Nestle, Kraft, Starbucks' illegal coffee crops harm Tigers, Rhinos

[Guest guest]

WWF: Coffee Crops Harm Tigers, Rhinos

AFP

 

Jan. 17, 2007 — Global food giants Nestle and Kraft Foods and coffee giant

Starbucks have sold coffee illegally grown in a key conservation area for

endangered tigers and rhinos, WWF said.

 

The coffee comes from the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park on the

southern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island, which is home to about 40

Sumatran tigers, of which there are fewer than 400 left in the wild, the

conservation group said.

 

It is also home to about 500 Sumatran elephants, a quarter of the remaining

population, and 60 to 85 critically endangered Sumatran rhinos.

 

Despite its importance as a conservation area and World Heritage Site,

nearly 20 percent of the park has been cleared for illegal coffee

cultivation, the WWF said in a report titled " Gone in an Instant. "

 

" About 17 percent of the national park area is being cultivated for coffee, "

Nazir Foead, from WWF Indonesia, told AFP.

 

" If current trends continue, in 10 years' time the area could double,

causing significant impacts to the (endangered) species' habitats, " he said.

 

Indonesia is now the world's fourth-largest coffee exporter and

second-largest producer of robusta, widely used for instant coffee. At least

half the country's coffee is exported through the port of Lampung, adjacent

to the national park.

 

" All the coffee exported from Lampung is tainted, " said Foead, who authored

the report. Local traders mixed illegally grown coffee with legal beans and

exported it to international firms.

 

Kraft Foods, ED and F Man in Britain, Dutch firm Andira, Hong Kong's Noble

Coffee, Germany's Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Marubeni Corp. of Japan, Hamburg

Coffee Company, Nestle, Olam of Singapore and Italy's Lavazza were the top

10 buyers of Lampung coffee in 2003, the WWF said.

 

Starbucks, Folgers and Tchibo also received shipments from Lampung in 2004.

 

Foead said they were probably unaware of its illegal origins, due to the

lack of regulations in the region.

 

" I think they don't know where the coffee comes from, " he said.

 

" The village and sub-district traders are mixing the (illegal and legal)

coffee. "

 

Neither exporting nor importing companies had mechanisms in place to prevent

the trade in illegal beans.

 

" We are asking the coffee companies to first of all recognize the problem, "

he said.

 

Swiss food giant Nestle responded by " launching an effort to clean up part

of its supply chain and advise farmers on how to produce higher-quality

coffee, " the WWF said.

 

US-based Kraft Foods Inc., the world's second-largest food and beverage

company after Nestle, and Lavazza were in the early stages of engaging with

the WWF on the issue, the group said.

 

Foead said the WWF was also working with farmers to convince them to

cultivate coffee outside conservation areas and provide them with the

technical know-how to produce better quality beans.

 

" We would like the big buyers to clean up their chains of supply and help

the poor farmers to plant coffee in a sustainable way outside the national

park, " he said.

 

" We do not want the buyers to shift to somewhere else. "

 

Foead said farmers could improve their productivity and profits if they

tended their plants properly and selectively harvested them.

 

The WWF also called on the Indonesian government to better protect the park

and give incentives to legitimate coffee producers and microcredit for

coffee farmers.

_

Sumatra, Indonesia, is the world's sixth largest island and home to some of

the most species-rich forests on Earth. Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park,

on the coast of southern Sumatra, is one of these forests. Extremely rich in

biodiversity, the 324,000-hectare national park is a World Heritage site

containing some of Sumatra's last lowland forests.

 

Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park has a high level of biodiversity. Save

The Tiger Fund, WCS and WWF have identified the park as a priority Tiger

Conservation Landscape (Dinerstein et al., 2006), a designation that marks

it as one of the most important forest areas for tiger conservation in

Southeast Asia.

 

The park has been included as a Global 200 Ecoregion, WWF's ranking of the

Earth's most biologically outstanding terrestrial, freshwater and marine

habitats. In addition, it has been designated as a priority area for

Sumatran rhino conservation through WWF's Asian Rhino and Elephant Action

Strategy (AREAS). And in 2004, UNESCO listed the area as a World Heritage

Cluster Mountainous Area, together with Gunung Leuser and Kerinci Seblat

National Parks.

 

More:

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/where_we_work/asia_pacific/our_programmes/are

as/news/trade_coffee/index.cfm

 

The Times

Why a cup of instant coffee could spell doom for last hairy rhino

Nick Meo in Sumatra

 

Farmers hack down rainforest

 

Rare animals facing extinction

 

 

After surviving the incursions of poachers, loggers and farmers, one of the

last great tracts of protected virgin rainforest in South-East Asia is now

being destroyed because of booming coffee exports, according to

conservationists.

They estimate that about 20 per cent of the Bukit Barisan Selatan National

Park in Sumatra has been hacked down for illicit plantations. If the

destruction continues unchecked in the 340,000-hectare (840,000-acre) park,

some of Asia’s last surviving tigers and the critically endangered hairy

rhino, as well as elephants, could vanish within a decade because of the

world’s craving for caffeine.

 

Gone in an Instant, a report published today by WWF, blames international

coffee companies for buying illicit coffee — often unknowingly — from

middlemen who abuse a lack of regulations to mix beans from the 20,000

tonnes grown illegally inside the park with legitimate crops from elsewhere

in Lampung province.

 

The low-grade robusta beans grown in the area are used to make instant and

packet coffee and energy drinks by some of the biggest names in the

business, including Kraft Foods, Nestlé and ED & F Man.

 

Nestlé was one of the companies praised by researchers for trying to find

ways of keeping illegal beans out of their coffee products. Others have

pledged to take action to deal with the problem after researchers contacted

them. Some who were approached, including London-based ED & F Man, denied

purchasing any illicit beans, WWF said.

 

Researchers used satellite imaging, interviews with coffee farmers and

traders and monitoring of trade routes to track the progress of illicit

coffee from cleared jungle to the breakfast table in Britain, Germany or

America.

 

Nazir Foead, the WWF director of policy, said: “WWF doesn’t want to shut

down the coffee industry in Lampung province but we’re asking multinational

coffee companies to implement rigorous controls to ensure that they are no

longer buying illegally grown coffee.”

 

At stake is the survival of some of Asia’s rarest and most spectacular

mammals, including three subspecies found nowhere else in the world.

 

The park is home to around 40 Sumatran tigers — about 10 per cent of the

animals left in the wild — and about 80 Sumatran rhinos, also known as hairy

rhinos, which are found in only three other parks on the island. A quarter

of the wild population of 2,000 Sumatran elephants are also thought to be

within the park, which is also rich in plant life.

 

Indonesia is now the fourth-biggest coffee producer in the world after

Brazil, Colombia and Vietnam, and half of its production is in Lampung

province. The coffee rush has brought settlers from crowded Java or

elsewhere in Sumatra, and about 15,000 families taken over plots of land

where they grow ginger, cinnamon, rubber and coffee.

 

WWF estimates that more than 40,000 hectares have been cut down for coffee

plantations inside the protected area. Government officials and

overstretched park staff have done little to stop them, and most of the

farmers make little more than a subsistence living, although selling coffee

has given many of them earnings for the first time in their lives.

 

One coffee farmer, Suratno, moved from Java in 1984 with his family and

admits to growing one and a half hectares of coffee inside the forest. He

said: “I don’t feel guilty about growing in the wilderness. There is still

plenty of forest in there. But I wouldn’t want to see it all destroyed. Then

there could be floods and erosion.”

 

Jonathan Atwood from Kraft, makers of Maxwell House and Kenco, said: “There

is a very complex supply chain and traceability is very difficult. We are

trying to formulate an action plan with WWF, farmers and the Indonesian

Government.”