Colombia Committed to Sustainability

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Features

BOGOTA, Columbia

By Bethany Haye

Sustainability is a goal that many industries, countries, institutions, and governments have been working toward with increasing intensity for the past two decades. But what does it really mean? The dictionary definition is the ability “to be maintained or continued over time.”

So sustainable agriculture means farming that doesn’t wear out the land and the ecosystem making them unfarmable; that doesn’t deplete the soil by draining its mineral resources, poisoning it with chemicals, or deforesting large swathes for monocultures.

ALSO: World Coffee Producers Forum to be Non-profit Representing Farmers

Within the coffee community, and particularly in Colombia where the FNC (National Federation of Coffee Growers) is the vital link between the country’s 560,000 smallholders, global markets, and the Colombian government, sustainability has become a much wider project. FNC was established to defend and improve the well-being of Colombia’s coffee growers. Sustainable agriculture is fundamental to that mission. FNC’s definition of sustainability is all-encompassing: “A sustainability standard is a set of principles, criteria, and indicators that assure social responsibility, natural resource care, and economic viability through certification or verification of a process or product.” Because sustainable coffee also, perhaps most importantly, means quality of life for the growers that can be maintained and continued over time.

How did coffee get unsustainable in the first place?

From the 1990s until 2004, when coffee prices dropped dramatically after the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement (among other things), the reaction of many Colombian farmers was to try to get as much yield as possible out of their acreage. Coffee grown in the sun can produce up to 150% more kilos per hectare, so clearing the forest to allow sunlight to penetrate became the method of choice. But, when the canopy goes, the other vegetation and birds go as well, allowing harmful insects to propagate, creating the need for pesticides. And, monocultures can destroy the diversity of nutrients in the soil within a very short span—as little as five years. Exposed to the semi-tropical sun, the coffee bushes require irrigation, using thousands of cubic meters of water. Other practices such as poor waste disposal lead to leaching of fermented waste into the soil, creating a need for fungicides. Within a few years, yields drop and farmers move on, clearing new land for a quick-fix of high productivity. In some coffee growing regions like Antioquia, this has contributed to a rate of deforestation approaching 8% per year, with disastrous effects on soil erosion and ultimately contributing to climate change. This approach is totally unsustainable.

Helping to spread sustainability into the global marketplace, Alternative Trade Organizations (ATOs), with roots in social justice and/or environmental causes are establishing niches alongside conventional agriculture export sectors. They are doing this by developing their own trade and marketing channels, and coffee is emblematic of the trend. As the certified organic and fair trade movements benefit from growing environmental and social awareness among consumers in developed countries, this helps the ATOs capture market share. Seven major sustainability standards have been developed by ATOs, NGOs, and large coffee conglomerates: 4C (Common Code for the Coffee Community) CAFÉ Practice (Starbucks), Fair Trade certified, UTZ-Rainforest Alliance, Triple AAA (Nespresso), and organic. These certifying bodies, in turn, are leading to consumer interest in the way coffee is produced and traded.

There have been a series of projects involving various coffee-producing countries and regions that sought to develop ways to bring farmers into the sustainability surge.

Solidaridad, which operates in more than 40 countries on every continent, has a large footprint in Colombia. From 2013 to 2014, Solidaridad ran a three-country test project called the Renovation Program. The Colombian section, managed in close cooperation with the FNC, included 5,282 producers around Tatamá National Park in Risaralda, Caldas. The objective was to promote climate-smart practices that increase productivity and resilience. The program trained 192 agronomists and established 900 demonstration farms in Risaralda alone. Two or more practices were adopted by 60% of farmers, and 720 hectares were converted from non-shade to reforested land. 376 hectares were reforested as conservation corridors. As part of this initiative, local rural teams encouraged growers to plant four main shade tree species, although they could also choose other species. The program also gave young entrepreneurs grants to set up tree nurseries, which allowed them to earn money by providing the seedlings the growers needed.

There are tough challenges to getting a large proportion of farmers to adopt ‘best practices’ although it is crucial to improving yields enough to make shade-grown coffee profitable.

The project’s 2014 annual report stated: “It is expected that the Renovation Program will help to increase yields post-2013.” And indeed, by 2015-16, those farms saw yields rise to 1,364 kg/ha (the national average is 1,123 kg/ha). The adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices has reduced deforestation in high-altitude regions in Colombia, (as well as Mexico and Peru, which also participated) and increased resilience from climate change by helping coffee farmers improve their yields. But the road ahead is rocky. The average age of coffee farmers is 56 years, and with lower skills levels and working remote farms, they are less likely to adopt new practices and technologies, making yield improvement seem illusory. Still, the report found that farmers are motivated to improve production from existing fields by adopting climate-smart practices and that this removes the need to clear new fields on higher ground, which in turn reduces deforestation and its associated carbon emissions. More efficient land use enables farmers to increase their incomes and improve their food security by using spare fields for alternative crops. As Juan Esteban Orduz, c.e.o. of the Colombian Coffee Federation (CCF) points out, economic viability is the foundation of sustainable practices, because “if the grower isn’t making enough to survive, he hasn’t got time to worry about sustainability.”

Having launched, promoted and pulled sponsors into the first World Coffee Growers’ Forum in Medellin in July 2017, Orduz and his team, who work closely with Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development headed by economist Jeffrey Sachs, are hard at work overhauling the structure of  FNC’s sustainability initiatives.

“Our most important program is “100/100”,” Orduz emphasized. The “100/100” program aims to make all Colombian coffee sustainable by the year 2027, which is the 100th anniversary of FNC’s founding. Orduz recently laid out FNC’s long-term goals—and the prize at the end of this 10-year project. “When we achieve that goal, when every bag of coffee that leaves Colombia is certified sustainable, Colombia will be the one-stop source for roasters, retailers, and the large brands adding a sustainable line to their product portfolio.”

He confirmed that today, Colombia’s share of certified or verified exports is already higher than the global average where about 12.5% of exports are verified or certified. Currently, 14% of FNC coffee exports are sold under one or more certification/verification seals. FNC is the largest single supplier of sustainable coffees worldwide, representing 6% of the world’s total exports. So far, roughly 40% of Colombian coffee farms comply with at least one sustainability standard, accounting for an area of more than 396,000 hectares or 42% of the cultivated area. About half of coffee farmers in the country currently participate in one or more sustainability initiative. And that percentage doesn’t include an undefined number of farmers who comply with sustainable practices including environmental sustainability and gender equity but do not submit to audits and so don’t obtain certification, Orduz noted.

“With Colombia’s well-developed network of coffee cultivation support organizations, we can be an example for other countries that are working toward high sustainability and sector-wide collaboration.”

As the champion of Colombian coffee growers and promoter of both their well-being and their high-value product worldwide, FNC is transforming production from what had become a subsistence activity to a viable, decent-paying one, and Colombia to the world leader, if not in quantity, in guaranteed quality, and most importantly, in certified sustainability. Which probably explains why both 4C and Nespresso have brought FNC on board to manage their sustainability programs which are the two largest in the world.

Another goal mentioned by Orduz is an eventual push to raise internal consumption within Colombia. With the economy semi-booming, and more foreign businesses, tourists, and nomads coming to the former “murder capital of the world”, Colombians’ own coffee-drinking habits are changing, and new third-place (out of home and office) consumption is rising, helped by the expansion of FNC’s subsidiary Procafécol and its premium coffee shop chain, Juan Valdez. The urban lifestyle influencer Starbuck’s has landed, and the cheap and cheerful Panamanian Tostao Pan y Café chain is democratizing café culture, along with original Colombian pioneer OMA coffee shops. This, of course, can become a factor in increasing sales, but Orduz is thinking beyond that; he is thinking in terms of internal consumption ultimately bringing more of the value chain home: changing the exportation ratio of green beans to roasted beans and ground coffee.