The Songbird Foundation-part 2

The coffee plant is a small tree-like bush that yields the coffee bean as its redeeming feature for human consumption. Traditionally, coffee is a shade-loving shrub that thrives among an ecologically balanced habitat; mainly the rain forests of Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, and other tropical regions. The harvested coffee beans, known as 'arabica', have a naturally appealing taste that is superior to other coffee beans.

Coffee plants have become environmental victims of human mass production. Due to the supply and demand, the traditional growing practices have been replaced with higher-yielding, but ecologically unsound methods of farming. The promise of higher yields and therefore, a more profitable crop, has enticed big business to obtain the rights to clear away the massive shade trees of the rain forest, replacing the stripped, barren remains of land with a newer, engineered sun-grown coffee known as 'robusto'.

Robusto is a fast-growing coffee that is inferior to the more natural arabica bean. When you take a moment to consider the consequences of the race to grow more coffee at a faster rate, and at the expense of our precious rain forest habitat, the true cost is an irreplaceable, barren expanse that has become deforested and void of indigenous plant and animal life; including both tropical and migratory neotropical birds. We are not just talking about a few acres, but millions of acres every year. As an example, the Caribbean islands are now mostly deforested due to the extremely damaging effects of sun-grown coffee farming.

So...What About the Farmers?

Coffee farming is a billion dollar industry. While sun-grown coffee costs more to produce, the long term profits exceed those of shade-grown coffee farmers. In order to protect the shade-grown coffee plantations and the farmers that maintain them, an organization known as TransFair was formed to help guarantee the coffee farmers a fair price for their shade-grown coffee. Members of TransFair are Fair-Trade certified. This means that when we, as consumers, buy coffee that has been registered with TransFair, we are reassuring the protection of our environment and insuring a decent lifestyle for those farmers that still believe in preserving the rain forest and protecting our precious wildlife.

And What About Our Feathered Friends?

So many of the songbirds that migrate to North America for the summer spend their winters sheltered in the rain forests of Latin America. In fact, studies have found that there's been 94-97 percent fewer bird species found in sun-grown coffee plantations as compared to ones that are shade-grown.

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