As long as Shade Grown Cofee has been around I drink it to support birds. It is pricey, but like a computer that price will eventually come down. I used to lookk at buying Shade Grown Coffee as a way to support good conservation and groups I.
I have been known to have pragmatic lapses and drink coffee from Dunkin Donuts and Sevn Eleven, even from McDonalds if I had to.
I have a nephew who has been in coffee as a business. He has a good heart, and I ask him why it is a mixed bag for coffee farmers in places like Central America to make money on coffee. He says it is easier for a person to make more and quicker money to feed his family to grow sun coffee; This worked if a coffee farmer did not figure in costs for intensive pesticides and year around labor to watch such an intensive crop. Many Sungrowing Coffee farmers went out of business. Now the business is made up of large, corporate plantations. talk about the “old ways” of reall taking advantage of plantation workers. It is common place in Latin American corporate farms. Sun Growing Coffee requires a lower quality coffee bean (robustus from Ethiopia), faster growing for the larger American and European Market. Read Bridget Stuchbury, a birder and professor from Canada’s York University in Tornto, Ontario. She has a great chapter for Coffee drinkers called Coffee With a Conscience. Stuchbury has a lot to write about this topic which we coffee drinkers can help birds while doing what they do; drink coffee each morning. This is something I do when I can afford to do it. Now it is front and center with me. Soon it will be far more widespread for all of the wrong reasons.
Matt
