COFFEE NEWS

Ever since a forward-thinking trio of physicists identified the phenomenon known as self-organized criticality—a mechanism by which complexity arises in nature—scientists have been applying its concepts to everything from economics to avalanches.

An Azteca ant tending green coffee scale.

Now, researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Toledo have shown that clusters of ant nests on a coffee farm in Mexico also adhere to the model. Their work, which has implications for controlling coffee pests, appears in the Jan. 24 issue of the journal Nature.

The basic idea of self-organized criticality often is illustrated with a sand pile. As you trickle sand onto the cone-shaped pile, the cone grows and grows until it reaches a “state of criticality” where it stops growing. Add more sand, and the grains just slide down the sides in mini-avalanches.

“What physicists have done—both mathematically and physically—is look at how many grains of sand actually fall with each avalanche,” said John Vandermeer, the Margaret Davis Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and one of the Nature paper’s authors. “What they find is that most avalanches involve one or two sand grains, and relatively few avalanches involve hundreds of sand grains.” Such a pattern—with small versions of a phenomenon being more common than big ones—characterizes what’s known as a power law, a sort of fingerprint of systems that exhibit self-organized criticality.

What do avalanches have to do with ants” Vandermeer and co-author Ivette Perfecto, a professor at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment, have been studying ants and other associated insects in a 45-hectare (111-acre) plot on an organic coffee farm in southwestern Mexico for three years and wondered whether the spatial distribution patterns they observed could be explained through the concept of criticality. With Stacy Philpott, then a U-M graduate student and now an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Toledo, they set out to examine the system in detail.

The ants, Azteca instabilis, have a natural history like that of many other ants. A queen establishes a colony in a tree, and once the colony reaches a certain size it splits and a satellite nest is established in a neighboring tree. Over time, you’d expect the ants to spread to every tree on the farm, but that’s not the case.

“The ants only occupy about three percent of the trees,” Vandermeer said. “But once you find them, you find them in clumps.”

How to explain the clumpiness?

“Normally when you have an animal or plant that’s distributed in patches like that, you tend to think that there’s some kind of underlying habitat variable that’s responsible,” Vandermeer said. But on the coffee farm, the habitat is about as uniform as a habitat can be, as trees are deliberately planted in a grid pattern. So the non-uniform distribution of ant colonies must be due to something other than habitat—something inherent in the biology of the ants.

Combining computer modeling with field observations, the researchers came up with a scenario that explains the spatial patterns as a case of criticality.

As the ant colonies spread from tree to tree, local clusters develop, but the clusters don’t expand indefinitely, all because of another insect with a sinister name: the decapitating fly. The parasitic fly lays its egg on the thorax of an ant; the egg hatches and the fly larva migrates into the ant’s head capsule where it feasts on the contents. Then the ant’s head falls off and the new adult fly emerges. Unfortunately for the ants, the bigger their clusters, the easier it is for the flies to find their colonies.

“So it’s the fly that maintains the ants’ spatial distribution,” Perfecto said. Looking at the frequencies of various sizes of clumps, the researchers found the telltale power law relationship, the hallmark of criticality.

Their understanding of the system has implications for controlling coffee pests, such as green coffee scale (Coccus viridis), a flat, featureless insect that lives on coffee bushes. On some bushes, Azteca ants protect the scale insects from predators and parasites and in return collect honeydew, a sweet, sticky liquid the scale secretes.

One of the green coffee scale’s mortal enemies is a beetle whose adult and larval forms both feed on it. “When an adult beetle comes to eat the scale insects, the ants vigorously defend the scales against attack,” Vandermeer said. “So within these clusters, the beetle can’t eat its prey.” The adult beetle, that is. The larval beetles evade the ants with waxy secretions on their backs that gum up the ants’ mouthparts.

Not only are beetle larvae able to polish off plenty of green coffee scale, they also get an inadvertent assist from the ants. In the course of shooing off parasitic wasps that attack scale, the ants also scare away bugs that parasitize beetle larvae.

“So we have a situation where the beetle is the main predator of the scale insects, which are pests on the coffee, and that beetle would go extinct if not for the patchy distribution of ants, because the larvae can only survive with the ants, and the adults can only survive without them,” Vandermeer said. “The farmers see the ants protecting the scale insects and want to eliminate them. But what we’ve discovered is that the ant, by forming these clusters, is a key component to maintaining the main scale insect predator in the system.”

The researchers received funding from the National Science Foundation.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080123131744.htm

 

The lead story in the Economist this week is about Zimbabwe, about how its economy has descended into chaos, how gangs are rampaging through the country and how production of crops and goods is at levels not seen since before WW2. These stories can be shocking, but for us in North America they are distant from our daily lives and do not affect us directly.

However it is surprising how complex and big, global issues can hit you at the local level. A few weeks ago, while buying a coffee in a warming hut at the top of Blue Mountain, a minor ski hill overlooking the small town of Collingwood Ontario, I noticed signs describing it as Ashanti Coffee. TreeHugger loves supporting local green initiatives, and looking it up I found that:

This coffee is from Cuba and Americans can’t buy it!

For decades, American sanctions against Cuba have left farmers without the access or means to pay for chemicals and machinery required for modern coffee production. Now, with the market for organic coffee taking off, Cuban shade-grown, organic coffee is turning out to be hugely popular in Japan and Europe.

We’ve covered the fabulous Freeplay Lifeline Radio before, and we’ve also written about the plight of coffee farmers who are exploited because they lack information about current market prices.

Now, in the kind of story that TreeHugger loves, we are seeing these two topics come together – clean, self-powered radios are being used to inform farmers about processing techniques to improve their product, and up-to-date market information to make sure they get fair compensation for their efforts:

Will organic-coffee lovers need a different kind of fix, soon? Earlier this month, Salon published a story decrying the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent tightening of organic-certification requirements. The main sticking point: These revised standards could drastically cut back on the ability of small grower co-ops to produce organic coffee.

“This ruling could wipe out the organic coffee market in the U.S.,” says Kimberly Easson, director of strategic relationships for TransFair USA, which certifies fair-trade products in the United States. Worries that the USDA ruling will jack up costs for small-scale organic producers, and drive them back into conventional commodity markets, also abound.

Starbucks has been accused of preventing Ethiopia from trademarking its coffee, denying farmers potential income of about $94 million.

The Seattle company denies any wrongdoing

Oxfam, a British charity, said on Tuesday that the US coffee shop giant, which had a turnover of $7.8 billion in the year to October 1, prevented Ethiopia from securing trademark protection for two of its best-known beans, Sidamo and Harar.

Had Ethiopia been successful, it would have allowed the impoverished country to control the use of the beans in the market, giving its farmers a bigger share of the retail price, the charity said.

Ethiopia’s foreign ministry said in a statement: “Securing the trademark for its Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe coffee beans could have allowed the country to increase its negotiation leverage through control of the names and ultimately drive a greater share of the retail price in the global market.”

Starbucks denied being behind the blocking bid by the US National Coffee Association (NCA) at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

“We have not been involved in trying to block Ethiopia’s attempts. We did not get the NCA involved - in fact it was the other way around. They were the ones who contacted us on this,” the company’s Dub Hay told BBC radio.

Blocking action

NCA head, Robert Nelson backed Hay, Starbucks’ senior vice-president in charge of procurement, telling the programme the NCA was contacted by a third party.

But Oxfam said it believed Starbucks was the instigator of the blocking action.

“We have heard from a number of sources that actually Starbucks was involved in alerting the US coffee association to block these applications,” the charity’s Jo Leadbetter said.

It “stinks of corporate bullying” she told the BBC.

Licensing agreements

The charity said Starbucks and other coffee companies should sign voluntary licensing agreements to acknowledge Ethiopia’s ownership of the coffee names, regardless of whether trademark protection has been issued.

“Coffee shops can sell Sidamo and Harar coffees for up to GBP14 a pound because of the beans’ specialty status,” said Tadesse Maskela, head of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia.

“But Ethiopian coffee farmers only earn between 30p and 59p [per pound] for their crop, barely enough to cover the cost of production,” Maskela said in a statement.

Girma Balcha, head of biodiversity at Ethiopia’s ministry of agriculture and rural development, said Starbucks’ use of Ethiopian coffee names without his government’s prior consent violated the International Convention on Biodiversity.

“In the absence of such an agreement, Starbucks has no legal background to use Ethiopian coffee names as a brand to enhance its coffee business,” Girma told reporters in Addis Ababa.

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/English/Archive/Archive?ArchiveID=38119

How much would you pay for a cup of liquid cat dung?   Quite a lot, if some highly discerning coffee drinkers are anything to go by.

You won’t find kopi luwak at your local coffee shop

On the lush, volcanic slopes of the Indonesian archipelago, villagers “harvest” kopi luwak.

The beans used for the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee have already been munched by cat-like palm civets, and now they are plucked from the dung to be dried and roasted.

Retailing in North America and Europe for up to $600 a kg, kopi luwak, literally “civet coffee” in Indonesian, is not a brew for the faint hearted.

Less than 230kg of it is estimated to be produced a year on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, and war and disease are making it even harder to find.

 

   

“I first read about it in 1980 but didn’t manage to get my

 

hands on any until 1993,” says Michael Beech of Raven’s Brew

 

Coffee Inc.

Until last year, when supplies began to dry up, it

 

was the main supplier of kopi luwak in the United States.

 

   

The kopi luwak bean comes from only three Indonesian islands

His clients have ranged from ordinary java junkies to comedy actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame, he says.

The firm has a backlog of 300 kopi luwak orders to fill at $75 for 114 grams. 

“To be honest, you can’t get $75 worth of quality in any coffee. You are really paying for the experience,” says Beech.

 

  

Fussy eater

The brew has become so rare that a newly published book on

 

coffee in Indonesia, “A cup of Java,” relegates it to legend.

 

“We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to

 

actually selling kopi luwak from the faeces of the civet cat,”

 

write authors Gabriella Teggia and Mark Hanusz.

 

To many Indonesians, the term kopi luwak has come to mean

 

simply the beans which the civet - a notoriously fussy eater

 

which selects only the ripest coffee cherries - would choose.

 

The war in Aceh province made kopi luwak even more rare

“We just use the name for branding, but we don’t trade in it,” says Jeffrey Susanto, whose family runs the Kopi Luwak string of gourmet coffee shops in Jakarta.

 

The rarity of kopi luwak is confirmed by Nugroho Bintang Satrio, the Central Java chief of the Indonesian Coffee

 

Exporters Association.

 

  

“Only a tiny portion of small-holders are left who collect it,” he said, adding that traders buy it at about 11,000 rupiah ($1.30) a kilo, about twice the price of ordinary robusta.

 

   

Deadly harvest

In the last year, a government offensive against rebels in

 

rugged Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra has also

 

cut into supply. “Farmers get killed if they harvest the coffee

 

too far into the bush,” said one trader.

 

Then there is the bad press caused by the deadly flu-like

 

SARS virus.

Civets, which are not cats but are related to mongooses, have been slaughtered in their thousands in China and imports banned from many Western countries for fear they carry SARS.

 

“Even if SARS was associated with the coffee itself, by the

 

time it’s collected and washed there is a very long period that

 

has elapsed,” says Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the

 

University of Guelph in Canada, who has carried out extensive

 

tests on kopi luwak and deemed it safe.

 

Producers are working on an elephant poop variety

Yet, despite all that, some still harbour doubts.

 

   

“Sumatra, in the popular imagination anyway, is just too close to China and I’m just wary of the whole SARS thing,” says Beech, adding that Raven’s Brew may cease to offer kopi luwak.

 

   

“We are working on an elephant poop coffee,” he says with a chuckle, explaining a plan he vows is serious.

The idea is to feed coffee to tuskers at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka and sell the product, farming the proceeds back into the orphanage.

 

   

“It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan elephants,” Beech explains.

 

According to some experts, a bean that has been partly digested tastes special.

 

   

“What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the bean and breaking down the proteins,” says Marcone.

 

   

“You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated during roasting, they react with other components and they create certain flavour compounds different from other beans.”

 

   

Exotic processing

So what does the world’s most pricey coffee taste like?

 

Pure unadulterated coffee beans, undigested by any animal

Coffee buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been

 

eating arabica or robusta beans.

 

   

“Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the world, but I have to be honest about it, it’s a crappy cup of

 

coffee,” says Beech of the robusta variety.

 

   

No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta cherries the luwak munches.

That fact is a legacy of the coffee blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as the world’s main suppliers of arabica.

 

   

Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee

 

trader. Inside is 250 grams of brown gold - kopi luwak arabica.

 

   

The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and

 

steeped in boiling water the flavour is, well, much like any

 

other coffee.

But the experience lingers in the memory.

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/English/Archive/Archive?ArchiveID=2966

 

  Brazilian authorities have freed about 800 slave workers at a coffee farm in Bahia state, the largest discovery since a clampdown on the practice began in the mid-1990s.

The scandal of Brazil’s illegal slave trade is thought to involve 25,000 victims

Some 200 workers were also found at another farm living in appalling conditions.

The site had no proper housing and inadequate food and sanitary conditions, said Marcelo Campos, an adviser at the Labour Ministry’s special unit to monitor slavery in Brazil’s vast interior.

“It’s the biggest find of this crime we’ve had since 1995,” Campos said on Monday, referring to when the unit was created.

Heart attack

He said one worker died of a heart attack when the inspectors turned up at the farm where the 800 workers were found, about 70 of them seriously ill.

Another 200 workers were discovered at the second farm, which had a different owner, in the poor interior of the north-eastern Bahia state.

“It’s the biggest find of this crime we’ve had since 1995″ Marcelo Campos, adviser to Labour Ministry

Despite government efforts, slave labourers often seized from isolated native communities have been used to clear space in Amazon rain forests for cattle ranches.

Before 1995, Brazil had no real policy to fight a practice that usually involves landlords hiring poor workers in a different region of the country and then transporting them thousands of kilometres to their isolated farms.

Armed guards

The workers are not paid and have no money to return to their homes. Sometimes they are prevented by armed guards from leaving the farms, where they are often not given proper food or housing.

The farm owners have so far not been charged, but Labour Ministry officials said they would team up with public prosecutors and try them for keeping workers in slave-like conditions.

If convicted, the owners could face up to four years in prison. Campos said the farmers would also have to pay the workers decent wages for their previous labours.

Since coming to power in January, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pledged to end the practice. An estimated 25,000 people still live in slave-like conditions in the country that was the last to formally abolish slavery in the Americas, in 1888.

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/English/Archive/Archive?ArchiveID=39613

Coffee consumers are being urged to “think before they drink” as a film accusing the industry of not giving producers a fair deal opens in the UK.

Coffee growers can be subject to a ‘volatile’ market price

The documentary film Black Gold says farmers in the developing world are typically paid around 60p for 1lb of coffee, forcing them to remain poor.

National Coffee Day, which is supported by fair-trade coffee firms and campaigners, aims to raise awareness.

The big coffee multinationals deny they are exploiting coffee growers.

Black Gold, which is about Ethiopian coffee producers, won praise after being screened at film festivals last year.

It was made by Nick and Marc Francis, two brothers from Brighton, who wanted to show how some farmers lost out in global trading.

Marc said some farmers were “struggling to eat” and the film aimed to demonstrate that they needed to be paid a fair price for their produce.

The brothers said they hoped people would support the awareness day on Friday.

‘Consumer lifestyle’

“We wanted to make a film which forced us as Western consumers to question some of our basic assumptions about our consumer lifestyle,” they said in a statement.

The film claims that coffee growers typically receive less than half of what they need to afford schools and basic health care.

We buy to the market price and we have to do that because we are a business that operates in the market Jonathan Horrell Kraft

Jonathan Horrell, director of corporate affairs at Kraft, which owns Kenco coffee, one of the biggest coffee roasters and importers in the UK told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Black Gold was “an important and powerful film” that raised important issues.

He said main problems were that farmers did not always get the full market price and that the market price for coffee had been “volatile in recent years”, dropping down to 45 cents for 1lb in 2001.

 

“We buy to the market price and we have to do that because we are a business that operates in the market,” he said.

He added: “It’s very important that farmers have access to the proper market price and also it’s important for all parts of the coffee industry that there’s some stability in the market that enables people to make a return.”

Helen Ireland, from coffee brand Cafe Direct, said the film highlighted the “impacts of the unfair trading system” that were happening all over the world.

“You can create a trading and business model that has a fair system across the supply chain and gives that stability to farmers who are guaranteed a fair price.”

She said Cafe Direct had taken this “one stage further” with growers who owned the company and who received investment and training.

“It’s seen as a commodity, but at the end of the day there are people behind that coffee and we’ve shown, if you look at a different way of trading - and we trade directly with the growers - there is a way that benefits everyone and gets the quality to the consumer.”

Source:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6733125.stm

 

Carmen Harroyo spends 16 hours a day picking coffee beans, but the weather-beaten 17-year-old said Monday that she is glad to do it if it helps give a single coffee drinker a much-needed morning boost. “I make $2 a day and share a room with my five sisters, but all the hard work is worth it if I help just one American suburbanite jumpstart her day,” Harroyo said, batting away a swarm of mosquitoes. “I appreciate the opportunity to touch another person’s life.” Harroyo said she dreams of someday helping people get their antioxidants by picking sticks from bushels of green tea until her fingers bleed.

Source:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33063