Agriculture and Environment: Coffee

Better Management Practices: Shade-Grown Coffee to Sun Coffee

For existing coffee-producing areas shade coffee systems are preferable to full-sun production systems.

Though shade plantations contain significantly less biodiversity than pristine habitats, they support more species than full-sun plantations. In addition, the shade plantations maintain higher levels of soil moisture, enhance nutrient cycling, and decrease erosion.

Shade coffee over sun coffee
In short, most ecosystem functions are preserved, even though considerable biodiversity is sacrificed. From a conservation point of view, shade coffee can serve as a useful compromise for continuing coffee production in existing areas or as an intermediary step in habitat restoration, but it is not a natural habitat itself.

The long-term economic implications of the conversion from shade to full-sun coffee are not well understood. For full-sun producers, the increased costs of inputs for producing their coffee are more than offset by the dramatic increase in yields. Hence, production increases.

Sun coffee - more expensive to produce
The question is: How low can the price of coffee go before it is too great to be offset even by greater productivity? Full-sun coffee producers are more reliant on expensive inputs and tend to have a greater working capital costs if not overall debt. This, too, affects their ability to weather poor prices.