Coffee and Conservation has an excellent of summary of Nestle and Starbucks’ reactions to the report that some coffee from Indonesia was grown illegally in parks reserved for endangered animals.
Nestle, for its part, has admitted it bought the crap, with the weak excuse that “the company admits the difficulty of determining the precise origin.” Dude, you’re a super huge, super rich company. If a lil fair trade company like Equal Exchange can track exactly where all its coffee comes from, I’m sure you can put your resources into doing the same.
Starbucks is listed as one of the buyers of this coffee on the coffee sellers’ records, but the mermaid denies buying any of the stuff. It appears difficult to ascertain how accurate these sellers’ records are, so Starbucks may not be lying.
If you don’t want to be an unwitting accomplice in the hearless actions of companies like Nestle, there’s an easy solution: Don’t buy from companies like Nestle.
And if you’re a regular coffee drinker baffled as to how start changing your un-eco ways, check out my 6-step program for the caffeine-addicted on Treehugger.
starbucks doesn’t buy any robusta beans; the type of beans described as illegal…
Comment by james — January 25, 2007 @ 8:30 am
Ah. Then that v. much backs up Starbucks’ claim. I wonder why these illegal peeps added Starbucks to their roster!? Seems like an easy way to get caught, in my view –
Comment by Siel — January 26, 2007 @ 12:42 am
I think although this is now an old post, it still bears some relavance to how complex coffee trading can be. In this case most of the coffee in question was indeed robusta grown in the Gunung Kerinci National Park area. There may also have been some Arabica mixed in with this, but it is highly unlikely that Starbucks would have been buying such small quantaties of what is traditionally not the greatest quality of coffee out of Sumatra. More likely export licence(s) from the trading companies that were targeted for illegal trade could have been used to export coffee to Starbucks,USA. To be fair SBux would for sure have had no idea of this, and the coffee itself was most likely not grown in South/West Sumatra itself- rather in North Sumatra/Aceh.
Comment by Alun — October 27, 2008 @ 9:44 pm