems slipping out of balance, looking after the soil, understanding cultivation and innovating to get past the difficulties has become the reality for many companies that depend on raw material from nature in order to exist at all.
So: here is how conscious, respectful cultivation has changed the lives of a great many families, providing quality of life, education, and a chance to contribute to a better future for the generations coming next.
Looming scarcity drives change
According to research by Delta Cafés, a company with more than 50 years in coffee production and distribution, the exponential growth of the world’s population combined with climate change could bring about a future scarcity of the base material: the coffee bean itself.
Financial and intellectual investment strategies have been feeding coffee growers’ cultivation, arriving with the support of brands such as Starbucks, which understand their social responsibility and set out to encourage the development of communities that play such an important part in the quality of the product.
A community engaged for better quality
Individuals play a very important part in how brands adapt and establish themselves, working to contribute to the formation and sustainable development of the community.
Starbucks says its aim is to ease the difficulties coffee farmers face: during the growing season they struggle to keep going, or to buy the material they need to plant, until they can sell their harvest.
Supporting those growers means giving them more time to focus on the quality of the bean, without having to sell the harvest early or below the market price.
Selling early damages both the quality of the beans (which do not reach roasting and finishing at the right moment), and the coffee economy, which falls behind.
Nespresso and its sustainability advisory board member George Clooney hold that “the better the bean, the better the coffee”. And for the bean to reach its highest quality, looking after the land the harvest grows in, and the people who tend it, matters enormously.
Education comes before development
As innovation and education strategies develop to help coffee growers improve, projects appear that let a farmer establish themselves as a reference point in their field.
That is the only way to get there: improving the quality of the planting, through corporate initiatives in human development that take in career, teaching, assessment and reward.
According to Delta Cafés, one of its development projects is built on realising and broadening the abilities and skills of each employee, while leaving their individual creativity and initiative intact, without setting it against the personal and professional development the company has laid out.
It is worth insisting, too, on the importance of recording the things that affect small farmers, through social responsibility: equal opportunity, guaranteeing labour rights under the law in force, and treating everyone who works there with respect and dignity.
Training in planting, and improving production
Companies that support educational campaigns for their growers understand what coffee production means from the point of view of education. Their support for community development builds gradually, and everyone comes out ahead. That exchange feeds innovation and a stronger commitment to what finally gets delivered.
So the effect of farmers developing through study and better planting techniques is to increase coffee production, and to work against the future scarcity of the raw material.
But if that thinking stays with a minority, then not only the farmers but the communities around them will go through changes for the worse.
Support of this kind means growers work with commitment and feel proud to contribute to a better future for the country, seeing that the generations after them will also have good chances to prosper doing something they already love: growing coffee.
Biodiversity to improve the ecosystem
We come to the stage of checking whether farmers are keeping the plantation and the ecosystem in balance. But how do you show a buyer that a step this important has actually been taken?
There are several ways. One is certification. Another, and it carries real weight, is guaranteeing that the producer acts as a custodian of the environment and the ecosystem through appropriate cultivation practices, fewer chemicals, soil conservation, and responsible use of water and energy.
It is not enough to say we intend to change; we have to change, and to know that the change is happening everywhere. To that end Nespresso has run its “AAA Sustainable Quality” programme since 2003, aimed at protecting biodiversity and sustainable livelihoods. Following that example is how ambitious global targets get met.
A word on certified coffees, taking Delta Cafés’ naming and range as the example:
- Organic coffee: aimed at more natural production, benefiting the soil and using water and energy responsibly.
- Fairtrade coffee: under this certification, growers work to bring production costs down, improving their income, and to sell a guaranteed minimum quantity, meaning every farmer has a minimum income against demand.
- UTZ coffee: applied to growers who follow a particular production process, arriving at better quality and quantity of raw material.
These descriptions are simple next to the whole process up to the moment of sale, of course. But that does not change the fact that there are ways of reducing the environmental and social impact across every farming community.
Partnerships for the longer road
Getting involved socially, and having the support of associations whose ideology matches your own position, matters a great deal.
Nespresso, for instance, works with 15 organisations that support communities and causes in line with its philosophy and convictions. Among them, some support causes such as:
- Leadership in the farming sector with a group of more than 500,000 Colombian coffee growers;
- Reforesting areas that have been cleared, to contribute to the ecosystem and to the survival of farming communities in the future.
And even giving rural producers access to specialists in getting a fair price for their services and their products.
Nescafé has developed a sustainability programme focused on growing with respect, which also supports educational programmes training agronomists during the coffee-growing season, teaching how to combine crops, how to price them, and how to innovate with other kinds of planting.
Measures like these reinforce the idea that people are the future, and that an ethical coffee production which grows in harmony with society, providing quality of life alongside social and environmental responsibility, can shape a solid community with a future that has enough to go round.
The benefits of conscious, respectful coffee growing
Beyond the many good things that come of respectful cultivation and the support of established brands, there are advantages worth taking into account:
- The ecological practices adopted by agricultural production programmes encourage care for water, reuse, less waste, and making it something available to everyone and always present in the environment.
- Strategies for ethically combining beans, with different varieties interplanted in the same plantation. This produces new specimens with grafted beans, new flavours, and a more productive plantation.
- Those practices support reforestation, which directly reduces deforestation and improves the air. They give us more quality of life, and the chance to beat the future statistics by acting now to avoid a possible coffee shortage.
- With reforestation and conscious planting it is impossible not to mention the improvement in animal biodiversity, which depends on that ecosystem to exist at all: bees, birds, insects, species with fundamental parts to play in the planet’s balance.
Conscious, informed, participating consumers
We are taking up responsible buying habits more and more. We want to know whether the packaging is biodegradable, whether animals were tested on, whether anything in it is of animal origin.
And even how the beans were grown. Where they came from, and what makes them special enough to want in your day, or not.
We are living in the millennium of information, and we know perfectly well that information is power. We want to feel we can change the world with every cup of coffee we drink.
Changing the life of some rural producer’s family, contributing to protecting nature, and understanding that our choices affect the generations after us, holding that awareness makes us want to understand the process and the people in it.
Social and environmental responsibility
What makes coffee so special, we come to understand, are the communities involved in producing it, the stories behind the brand, and an altruistic core of concern for the planet and the lives on it. Brands that believe in the future invest in individuals, and do everything they can so that everyone else gets to leave a mark of their own.
