Roughly a billion people enjoy coffee daily, and more than 100 million people rely on it for income. However, the coffee industry is the sixth-largest driver of deforestation and is also rife with human rights abuses, including the labor of enslaved persons and children. But it doesn’t have to be this way, says this guest on the Mongabay Newscast.
Etelle Higonnet is the founder of the NGO Coffee Watch, having formerly served as a senior adviser at the U.S. National Wildlife Federation with a focus on curbing deforestation, and before that as campaign director at Mighty Earth, focusing on advocacy for zero deforestation with an emphasis on the cocoa, palm oil, rubber, cattle and soy industries.
The main commodity on her radar now is coffee. On this podcast episode, she explains how the industry can — and should — reform its practices.
“It’s so simple … pay a living [a] living income wage,” she says, “ and a lot of human rights violations will just dry up.”
To target deforestation, Higonnet says the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is “a beautiful law” that “simply put, would bar imports of coffee into the European Union if that coffee is tainted by deforestation or illegality. So, two things that are illegal off the top of my head are slavery and child labor.”
The bill is perhaps the first of its kind to target illegality linked to coffee, which has historically been absent from similar legislation targeting other commodities such as palm oil, timber or cocoa.
While the EUDR was slated to go into effect at the end of last year, Higonnet tells Mongabay that certain industry lobbyists and efforts contributed to its delay until the end of 2025, even though compliance for coffee is relatively simple compared to other commodities.
“There are some people who are [just] afraid of all the change that it represented and have been dragging their feet and whingeing about how they can’t comply. Luckily, there are literally thousands of companies that spoke out for the EUDR and trillions of dollars of assets under management that spoke out for the EUDR.”
Legislation is not the only solution, and Higonnet emphasizes that individuals can have an impact by simply buying coffee from brands that have demonstrated ethical sourcing.
Additionally, consumers can pressure their retailers to source ethically. “You can go and look for coffee that guarantees a living income, and that is agroforestry coffee,” she says.
Coffee naturally grows in such agroecological conditions under woody perennials like trees — hence the premium term “shade grown” — but commercial operations focus on monocultural, full-sun growing conditions that deliver maximum production. This means removing tree cover, which causes biodiversity depletion and rainfall and surface water scarcity, contributing to the lower crop yields that the world is currently seeing. These conditions only intensify market speculation and higher prices in a vicious cycle exacerbated by tariffs.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.
Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Etelle Higonnet: The coffee industry is filled with slaves. It is one of the top drivers of slavery in Brazil. We’re about to come onto Juneteenth like it’s 2025. How can we have thousands of slaves today? Coffee. That’s insane. That’s totally crazy. It’s so not okay. I have no words. And then let’s also not forget, there is a major driver of child labor. To the best of my knowledge, there are literally millions of kids. Working in coffee, and if you have been drinking coffee your whole life, like me, you have been drinking child labor, slavery, deforestation. You have been putting it into your body, so we have got to change this.
Mike DiGiroalmo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo bring you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists. Working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Etelle Higonnet an author, former researcher for human rights watch, and the founder of the NGO Coffee Watch. She joins me today to talk about coffee. A billion of us drink it every single day, and well over a hundred million people rely on it for their livelihoods. However, the commodity has suffered, reduced harvests and is being impacted by global tariffs as its price is set to soar. But the industry itself has a troubling track record of enabling highly prevalent human rights, abuses, slavery, and massive amounts of deforestation with estimated millions of children in child labor. Consumers and lawmakers have been calling for a change. This lack of accountability and a guarantee of coffee free from child labor or deforestation is incredibly distressing and it can make all of us who enjoy the beverage feel a bit Sisyphean in our attempts to do better with our personal choices. In this conversation, Higonnet helps dispel this malaise by explaining exactly what can be done to address these highly abusive practices. The good news is the solutions are there and could be implemented. Global supply chain regulation has been conspicuously absent. The European Union deforestation regulation, EUDR is perhaps the first bill of its kind to address the coffee supply chain problems, and it does so in a way that companies could follow with relative simplicity despite the industry’s claims to the contrary, many of these companies and their lobbyists have actually attacked this regulation, contributing to its delay, Higonnet tells me. She was so good at explaining the morbidity of this situation that it literally left me speechless, which was broken by her gracious interjections of brevity and humor. This episode is gonna hit home for a lot of people, but it’s worth listening to as Higonnet provides actions anyone listening can take to make an impact.
Etelle, thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.
Etelle: It’s a wonderful to be here with you. Thank you for having me.
Mike: So we’re gonna talk today about the coffee industry and roughly over a billion people globally enjoy coffee every day. And so, this is a product that a lot of us use. It affects a lot of people. A lot of people rely on it for their livelihoods. You’ve written a number of op-eds for us on this industry, so let’s start by unpacking some of the points that you’ve made in these op-eds and the impact of the coffee industry, it said that it’s a major driver of deforestation, mass extinction, child labor, slavery, and a lot of other horrific abuses. So just how much destruction and human rights abuses are resulting from this industry?
Etelle: I should start by confessing something, which is that I love coffee and I also cannot start my day without drinking coffee. My husband makes me this delicious little oat milk latte. Otherwise, I’m like a discombobulated hedgehog. So I say this about coffee’s destruction with a heart full of love for the industry, and a real deep belief that we can make the world better with every cup and we should do. The reason that we must do so with some kind of urgency in our hearts is because it’s the number six driver of deforestation in the world that’s effing crazy and really not okay. The second reason why we have to fix the coffee industry ASAP yesterday took toot on the double is because a lot of it is grown in pesticide soaked monoculture, which is terrible for biodiversity, and that’s really bad.
Mike: Yeah.
Etelle: And we’re actually in a mass extinction. And a lot of people believe that we’re in an insect apocalypse. Mongabay has written about this. They did a whole series, but you are not alone. It was like the front page of the New York Times magazine a while back. This is a really serious thing. If we lose all the insects, like what do you think is gonna happen next? Obviously, we’re at the top of the tropic chain we will also be affected and the coffee industry sprays tons of horrible chemicals all over itself, which are really driving part of the insect apocalypse and driving part of the mass extinction that we’re in. So, it’s not just deforestation, it’s this resistance to regenerative agroforestry at a kind of weird, destructive, embracing of pesticides of monoculture, but also the coffee industry is filled with slaves. It is one of the top drivers of slavery in Brazil. We’re about to come onto to Juneteenth like it’s 2025. How can we have thousands of slaves today in coffee? That’s insane. That’s totally crazy. It’s so not okay. I have no words. And then let’s also not forget a major driver of child labor. To the best of my knowledge, there are literally millions of kids working in coffee, and if you have been drinking coffee your whole life, like me, you have been drinking child labor, slavery, and deforestation. You have been putting it into your body. So, we have got to change this.
Mike: Ugh…I just…it’s really, really difficult to soak this in and sit with this information because as you mentioned, a lot of us enjoy this product. So, I want to bring us back to listeners. So, let’s say I’m at a local coffee shop in New York City. Let’s call it a mom-and-pop shop, not a chain, and I look at the menu and I order a cappuccino. What are the odds that this came from some of these horrific practices and human rights abuses that you’ve just outlined here?
Etelle: Very high. More than half.
Mike: …that’s…yeah, that’s a lot.
Etelle: I know this is really hard to sit with. I know it’s really hard. When I decided to start Coffee Watch this new NGO that I founded last year, I only really knew that it was the number six driver of deforestation. I didn’t know about this horrible hunger for pesticides, like HHPs (highly hazordous pesticides). I didn’t even know how bad the slavery was and the child labor. I did not know. Most people do not know the fact that they drink this horrible poison coffee, this slavery coffee, this child labor coffee is not their fault. They don’t know. We should not expend a lot of energy feeling horrible about ourselves and feeling guilty and wallowing in like self-flagellation. No, no, no.
Mike: Right.
Etelle: The key thing to focus on, Mike, and for all your listeners out there is coffee can be so beautiful. Coffee can be amazingly good for people and planet, for farmers and forests, it can be regenerative agroforestry, like there are a lot of crops that do not lend themselves well to regenerative agroforestry. Oh my god, coffee loves it. Coffee like dreams of being in regenerative agroforestry systems, that’s literally where coffee comes from. Coffee is made to be under trees. It’s like that’s what it wants. We have just altered it into turn these varieties of coffee from like shade loving agroforestry, Arabica and other species of coffee that also all love shade to full sun monoculture robusta. We did that. We did that. That’s human. That’s weird. It’s like this weird anomaly and aberration and we can undo it just the way we did it. We can all aim for agroforestry and also there’s no reason to have like slavery and degradation and child labor coffee. We can have dignity coffee. All we have to do, it’s so simple, is pay a living income price and a living income wage. And a lot of human rights violations will just dry up and it’ll be much easier to target them and solve them. So actually, the good news is the solutions are here. They are simple. They’re already being executed by some of the world’s best coffee companies who have not gone bankrupt. In fact, they’re doing super well. They can do good and do well. I was just visiting one of those coffee shops–coffee companies–like two days ago, Slow Forest Coffee, and it just rocked my world. It’s a perfect example. Of how we can have great coffee, living income, agroforestry, no chemicals, no deforestation. Its beautiful. How amazing is that, right? That should lift our hearts as much as we get down from the bad news, right?
Mike: I mean it definitely sounds much better than what we’ve been doing for a lot of this time we’ve had this industry globally. I shudder to ask this next question, but let’s say I walk into a big name brand chain, like a global coffee company. What are the chances then that this coffee came from those abuses?
Etelle: Also more than half. It’s just rolling the dice, Mike, right? Because if half of global coffee is connected to deforestation and to pesticide soaked monoculture and to extreme poverty, then of course it’s connected to these problems of child labor and slavery, right? Because the thing is, most coffee farmers they earn like under $2 and 15 cents a day. Especially when you consider not just the smallholder farmers, but also the farm workers who harvest. And who do all this other like menial labor on coffee farms. Our best estimate is that there’s 12.5 million farms in the world around 25 million small holder farmers and probably around a hundred million farm workers, right? Most of those farm workers are extraordinarily poor and mistreated. Part of the problem, the reason why we tend to have forced labor, trafficking, slavery, child labor, and other labor abuses is because of that extreme poverty. You just do the math, right? Or here’s another way of doing the math. The best studies we could get our hands on indicate that 91% of Ethiopian coffee farming families use child labor. 74% of Colombian coffee growing families use child labor. 64% of Honduran coffee farming families use child labor. I could go on, but you get my point. The point is that this is so prevalent. That is why I am saying the chances are more than 50%.
Mike: It is shocking. Perhaps it’s not shocking to some folks who have looked into this more, but it is quite stark. And that has direct—It’s directly related to the price of coffee which is right now set to soar worldwide due to harvesting complications and also tariffs. And so I would like to talk about this context with you because before we hopped on this call, as you mentioned, this is an interrelated thing. So, what will be the effect on deforestation? And also the abuses that you’ve just described with this current context. Do you think that the low supply and the high price of coffee will drive more deforestation and cause even more abuses?
Etelle: Mike, this is so intertwined. It’s crazy, right? But when I talk about social and environmental abuses, they are why we have the high prices today. That’s why coffee is at the sky high, all time high price. But let me unpack that. Okay, so let’s talk about trees. Trees are rain machines. When you have lots of trees together, you stabilize rainfall. When you cut down all your trees, chop, chop, chop, your rainfall goes nuts. And actually, your rainfall may dry up. And if you cut down 90% of a giant forest that was anchoring an entire ecosystem and anchoring all the rainfall for a huge region, of course the rains get crazy, and then you have crop failures, and then you have scarcity, and then you have not enough supply for too much demand, and then the price goes up and then the speculators go bananas, and then the price goes up even more. That’s like the trajectory. But just to explain why I’m saying that deforestation is the cause of the price hikes that we see in coffee. Around like 31 to 39% of global coffee comes from Brazil. Depends who you ask. Brazil’s the number one coffee producing country in the world. Half of its coffee comes, give or take from Minas Gerais. This region that used to be the Mata Atlância and actually Mangabey has written about this. Do you wanna know how much of that forest is gone? Over 90% of that forest is gone. Literally over 90% in that enormous forest. That was like not as big as the Amazon, but close.
Mike: Yeah.
Etelle: It’s gone. Okay, so that is why the rain in that entire region has gone bananas. That’s why we’re now having crop failures, which is why we’re having scarcity, which is why the prices are so high. And by the way, Brazil is not the only country that trashed its forest to grow coffee, that’s happened everywhere that coffee has been grown, it has come at the expense of forests. So, shocker, now we’re screwed because the rains are all messed up because we chopped down all those rain machines. And the only really serious solution to walk ourselves back from this cliff of scarcity and crop failure and sky high prices and speculation and total insane volatility in the market, which is really bad for farmers and really bad for a lot of businesses, especially at the small mom and pop coffee businesses, the only way to walk it back is something called agroforestry, where you plant back a lot of trees into the coffee, in and around the coffee. Reforestation, restoring part of what we broke. Let’s fix what we broke as much as we can. Then we can *phew* stabilize the rainfall, then we can stabilize coffee. Oh, and by the way, all the other crops there too. So, there’s this super strong connection between deforestation and high price. And when you have really high prices it prompts people to want to plant more coffee and then you have more deforestation. So actually it’s like a downward spiral of evil.
Mike: Yeah.
Etelle: And we have to be very mindful of this and we have to walk ourselves back up.
Mike: Yeah. I mean that makes a lot of sense. I mean, in the way you explained, is what I mean. What we’re doing, to me, doesn’t make sense, but yes. So how do the tariffs affect this then?
Etelle: The tariffs are having a very big deleterious impact on the coffee industry and have done for some time. There are a few standout awesome countries. I wanna give them a shout out right here. Canada, Australia, Norway, they do not have rubbish, evil, exploitative tariffs that are hurting the Global South. But by and large, the EU, Japan, the UK, most countries have terrible tariffs. Let me explain why their tariffs are terrible. Their tariffs are racist and colonialist and exploitative and designed to impoverish the Global South countries where coffee is grown. How do they achieve this? Most coffee consuming countries have very low tariffs on the raw product, and they jack up the tariffs every time you try to transform, and process the coffee. So, when you roast it, for example, or you decaffeinate it that’s where the money is and that’s where the tariffs come in. That’s how you end up in a system where the coffee producing countries are so disincentivized to do the transformation that would bring them the big bucks that are in the coffee industry. It’s a very lucrative industry. The money just isn’t going to the coffee growing countries, who by the way, need it and they use that revenue to do poverty alleviation for their farmers to feed people when there’s droughts and scarcity and collapse and the prices go through the floor and everyone is up S-H-I-T creek with no paddle. Whereas, the rich countries are doing the transformation on a whim, we can just shut down USAID and say, oh, all those projects that we haven’t been funding to do poverty alleviation for your coffee farmers, um, goodbye. It’s gone. Or the EU can just say oh, we’re repurposing that money to re-arm Ukraine. So basically the countries that need that money to do poverty alleviation for their coffee farmers, they’re being denied that money through the tariff system that we have today. And Trump’s tariff wars just made it so much worse for everybody, but especially for the countries that sell a lot to the US and that have high tariffs. So first and foremost, that’s Mexico and Nicaragua. They are being screwed.
Mike: It’s a very bad situation. Turning to legislation that is at least combating this. Now, historically, as you have pointed out to us, not much has been agreed upon to address deforestation, especially from coffee, but the European Union deforestation regulation, EUDR does. Can you explain for our listeners, how exactly does the EUDR help in this circumstance?
Etelle: The EUDR is amazing. It’s a beautiful law. Everyone who cares about forests should be supporting it and speaking out for that law, and signing petitions and posting on social and whatever else you can do because EUDR simply put, would bar imports of coffee into the European Union if that coffee is tainted by deforestation or illegality. So, two things that are illegal off the top of my head are slavery and child labor. So that is actually a really good and important law that was proposed. It’s been so under attack, like you have no idea. These disgusting, evil lies have been spread about the EUDR, I think by actors who are well aware this is misinformation. These are like, I think, just horrible disinformation campaigns based, some very unscrupulous actors, and then there are some people who are just afraid of all the change that it represented and have been dragging their feet and whingeing about how they can’t comply. Luckily, there are literally thousands of companies that spoke out for the EUDR and trillions of dollars of assets under management that spoke out for the EUDR somehow. All those NGOs and citizens, millions of people actually, citizens, all those companies and investors that have been saying, please save global forests, get this law like up and running. Those voices lately have been drowned out by these like weird sort of dodgy misinformation campaigns and hyper negative rogue companies and lobby groups that ,I think personally, are probably doing this because they have got slaves and kids and deforestation and don’t wanna stop. Yeah, this is like a make or break moment for the EUDR, but the EUDR would be amazing if it came into force, it would transform global coffee. Because 26% of coffee goes to the EU.
Mike: As you just mentioned, Europe accounts for like you said, 26%–some sources say 30—of the global coffee market. And so the EUDR alone is not gonna be enough, based just on this. So, what, could other nations do right now? What do you propose?
Etelle: So really fascinatingly, the UK passed something called The Environment Bill, which went through the Parliament and has lords and got Royal Ascent and, um, the Environment Bill Schedule 17 people often call it the UKDR. Just ’cause it’s so similar to the EUDR, it would block products from high-risk commodities that are tainted by illegal deforestation from entering the UK. And essentially everybody’s just waiting for DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs). DEFRA has put forth implementing regulation draft that only included four commodities that was missing coffee, if I may be so bold, but actually like, where is the implementing regulation? Excuse me it has been years that we are we’re waiting. So the UK could just get off its little butt and pass this and get it out in the world and that would be huge because then they would be supporting the EUDR with something quite similar, a little bit less stringent, a little bit less strong, but still quite similar. And then across the pond, if you look at the US. The US has a bill with bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. That’s called the Forest Act. Senator Schatz and [Representative] Blumenauer were the heroes behind the Forest Act. Um, right now, obviously things are so chaotic in Washington, that’s unlikely to pass anytime soon. But there are bills that were proposed in California, and New York, and Illinois to end deforestation in state procurement. Um, unfortunately, the governor of New York and the governor of California vetoed their bills. That was so sad. Oh my God. Why did they do that? Haha! I don’t know. I wanna like cry and put my hand in my hands. I think they were misinformed, and they also experienced the really dodgy, horrible lobbying from *Canada* of all countries. I always thought Canadians were nice. It was like, oh, they’re such sweet people. They make Maple syrup and all these other wonderful things. Their country’s beautiful. Then I was like, nope, nope, actually terrible lobbying from Canada to stop these beautiful bills. So, I was shocked how bad Canada was, on these bills. But, and again, they really seem to wanna trash their forests and listen only to the worst like bottom of the barrel, bad apples in the Canadian pulp and paper and timber industry. So that seems to have animated their attacks. But yeah, there are bills in New York and Illinois and California. There’s a proposed bill for the Federal United States, the Forest Act. There’s the UKDR, all those things are amazing. Switzerland tried several times to pass a strong human rights and supply chains act. It fell on its face a couple times, and the incredibly courageous, resilient coalition behind that is still fighting. Go Swiss activists! Go Swiss activists, you can do it! And there’s yeah, there’s efforts all over the world to get laws passed that are awesome and that would save global forest and protect human rights. All I have to say is love and respect to those activists and poop on the lawmakers who are shutting down those efforts, poop on them because they need to breathe and their kids presumably also need to breathe. So, if they’ve not clocked that, we are not gonna breathe without forests, then like I have news for them, which is we’re all gonna die if you don’t pass those laws.
Mike: So that’s great to hear about the other laws that are in consideration. I wanna jump back really quick to the EUDR, which doesn’t come into effect until the end of this year, but you’ve indicated to us that whistleblowers say industry execs are in denial about having to comply with the EDUR and they think that the Trump administration or some right-leaning authoritarian European politicians will allow them to evade compliance. So, can you just shed some light on what these whistleblowers have indicated?
Etelle: That’s right. What I’ve heard from sources inside the industry is that a lot of companies do not actually believe that EUDR is gonna come into effect. They believe that it can be delayed by another year. It was already supposed to be in January this year. So, we are like missing our chance to start saving global forest already this year. That’s very sad. But they think they’re gonna get another delay. They think they’re gonna get more loopholes. They think they’re gonna get really bad interpretations of the law rammed through so that the law becomes a toothless tiger. And some people actually think that the law is just gonna get killed, which honestly, I couldn’t quite believe that they would think that because it’s so anti-democratic, this law has gone through every hoop and hurdle of the process.
Mike: How would it get killed?
Etelle: So this is my personal take on it, but essentially some far right, whackadoodles tried to kill the law already in proposals that revealed a total lack of understanding of how the WTO works and also total lack of understanding of how deforestation works and trade. Their proposals were so dumb and so bad. Luckily, almost everything that they proposed got shut down and rejected. The one thing that they got was that the law was delayed, so it was supposed to come into effect in January of this year. Now it’s gonna come into effect January of next year, but even though these wackadoodle banana pants, awful parliamentarians were listening to the worst rumblings from like the dregs of the agribusiness sector to try and kill, derail and delay the EUDR, and even though that got shut down, it’s like a zombie. They just keep coming back. So now there’s this new wave of efforts to kill the EUDR to delay it, water it down.
Mike: Hello listeners, and thank you as always for tuning in. I have two pieces of news for you. One: Mongabay has an official podcast email. We love receiving all the kind messages of support, but to ensure that we can adequately and efficiently respond to them we’ve created a place for you to send your thoughts, questions, or comments. Reach out to us at podcast[at]Mongabay[dot]com. Once again, that is podcast[at]Mongabay[dot]com. The second piece of news is a hearty congratulations to our colleagues at the India Bureau for winning the best science and health podcast award at the Publisher podcast awards in London this past week. I highly encourage you to go check out the award-winning miniseries Wild Frequencies from Mongabay India. Please go check it out. As usual, subscribe to the podcast you’re listening to now the Mongabay newscast whereever you get your podcast from and leave us a review. That is the best thing you can do to help expand our reach. Thank you so much. Now let’s get back to the conversation with Etelle Higonnet.
Now something that you’ve pointed out, which I think is a really important point to talk about here, is that the supply chain for coffee is actually comparatively far less complex than it is for other [commodities], meaning that compliance is actually relatively simple. Can you explain more what you mean by this?
Etelle: Sure. Coffee is just coffee. It doesn’t turn into lots of other things. Rubber is interesting as a comparison point because around I think two thirds of global rubber goes into tires, but actually you also have rubber in so many other things. It’s in condoms, it’s in sneakers, it’s in your car, it’s in yoga mats. It’s just in a lot of small products. Gloves that we all had to wear during the pandemic. And palm oil is even more complex. Palm oil is in your lipstick, it’s in your shampoo, it’s in your cup of noodles, it’s in your ice cream, your chocolate, your um, Cheerios. It’s just in half of the things that the average person leaves the supermarket with, half the things that you put in your cart when you go to the supermarket have palm oil in them. So that makes it a little bit more challenging, I think, for palm oil. And then cattle products, also we think of cattle as just beef, but no. What about all of our handbags, all of our leather shoes and bags and jackets? We forget that our leather car seats can be tied to appalling deforestation in the Chaco. This amazing report came out called ‘Grand Theft Chaco,’ which I cannot recommend enough to anyone who drives a car and has a leather car seat. You should go read that report. Um, yeah. So coffee is pretty simple because it’s just coffee is coffee and it’s in your coffee.
Mike: It’s, uh, it’s interesting to me that the industry is using this as a talking point, saying that compliance is too difficult. At least that’s what I think they’re saying. But it would appear that’s not really an argument for a delay of this based on the relative simplicity of that supply chain, if I have that correct.
Etelle: So, look, yes. A lot of companies that have been whingeing and complaining about compliance with the EUDR say it’s just too hard to comply. I’m sorry, excuse me? It’s too hard to comply with a law that says that your product should not have illegality in it? Are you telling us that you knowingly have products that are effing illegal? Like what? Haha! It’s too hard to have no deforestation in your product? Are you for real? I am sorry, that’s just such a…people say this and I try to take a deep breath and be calm and be patient and understanding, but like actually these days there are satellite maps everywhere. Everybody who’s not under a rock in a coma in outer Tajikistan knows what a satellite map is. Okay? Satellite maps, that’s how you check your deforestation. There are so many service providers just dying to help companies figure out how to go deforestation free. That is not such a big hurdle, I think, and it is also really important if we would like to keep breathing and surviving on planet Earth. Okay? And then the other thing is if your products have illegality in them, like slavery and child labor, um, this is your chance to stop and do better. And if you’re upset because the traceability is hard, then let me sit and look and understand that argument from some companies. That they say traceability is hard. Does that mean they’re actually for real, telling us that they do not know where their stuff is from? Like what? You know I hear these things and I just feel like I’m living in some kind of Alice in Wonderland place where I’ve like taken crack and mushrooms by accident.
Mike: Haha. I mean, you make an incredibly good point. It is really stark to hear these talking points. I agree with you. And something else you pointed out to us, because there exist these certification schemes, which supposedly are to indicate that the coffee is child labor free, but you’ve pointed out to us that these cannot guarantee deforestation free or child labor free coffee. So, can you talk about these certification schemes? What’s the deal with these?
Etelle: So, it depends on what commodity you’re looking at. And coffee certification’s a really big deal. Like we think that give or take around a half of global coffee is certified either with self-certification schemes. It’s kind of the fox patrols the hen house, or third party certifications schemes. It’s like the badgers patrolling the hen house as opposed to the hawks. And if you look at palm oil, it’s down a whole notch, I think, if I’m not mistaken, somewhere around a quarter of global palm oil is certified. And then you have other commodities like cattle where almost no cattle to my knowledge, is meaningfully certified, like with something that guarantees no deforestation, no horrible human rights violations and land grabbing, fires, et cetera. So, there are some high-risk commodities where certification just can’t provide a meaningful solution at scale because there isn’t enough of that stuff that’s certified. So just to roll back our conversation, there are like seven commodities that are destroying the forest in the world, basically. If we solve those seven things, we can save global forests, and the EUDR—yay!—covers all seven of them. The UK implementing regulation only four. So, *sob*sob*, and the forest Act in the US, five. So yeah, but the EUDR covers all seven, right? It’s like palm oil, pulp and paper cattle, soy, cocoa, coffee, rubber. All the—I call them like the seven deadly sins of forest destruction. So some of those commodities that are not very certified, obviously certification can’t really provide like a meaningful solution at scale. But then let’s talk about coffee, where actually a lot of coffee is certified. Some coffee certifications have created subsets of their certification where they say they can guarantee compliance with the EUDR. So, Rainforest Alliance and Fair Trade, now have like an EUDR compliance pathway within their system. I believe the FSC for pulp and paper did something similar, and RSPO also did something similar where they’re like, in general we can’t guarantee compliance with the EUDR, but if you pay a little extra, you go into this little subset and then boom, we guarantee compliance with the EUDR. But by and large to my knowledge, cafe practices, which is Starbucks certification and 4C, which is very much used by Nestlé. I believe that,unless I’m mistaken, around 83% of 4C certified coffee actually is for Nestle. Like I do not think that those guarantee compliance with the EUDR, so we could just pause on that and sit with that for a minute. Like those certifications are telling us, if I’m not mistaken, that they can’t guarantee legality and no deforestation, which again should prompt us to say “WTF?”
Mike: I think it’s safe to say, and you’ve already talked about some of the actions we can take to make a difference, because I think it’s safe to say that most of us that enjoy coffee, we don’t wanna be supporting businesses that enable slavery or child labor or deforestation. What would you tell people to do, like people listening right now, what would you tell them to do to make a difference in this situation?
Etelle: Oh my god this is a great question. First of all, I would say you have amazing rockstar power that you did not even know you have, but you have a lot of power to fix this, so don’t be upset and sit in some kind of doom scrolling spiral of despair. No, no, no, no, no. Take heart and act. There’s so many things you can do. Number one, you can buy from the heart. You can go and look for coffee that guarantees a living income. That is agroforestry coffee. There are a bunch of small, mid-size coffee companies that embody this kind of ethos of love the planet, love the people, great for forests, great for farmers. I’ll just list a few of them really quickly right here, but there’s so many more. There’s Orangutan Coffee, there’s Slow Forest Coffee, there’s Kiss The Hippo Coffee. There’s so many great coffee companies. If you are in the US, you can probably get Smithsonian Bird Friendly Certified Coffee, which has great agroforestry standards. Okay, so you can buy from the heart. Number two, you can not change your body pattern at all, buy exactly what you were gonna buy before, but every time you buy, ask the barista or the manager or the person at the supermarket or the restaurant like, is this living income? Is this organic? Is this like Agroforestry, does this have deforestation in it? Why? Because every time you ask people start thinking about it. And you can also take a picture of yourself with your little cup and put it on Insta or a Twitter—which I refuse to call X—or whatever other thing you are on, and tag the company and say, I am your client. I love your stuff, but you have got to do better for people in planet. Please stop the deforestation. Stop the slavery. Like just doing that companies really listen and literally it just takes one minute for you to take a picture of yourself with your coffee and write a little note and tag so I think buy from the heart is really great. You can go on Coffee Watch’s website. We have curated every single petition for better coffee, and you could just click on those petitions. It should take you less than five minutes. Those petitions actually do make a difference. Those are petitions against slavery and coffee, petitions for a living income and coffee, petitions to get disgusting, like single use cups out of our coffee system. Anyways, we have all the best petitions that are not ours, by the way. They’re just other people’s, but we curated them. We put them in one place. You can join Coffee watch newsletter. We have lots of cool things that people can do that we are gonna put out regularly, like four times a year. You can support the EUDR if you’re in Europe. You can literally call, write, Tweet your representative if you’re in Europe. If you’re in the UK, support the UKDR. Again, call, write, tweet your representative. You are so lucky to live in a democracy where people are not gonna put you in jail like Russia for complaining. Like use that power. Same in the US. You can support the Forest Act and the US, the UK bill if you’re in the UK, the EUDR if you’re in the EU, if you’re in Switzerland, join that awesome coalition. They’re so cool. They’re rock stars. Go with them, do stuff. I think the last thing that’s really important that I would say is we have this immense power to move the people that we love and who love us, go to your local coffee shop, the place that you always go, the place that you feel happy and comfortable. Talk to the baristas and the manager. Tell them how much you love being there and that you care about sustainable coffee and have a conversation with them. Chances are they also care. Then maybe together you can transform that place. And it’s like throwing a stone with these beautiful ripples that can spread. I believe in love and we all can change the world through love.
Mike: I would love to end the conversation here because that was such a beautiful statement, but I just want to ask this one last question. If there is a, by chance, a local mom and pop coffee shop owner listening to this right now, what’s your advice for them?
Etelle: Change your sourcing. Source from an ethical company that will sell you coffee that is deforestation free with a living income or at a minimum call your provider and tell them that’s what you want them to give you. That you won’t buy their stuff unless they guarantee to you that what they’re selling you is like EUDR compliant with a living income and agroforestry.
Mike: Can people do that? Anywhere? Could like could a coffee shop in the US say I want an EUDR compliant brand?
Etelle: Anywhere. You can do it in Brazil and Vietnam, the US and Canada and Switzerland and Europe and the UK, there are like good coffee companies all over the world. There are alternatives. It’s not that all of global coffee is terrible. No. It’s just the majority has these huge problems, but there are great alternatives that exist. Like right now, they already are existing.
Mike: Well, Etelle, thank you so much. Where can people find more information about your work?
Etelle: Oh, that would be so beautiful. If people wanna go and look at our website, it’s coffeewatch.org and there’s lots of reports there and information about how to get involved and what you can do to make the world a better place with every cup.
Mike: Thank you, Etelle. It was a pleasure having you.
Etelle: It was my pleasure.
Mike: If you want to read pieces from Etelle Higonnet, or connect with the organization, Coffee Watch links are in the show notes. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work that we’re doing by telling a friend and leaving a review. Word of mouth is the best way to help expand our reach, but you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor via our Patreon page at patreon.com/mongabay. Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet, so when you pledge a dollar per month, it makes a big difference and it helps us offset production costs. So if you’re enjoying our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, head over to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more in support the Mongabay newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from nature’s frontline at mongabay.com or follow us on social media. Find mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Facebook and TikTok, where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube @MongabayTV. Thanks as always for listening.
