Coffee it is, then.  In the chapter that explores the impact on the environment of different ways of growing coffee, I learn that the coffee plant in its untouched form is intolerant of direct sunlight and grows under a canopy of taller shade trees.  While some coffee is still grown that way, new hybrids and methods of production developed in the ‘70s and pushed by USAID and other agencies have gotten many farmers to grow coffee in full sun.  These require much higher doses of chemical inputs, but yields are higher—in the short term.  Removal of the canopy cover means that land is more prone to water and soil erosion, putting long-term cultivation of the area at risk.  Jaffee quotes ecologist Ivette Perfecto: “We estimate that almost half of the area in coffee production in northern Latin America had been converted by 1990.” 

Growers use coffee technologies to varying degrees.  On one end of the spectrum is rustic or mountain coffee, which just requires the replacement of underbrush by coffee plants.  Next up are traditional polyculture/coffee gardens, wherein other plant species, beneficial to the growth of coffee, are also introduced.  Commercial polyculture and shade monoculture, techniques often twinned with agrochemical use, involve the removal of all native plants in a given plot and their replacement with one (in the case of monoculture) or a few (in the case of polyculture) species of leguminous plants to shade the coffee plants.  Finally, there’s full-sun coffee, which requires large quantities of fertilizers, pesticides, and management, but generates very high yields. 

Although some non-organic fair trade coffee still exists (the terms are not synonymous; fair trade is an alternative movement attempting to deal with social justice for people; organic exclusively relates to chemical inputs, or rather, the lack thereof), the market for it is negligible, so most of the time, fair trade also means organic.  Growing organic coffee involves a great deal more work than growing non-organic coffee: building stone terraces below each coffee plant to avoid erosion, careful, time-consuming pruning and weeding with a machete, and the hauling of tons of compost, often from a long distance away, to spread around the base of the plants.  Organic coffee farmers must often hire extra laborers to deal with the extra work, thus cutting into the (already undersized) profits they reap from growing fair trade/organic coffee.

However, the coffee yields of the organic coffee growers in Jaffee’s study are 40 percent higher than the conventional farmers’ (none of Jaffee’s subjects grow full-sun coffee).  Plus, learning about organic production informed the way they grew the corn and beans in their subsistence plots.  They used ‘green manure’ or compost to fertilized, and replaced traditional slash-and-burn agriculture with slash-and-chop-and-turn-to-mulch. 

Another green revolution, perhaps?

Nathalie Jordi's appetites keep her bouncing between between County Cork, New York, London and the French Alps.  When not slinging curd or interviewing farmers, she writes for Travel&Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Gastronomica, and her blog at www.autobiogeography.com.  Her dreams of a life spent baking, drinking margaritas, and sitting in the sun are gathering steam during her current stint as a waitress in New York City.