Our sustainable step of the week is in honor of International Coffee Day, celebrated on October 1st each year. It began in 2015, and it’s a day to appreciate coffee farmers and promote awareness of the ethics of fair pricing and sustainable coffee farming.

We’ve all heard the buzzwords — organic, fair trade, shade-grown. Somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve considered these to be good things. When I’m trying a new brand, I try to buy one that ticks some or all of the boxes. But I’ve never deep dived into why.

Let’s take that plunge today. Why does our coffee choice matter?

Coffee and the Planet: A Complex Relationship

Coffee plants naturally prefer the shade in a tropical climate — which is one of the reasons organic beans tend to be shade-grown in rainforests.

But it’s not as easy to plant among trees — or to tend or harvest crops — as it is in a big open space. So large scale coffee plantations are most often created by clearing large acreages of tropical rainforest. Because the organic coffee beans won’t do well in that much sun, farmers created hybrid beans that thrive in the sun.

Rainforests are not only our world’s best carbon sinks, but they’re biodiversity hotspots. Many species lose their habitats, and some, including these adorable sloths, face endangerment as a result.

Other species forced to flee when the trees are cut are the lizards and birds who munch on the pests who snack on coffee beans. With them out of the way, the coffee-destroying pests have a field day with the free lunch. Enter chemical pesticides. The trees and the critters also provided natural fertilizer (decaying leaves, bird and animal droppings). Without these, the farmers need to use chemical fertilizers.

When it rains, there’s no tree canopy to disperse the water, and it ends up washing the soil out, eroding it and depleting it of essential nutrients. Over time, the land becomes less land less productive and requires more chemicals to maintain crop yields — a vicious downward spiral. This runoff also washes chemicals into the surrounding community’s water supply, harming aquatic life and contaminating drinking sources.

Coffee farms also require large amounts of water for irrigation, which can strain local water resources, particularly in areas already facing water scarcity.

On the other hand, when we go back to the original beans and grow them in their happy place of tropical shade, coffee can have a positive effect on ecosystems. Shade-grown coffee provides habitats for wildlife, preserves biodiversity, and promotes soil health.

What about the social impact? Is that what Fair Trade is about?

Partly, yes. The Fair Trade certification ensures three things: a living wage for the pickers, a decent profit for the farmers, and responsible environmental practice.

Sadly, this is far from the norm.

Coffee’s a competitive commodity. Over 12 billion beans are grown each year, and each individual coffee farmer has an uphill climb to get their beans noticed.

As a result, they often have to sell their beans for less than the cost of production — if they want to sell them at all. This keeps coffee farmers in a perpetual state of debt and poverty — while working their fingers to the bones. It’s common for farmers to keep their kids out of school during harvest season because they’re desperate for all the cheap labor they can get. Some regions run their school calendars around the picking season, but even so, this detracts from their education and keeps the cycle of poverty on and strong.

They also can’t afford to pay their workers well. Pickers are often paid for the amount they pick, which can lead to long, hot days in the sun just to earn $2-$3/day.

Coffee pickers are commonly travelers — migrating from farm to farm following the work. It’s common to see 40 or more workers and their families living in a one-room warehouse. Access to clean water and other amenities (like privacy) isn’t guaranteed. This isn’t a life that most of us, sipping on our morning brew in our PJs and fuzzy slippers, can imagine.

Fair Trade Certified coffee attempts to resolve this. To earn the logo for a label, a coffee company has to pass rigorous fair trade standards that include a fair profit for farmers, a living wage for workers, safe working conditions, protection of the environment, and strong, transparent supply chains. It’s a great program that has helped a lot of people worldwide.

But it doesn’t always deliver the greatest cup of coffee.

Direct Trade very often addresses the same issues, too — in a more delicious, sometimes even more sustainable way.

Fair Trade vs. Direct Trade

Both of these buying methods can result in getting more money into the hands of the farmers and the farm workers.

Fair Trade has to meet stringent criteria to get the certification. When you buy Fair Trade coffee, you can rest knowing that the people who make it are earning profits, the eco-footprint is a good one, and there are no harmful chemicals or GMOs in your brew. So much better than the conventional conditions of poverty, environmental destruction, and pesticides in our cups.

But not all coffee companies want this certification. While Fair Trade has and continues to do a lot of good in the world compared with conventional (think Nescafe) farming, the model is still imperfect. Here’s a great article from Stanford University that goes deeper into the benefits and drawbacks of Fair Trade. The bullet points are that while the concept is essential to lift coffee workers out of poverty, the current model for Fair Trade certification pays the farmers a bare minimum living wage while overcharging for an often low quality bean.

To source great coffee and to put even more money into the hands of the people who make them, some importers and roasters prefer to buy directly from the farmers.

A direct trade coffee company travels to coffee farms around the world, creates relationships with individual farmers, and buys their beans from them without any middleman. The result is often more interesting, better flavored coffee. It also very often means that the farmer makes even more money than they would through the Fair Trade program. Companies who buy direct are among the most ethical in the world.

But there are no official standards or certifications. If you want to know you’re drinking ethical coffee without pesticides or ecological destruction, you need to do your research into each company specifically. One clue is if the company produces regular sustainability or transparency reports — the good guys want people to know about it; the bad guys, not so much.

Brands For a Healthy Future: A Green Brew

The simplest way to drink ethical coffee is to look for the organic or Fair Trade logos. These are all available in any grocery store, and they’re solid markers that by choosing these coffees, you’re making the world a better place.

But if you feel like adventuring into lands unknown, and possibly putting even more money into the hands of the people who work hard for it, here are some brands that stand out for responsible direct trade — and are more likely to leave a rich and interesting flavor in your mouth:

• Intelligentsia Coffee: Known for its direct trade practices, Intelligentsia works closely with farmers to ensure fair prices and sustainable farming methods.
• Blue Bottle Coffee: This brand focuses on transparency and works to minimize its carbon footprint by using sustainable brewing methods.
• Counter Culture: A pioneer in the direct trade coffee industry. They publish sustainability reports each year.
• Pachamama Coffee: The definition of empowerment: the farmers in Latin America and Africa share ownership of the company.
• Stumptown Coffee Roasters: They emphasize organic and biodynamic practices in their farming.
• 49th Parallel: A Vancouver-based, direct trade company that tells you the story of the farmer on each coffee page of their website. They have many different, interesting flavors and I have yet to taste a bad one. They publish regular transparency reports that disclose their sources and pricing.
• Detour Coffee: A small direct trade roaster from Ontario (Canada) whose mission is low emission.
• Pilot Coffee Roasters: A Toronto company with excellent ethical standards.
• Los Beans: A Vancouver company that’s both Fair Trade and direct trade
• Reunion Coffee: A Toronto company that’s ethical down to its core — they even roast using renewable energy. My mom just bought a bunch of their roasts and will report back about which one(s) taste great.

The illy Dilemma

When I started writing this post, I thought I had my own personal coffee sustainability locked down. (Minus the occasional take-outs from Starbucks — a habit I’m going to kick soon, I swear.)

Turns out, though, this week’s sustainable step is one I’m going to be taking, too.

We love illy at our house. I’m sipping on it now. illy is a B-Corp with direct relationships with farmers, and they’ve been named one of the world’s most ethical companies by Ethisphere Magazine.

They’re not organic or Fair Trade certified — but neither are a lot of the companies who are doing the most good in the world. From everything I read — both about them and from their family — I think they would like to be doing the right thing — and usually are.

That said, there was a recent scandal that blew the top off of some trusted certifications, including Rainforest Alliance, when some farms in Brazil who had achieved this so-called ethical accreditation were found to be using slave labour. This article from Global News explains it in depth. A few big companies, like illy, Nescafe, and Starbucks, were among those buying beans from these farms. They cut ties with the farms as soon as they found out. But it highlighted something important: These large corporations are too big to be on the ground with every bean they source — they have to rely on the certifications, and the certifications will sometimes be imperfect. This accident would be far less likely to happen with a small, direct trade importer.

I won’t boycott illy going forward. Far from it. For a large coffee company, I think they’re among the best in the world, both for flavor and for ethics.

But I will be spending my next several coffee dollars trying to find a direct trade replacement for our everyday home consumption.

Sustainable Steps Takeaway

Maybe you’re already drinking a sustainable cup of coffee each morning. If so, drop me a line in the comments with your recommendation. My personal sustainable step of the week is to take my coffee dollars on an experimental trip of international flavors.

Here’s to making every cup count!