NEW YORK - Renowned primatologist Jane Goodall joined corporate executives last week to launch a new line of “chimp-friendly” coffee, designed to open consumers’ eyes to environmental degradation in western Tanzania and the steep toll it’s taking on chimpanzees and humans alike.
The Gombe Special Reserve line will be marketed throughout the United States by Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
The coffee is named for the Gombe National Park, where Goodall began her groundbreaking primatology studies in 1960. Then, there were more than 150 chimpanzees in Gombe. Today, there are only about 90, and rampant deforestation has destroyed the leafy corridors they need to travel to two nearby populations to breed.
Although the park itself is largely protected, the surrounding area has been all but denuded in the search for lumber, farmland, and grazing areas. This has eroded the watershed, weakened the soil, and left the villages prone to flooding and environmental disasters.
Green Mountain and the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) are working directly with 2,700 small-scale farmers — most cultivating plots under two acres — in the Kalinzi Cooperative in Tanzania’s Kigoma region to purchase at fair prices coffee grown using sustainable practices.
Some 10 percent of the proceeds of sales through the JGI Web site will go to the Jane Goodall Institute, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to ecological conservation. But that is not the centerpiece of the effort. “This is not a cause coffee,” says Lindsay Bolger, director of coffee sourcing and relationships at Green Mountain. “It’s a partnership between public and nonprofit organizations to help consumers gain more awareness.”
In particular, the partnership aims to draw attention to the poverty conditions of many coffee growers around the world, as well as the environmental degradation in Kigoma and its affect on chimpanzees and humans.
Chimps don’t drink coffee; they won’t eat the fruit or leaves, or even linger in areas dense with coffee plants. That’s a good thing, says Jane Goodall. “Coffee can act as a buffer to protect chimps and people from each other,” and minimize the exposure to disease that threatens chimps, she says.
Since coffee grows best in shade cover, JGI and Green Mountain are hoping this work will encourage the protection and replanting of trees. Some of the growers in the cooperative have already allowed 10 to 20 percent forest regeneration in their area, according to Goodall.
Goodall is a self-described coffee lover — an expert at brewing coffee in remote hotel rooms using only a coil heater, pantyhose, and two cups; it’s a skill she demonstrated at a New York press conference launching the new coffee line. She says coffee is a natural next step in the work she has done in the region, both with chimps and humans.
Since 1994, JGI’s Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education initiative has been working with villagers in the remote, high-poverty area to encourage sustainable farming, establish small businesses, improve access to schooling for girls and boys, and encourage health, sanitation, and HIV/AIDS awareness.
“I realized that some of the best coffee was being grown in the high hills [in Kigoma], but the growers weren’t making any money,” Goodall says. “How can we think of [making arguments for] saving the chimp beings if the human population around is clearly struggling to survive? There are more people than the land can support with current practices.”
Coffee is Tanzania’s largest export. Yet farmers are often paid less for their beans than it costs to produce them, according to the United States Agency for International Development.
The coffee market in Tanzania, as in many African countries, revolves around government-run auctions. Small-scale growers sell their beans to middlemen who mix them with beans from other farms until they reach a sufficient weight to sell to the auction. At auction, the beans often net more than the growers are paid.
Green Mountain and JGI received special government permission to purchase directly from the growers.
Farmers are given technical assistance to establish environmentally sustainable production methods, and help with quality control. In return, Green Mountain works with them to establish the prices.
Green Mountain declined to specify the specific per-pound price paid to farmers, in part because it varies. “They are being paid approximately twice the rate that they would recover going through the conventional auction process, and always above the Fair Trade price,” says Sandy Yusen, director of public relations at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
To achieve Fair Trade Certification, coffee importers must agree to pay no less than $1.26 per pound of coffee; non-Fair Trade coffee can net as little as $0.60 per pound, according to Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that tracks and promotes fair trade practices. That leaves many coffee growers laboring in poverty.
The Gombe Special Reserve approach is something along the lines of fair-trade-meets-free-market. Says Bolger, “the idea is that rewarding better processes for better quality coffee will help them think about the next steps” — certifying as organic, for example, and developing local methods of eco-friendly processing that use little water.
“This is a whole new hope for coffee farmers up in these high areas,” says Goodall.
Other coffee companies, including Peet’s Coffee & Tea have partnered with nongovernmental organizations to encourage fair trade and sustainable practices among coffee growers in other areas of Tanzania.
Copyright © 2007 OneWorld.net
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