Coffee Agroecology: A New Approach to Understanding Agricultural Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services and Sustainable Development

Abstract

“Great coffee is this amazing miracle . . . its warm deliciousness in the morning transforms even the most rough-edged of us into intelligent, sparkling, upstanding men and women.” This quote, from Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee, illustrates the love affair people all over the world have with coffee. As we enjoy our morning cup of coffee, few of us think beyond the wonderful aroma of fresh coffee and the transformation that is about to take place in our mind and body as the caffeine kicks in. Few of us reflect on the fact that embedded in that delicious cup of coffee is a fascinating tale of global trade that starts on a farm somewhere in the tropics, travels across the ocean and ends up in our kitchen or neighborhood coffee shop. What happens in between is an amazing story of ingenuity, exploitation and resistance of both humans and nature and the interactions among them. In their book The Coffee Paradox, Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte examine the trajectory from the bean to the cup, tracing the coffee value chain once the bean leaves the farm.1 They ponder how we ended up in the paradoxical situation in which there is on the one hand usually a low stock of coffee and on the other hand usually low prices paid to farmers who produce it. They cast their analysis as a particularly interesting example of a more general world pattern. Here, elaborating on a completely different part of the grand paradox that is coffee, we focus on the first part of the trajectory – how the bean comes into being, or, more precisely, on the many ways the bean comes into being. It is in this part of the tale that the main protagonist is nature itself in all of its complexities. It is also this part of the tale that contains perhaps the most intimate relationship our species experiences – between people and nature. Coffee is produced by millions of farmers in the Global South. The great majority of them are family farmers engaged in small-scale farming, and only a few of them produce on large – sometimes very large – farms. However, these two extremes reflect far more than just size. They represent two styles, two complex classes of activities and structures, two categories that we refer to as “syndromes of pro- duction,” characterized by a set of co-occurring ecological, cultural, political and socioeconomic factors that work in consort, sometimes in contradictory consort.2 This notion of syndromes of production is best introduced by example. To that end, let us take a tour of two farms that represent two very different syndromes of production. During the tour, we will weave ecological and human interest aspects of coffee farming by describing the livelihood of people on these two contrasting farms and their relationship to nature and the commodity they produce. Our intent here, and in the rest of this book, is to present a picture of the very different ways in which a coffee bean becomes that deliciously aromatic beverage that turns us into “intelligent,