Equal exchange coffee12/2/2023 This is part of the reason that the Smithsonian conservation scientists created their Bird-Friendly coffee certification scheme. Instead, they must rely on others to certify that farmers are adhering to a particular set of environmental standards. But consumers are rarely able to visit coffee farms to see for themselves whether the claims made about farming methods are true. Typically, bird watchers are very supportive of conservation activities and programs that benefit their local birds, and they are generally willing to pay for them. “I was surprised to see that only 9 percent of those surveyed purchased Bird-Friendly certified coffee and less than 40 percent were familiar with it,” Ms Williams said. “One of the most significant constraints to purchasing Bird-Friendly coffee among those surveyed was a lack of awareness,” said Alicia Williams, lead author of the study and a former research assistant at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and at Virginia Tech. Why? Corporate greenwashing confuses the public and harms birds Surprisingly, this survey found that only half (49%) of all serious birders considered bird habitats when purchasing coffee, and even fewer (38%) birders were familiar with Bird-Friendly shade-grown coffee - and only 9% purchased it ( ref). It stands to reason that birders and other environmentally-conscious people would actively seek out and purchase certified Bird-Friendly coffees, but are they? To better understand birders and their coffee drinking choices, Professor Dayer and her collaborators administered an online survey in 2016 to 912 donors or members of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who self-identified both as coffee drinkers and as birdwatchers to assess their familiarity with, receptivity to purchase, and perceived constraints on purchasing a variety of certified coffees. (Credit: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center / CC0) Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center via a Creative Commons license Growing support for certified Bird-Friendly coffee is starting to make a difference: Today, more than 37,000 acres of certified Bird-Friendly coffee farms in 11 countries produce 34 million pounds of coffee.į I G U R E 1 : The difference between shade-grown and certified Bird-Friendly shade-grown coffees. Bird-Friendly coffees are guaranteed to support bird habitat, in addition to fair and stable prices for coffee producers, healthy environments for local communities, and equal access to markets for Bird-Friendly coffee producers. This simple connection between habitat loss, pesticides and fertilizer pollution to intensive coffee farming methods was the impetus for Smithsonian conservation scientists to create the strictest agricultural certification criteria for coffee: their Bird-Friendly certification requires that coffee is organic and that it meets strict requirements for both mature canopy cover and the type of forest in which the coffee is grown. This loss of tropical forest biodiversity to a row monoculture harms resident rainforest birds along with their migratory cousins so they all are disappearing along with their rainforest homes. Today, most coffee sold is sun-grown under little or no shade because sun makes coffee bushes grow faster and produce more coffee. “As a result, many birds cannot find suitable habitats and are left with poor prospects of surviving migration and successfully breeding.” “Over recent decades, most of the shade coffee in Latin America has been converted to intensively managed row monocultures devoid of trees or other vegetation,” Amanda Rodewald, a co-author of the study who is the Garvin Professor and senior director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said in a statement.
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