Protecting the coffee trees and producers from climate change and delivering ethical coffee to the consumers.
| Date of interview | August 5, 2022 |
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| Interviewees | Starbucks Coffee Japan Ltd. Akane Wakabayashi, Coffee Specialist Yoshimi Mochizuki, 17th Coffee Ambassador |
Please tell us how the coffee beans are delivered to Starbucks Coffee (“Starbucks”) from the countries of origin?
Ms. Wakabayashi: There are roughly 70 countries along the equator that are known coffee producers, and Starbucks purchases its coffee beans from about 30 of them. The three major coffee-producing regions are Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. In particular, Starbucks sources a significantly large portion of its coffee beans from Latin America.
Coffee beans are purchased by Starbucks Coffee Trading Company in Switzerland and then transported to the roasteries around the world including Japan, from which the roasted coffee beans are distributed to the local Starbucks stores.
Please tell us what environmental factors must be considered to produce high-quality coffee.
Ms. Wakabayashi: Coffee beans are actually the seeds of the plant, encased in its fruits known as coffee cherries. When the coffee cherries ripen, they are harvested by hand.
The essential conditions that must be met in producing high-quality coffee include optimal elevation, temperature variation, and microclimate. It has been reported that the slower the pace at which a coffee plant is grown, the tastier its beans become by storing a wider variety of flavors. To achieve such result, temperature variation is a requisite, which is the variation between high and low air temperatures that occurs during the same day.
And for this temperature variation to optimally occur, the site of coffee cultivation must be at the right elevation. In addition, how the coffee tastes is influenced by the temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and other aspects of the area’s microclimate.
What are the effects of recent climate change that you are seeing impacting coffee plantations?
Ms. Wakabayashi: There are two main species of coffee, which are Arabica and Robusta. While the majority of the coffee served by Starbucks is brewed from Arabica, according to some estimate, roughly 50% of the global areas that are suitable for growing the species of the coffee plant would disappear by 2050.
One of the reasons is a reduction in temperature variation caused by the ongoing temperature rise. Also, as the temperature and humidity continuously climb, the risk of diseases and pests that are detrimental to coffee plants also increases. In particular, this disease − known as "coffee leaf rust" (CLR) that has been impacting the coffee plants across Latin America − causes orange spots on the back of the leaves and renders them incapable of photosynthesis.
Once CLR is introduced to a region, it could cause irreversible damage to the extent that some of the coffee plantations there could end up with zero coffee production that year. In addition, there is this highly problematic pest known as "coffee berry borer", which eats coffee beans and suddenly increases in numbers as the temperature rises.
Even when insecticides are applied in suitable amounts to prevent the spreading of the pest, they could get washed away by rain if the timing of precipitation deviates from the norm, so the use of this pest control technique might not always prove to be effective.
Such variation in the timing of rainfall also produces other undesirable effects. While the coffee plant typically blossoms after a rainfall and bears fruit when the flowers have fallen off, if the precipitation continues for a longer stretch of time, the flowers might come off prematurely before the coffee beans are fully formed. Also, if the rain is too intense, it could detach the coffee beans from the branches and lead to even lower coffee production.
In addition, if the timing of harvesting must be adjusted to a shift in the rainy season, the pickers that are hired to gather the coffee beans on a regular schedule each year might not be able to come, which poses a whole other set of challenges.
So climate change has apparently been causing such dire circumstances that threaten the livelihood of the coffee producers, correct?
Ms. Wakabayashi: Yes. Because most of the coffee producers are farmers operating on a small scale, their lives would be devastated if they are unable to harvest their coffee beans as they would normally, even for just one season. If this happens, many farmers quit while others resort to selling poor-quality coffee beans in order to make ends meet, which is a vicious cycle.
There could be another option, which is for them to move their coffee plantations to higher elevations where temperature variation is better. But this leads to deforestation, which is a major cause of climate change.
Ms. Mochizuki: Being a Starbucks Coffee Ambassador, I often check news articles and videos to learn about the current status and conditions of coffee cultivation and production at the ground level. And I notice there have been more and more reports of the coffee producers’ significant suffering.
At the same time, and even under such difficult circumstances, I see them implementing a variety of well-thought-out measures to minimize CO2 emissions when shipping coffee products.
In terms of climate change adaptation, the coffee producers are developing hybrid cultivars that are more resistant to diseases and pests and can better endure climate change.
Could you tell us about the current status of your new cultivar development?
Ms. Wakabayashi: For instance, Starbucks purchased a Costa Rican coffee plantation called Hacienda Alsacia in 2013, which has a coffee research and development facility on the premises amidst the farmland. At this facility, a team of workers led by agronomists (agricultural scientists) is creating new cultivars that can effectively adapt to climate change and fight off the CLR disease, through a scrupulous cycle of grafting and replanting, without involving genetic engineering.
Another initiative that has been set in motion since 2015 is the Starbucks One Tree for Every Bag campaign, under which the company donates to a coffee farm a plant of a coffee cultivar developed by Hacienda Alsacia for each pack of coffee sold at a Starbucks store in the U.S. The recipients of these donations are coffee farmers in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Sumatra, etc., whose coffee production has been severely disrupted due to pathogenic bacteria. We have a goal of donating 100 million trees in total by the year 2025.
Are the coffee farmers conscious of the so-called year 2050 issues in your view?
Ms. Wakabayashi: Starbucks has farmer support centers set up at 10 different locations across the globe to provide aid to coffee producers, where agronomists knowledgeable about the local culture and coffee cultivation are hired to give advice to farmers at their plantations.
As we learn about those farmers’ circumstances through the agronomists, they are apparently cognizant of the little changes manifesting as different precipitation patterns, anecdotes of climate change in their daily lives, and actual CLR sightings.
Is Starbucks taking any other actions to address the impacts of climate change besides cultivar development?
Ms. Wakabayashi:When I posed the same question to the farmer support center in Colombia, they said that shade management was the key.
This is another initiative of ours that involves planting shade trees that provide shade over coffee trees to cool the temperature and also protect them from thunderstorms. So the farmer support center in Colombia is growing the seedlings of shade trees and give them to coffee farmers for planting on their land.
In this case, the farmers are apparently growing banana and mango trees to generate additional income, as well as legumes to enhance nitrogen fixation in soil, as is essential for coffee cultivation, which in turn can reduce their use of fertilizers.
Meanwhile, to deal with droughts that typically occur in Africa, a layer of grass, wood, straw, and other material is applied to cover the surface of soil, which is known as mulching.
Are there other initiatives being planned by Starbucks toward the year 2050?
Ms. Wakabayashi: Starbucks strives to source its coffee in an ethical manner based on a set of guidelines called "C.A.F.E. Practices". This is part of our certification program, which we established in 2004 with Conservation International, which is a global environmental NGO, and is the first of its kind in the coffee industry. Under this program, participating coffee plantations are evaluated on the four main criteria of quality, economic transparency, social responsibility, and environmental leadership. The program had the interim goal of achieving 99% ethical coffee sourcing across the entire Starbucks operations based on these criteria by 2015, which we managed to meet.
So our eyes are now set on improving the quality of the coffee we serve and increasing the coffee production while seeing eye to eye with the farmers and helping improving their lives in the process, based on the C.A.F.E. Practices in cooperation with the farmer support centers.
Ms. Mochizuki: In addition to the C.A.F.E. Practices, our stores have been conducting their own unique activities, which include reducing the use of plastics. These are important as they help mitigate climate change, protect the coffee producers, and conserve our own living by extension.
We also run an internal initiative known as the coffee master program, which is a training program for store managers to learn about a variety of issues that are transpiring in coffee production operations, so that they can share the knowledge with the partners working at their stores.
While climate change is apparently causing a whole host of negative effects, is there any silver lining to it, in terms of opportunity to achieve any positive outcome by taking advantage of the change?
Ms. Wakabayashi: For the short term, one bright aspect may be that coffee cultivation is becoming increasingly possible in the parts of the world where the plant was previously unviable. But it is rather difficult to find any positive aspect for a long-term perspective.
Ms. Mochizuki: I’ve heard of cases where people, who had not been interested in any environmental issues all that much, started engaging in ethical practices after realizing that they would no longer be able to enjoy their good quality coffee at a reasonable price by the time 2050 rolls around and being urged to take action. So, climate change is at least serving as such impetus for people to become more environmentally conscious.
So how is your outlook on the future?
Ms. Mochizuki: Starbucks sources its coffee ethically in line with the C.A.F.E. Practices. So I would like to communicate such message more widely to our customers through the partners working at our stores across Japan that, as they drink our coffee and enjoy its delicious taste, they are making a potentially positive impact on the global environment while helping the coffee producers improve their lives.
In this questionnaire survey we conducted before, we asked our customers why they chose Starbucks over other options, to which roughly 5% of them said because we are ethical. While I take it to be a positive sign, I believe one of my duties as Coffee Ambassador that I’m able to fulfill is to improve this figure in the future.
Ms. Wakabayashi: As Ms. Mochizuki just touched on it, I’m hoping what we do serves as an encouragement for our customers to start thinking about the future of our planet.
Meanwhile, I would like to play my part in allowing the 40,000 partners that are working at the stores across Japan to become fully aware of all key initiatives Starbucks is engaged in, by way of the coffee master program.
In terms of major events, we will be holding a three-day campaign entitled "Ethically Connecting" Day on September 8 - 10. For this year’s iteration, we will be offering Tanzania Ruvuma sourced straight from Tanzania, which is one of the countries where Starbucks has been providing support in the areas of quality and profitability improvement. We will also allow the customers to learn some fun facts about coffee as they enjoy their brews, by having our partners provide information on Starbucks’s key initiatives along with a quiz on its ethical practices, etc. on the in-store blackboards.
What is the biggest source of motivation for your work?
Ms. Wakabayashi: My primary motivation is the realization that I am part of Team Starbucks, including all its coffee producers, working in concert with each other to deliver our delicious coffee-drinking experience to our customers. So I get to travel to the coffee-producing countries to visit the actual plantations there as it is part of my job. I feel enthusiastic about continuously bringing Starbucks’s unique coffee experience to the customers with the rest of the team, as we all head into the future, helping and depending on each other.
Ms. Mochizuki: As I had always been interested in the conservation of the environment, I chose to work for Starbucks in the hopes that I would be able to be a part of the solutions to the issues affecting the global environment and participate in the company’s activities advocating the cause.
While coffee is traded globally in enormous volumes, some of the producing countries apparently feel they are being treated unfairly. So, if we could collectively take action in ensuring that all the coffee that we drink is ethically sourced, the world would be a better place.
The biggest motivation for me is this idea that I’m helping delivering coffee to the customers not only for the sake of serving coffee per se but also to improve the future that awaits us.
(Posted on September 1, 2022)
