Agriculture and Environment: Coffee

Better Management Practices: Diversify Production & Income Sources

With the global drop in coffee prices, there is an increasing awareness that dependence solely on coffee is not a healthy strategy for producers.

Instead, diversified agricultural production systems could best protect the incomes and viability of coffee producers, particularly the small producers that are responsible for most of the coffee grown in the world.

Integrating high-value crops
If this is the case, then there is a need to focus on integrating high-value crops such as vegetables and fruits that can be interplanted with higher-value arabica coffee. Interspersing coffee with fruit trees, vegetables, and/or ornamentals can diversify sources of income and reduce dependence on a single product.

While such diversified production systems do not restore biodiversity to the levels found in native stands, they maintain higher levels of biodiversity than the alternatives, and they tend to yield more financially stable local economies as well.

Development of alternative markets
Another key issue is the development of alternative markets and the ability to supply them. These skills are not common among producers and have been sadly lacking to date in the different, alternative coffee marketing programs. Coffee production and even other agricultural crops may be only one source of income for producers in the future.

For example, it is possible that coffee growers could receive payments for carbon sequestration - either in aboveground biomass or by building carbon and organic matter on or in the soil. Studies would need to be undertaken to show the relative value of sun and shade-grown coffee for carbon sequestration.

Promoting Ecotourism!
Ecotourism, particularly bird watching, could also be incorporated into coffee-growing areas as another stream of income where shade trees have been left and birds migrate through. As producers in other parts of the world have found, these sources of income could rival or even exceed those from coffee.