As the world's thirst for coffee shows no signs of slowing down, widely used practices to ramp up the crop's production have become self-defeating, according to a nonprofit watchdog group.
In Brazil, the world's biggest coffee producer, coffee farming is driving deforestation — and that, in turn, makes coffee harder to grow.
More than 1,200 square miles of forest were cleared for coffee cultivation in Brazil's coffee-growing areas between 2001 and 2023, according to a new report from the group Coffee Watch. The group used satellite images, government land use data and a forest-loss alert system in its analysis.
Overall, in areas with a high concentration of coffee-growing operations, a total of more than 42,000 square miles of forest are now gone, the report said. This includes forest loss caused directly by coffee farming — where land was cleared to grow the crop — as well as indirectly, from nearby road and infrastructure projects, for example.
"Coffee essentially punched a Honduras-sized hole in Brazilian forests," says Etelle Higonnet, Coffee Watch's founder and director, noting that the Central American country has a similar land area to what's been lost.
To be clear, coffee is not the leading cause of deforestation in Brazil. Cattle ranching is responsible for a far larger share, Higonnet notes, but she says coffee's role in deforestation has not been talked about enough.
Scientists have shown how deforestation leads to less rainfall in tropical rainforests. That's because the trees there soak up and release moisture, which rises to create clouds and more rain. Cutting down trees disrupts the cycle, reducing rainfall and leading to drought.
Drought, of course, makes it harder to grow coffee.
"When you kill the forest, you're actually also killing the rains, which is exactly what your crop needs to thrive in the long run," Higonnet says. "Even for people who don't much care about climate change and mass extinction, if they drink coffee and care about having coffee in the long run, this should be very scary for them."
Most years of the past decade have seen rainfall deficits in Brazil's major coffee-growing areas, the report says.
Farmers are expanding to respond to the world's "insatiable demand for coffee," says Aaron Davis, a senior research leader of crops and global change at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England, with a longtime focus on coffee. "And to produce that coffee, you need land. Simple as that."
Davis says the report is "timely and useful." He was not involved in the study.
"This will help to provide metrics on deforestation and start the conversation around the influence of coffee production on forest loss," he said.
Coffee Watch's Higonnet credits Brazil's current administration, under leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with making progress against deforestation. Brazil's Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, which works to prevent deforestation, has not responded to NPR's request for comment.
Higonnet hopes the report spurs coffee businesses to refuse to buy coffee that was grown on deforested land. The National Coffee Association, a trade association for the U.S. coffee industry, has not responded to a request for comment on the report.
More environmentally sustainable coffee-growing methods exist, such as using shade trees to shield some plants from the sun, and diversifying crops. But these methods typically don't yield as much coffee as industrialized production. Higonnet says the coffee-growing areas they studied in Brazil are by and large not using the sustainable agroforestry practices. Davis adds that more needs to be done to reward farmers who are being more sustainable.
He says that the responsibility to encourage more sustainable coffee production extends to consumers.
For coffee drinkers, Davis says, "I think there needs to be an awareness and a mind shift around the implications of purchasing products like coffee."
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