Coffee Replaces Cocoa--and Rain Forest

Depending on who’s talking, Wanderlino Medeiros Bastos is either the Atlantic rain forest’s worst nightmare or its last best hope.

A coffee grower from Espirito Santo state, Bastos moved into this densely forested region five years ago intent on converting its failing cocoa plantations to coffee.

Today he sells seedlings and dispenses agricultural advice from his 1,111-acre showpiece farm at the edge of a highway 500 miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro.

“All around the world, wherever there is cocoa there’s coffee. So it just makes sense that I’m here,” Bastos says, standing before neat rows of coffee plants that line hills that only a few years ago were covered in verdant rain forest.

Bastos argues his presence is inevitable, part of coffee’s natural migration north, away from the cyclical frosts that may have claimed as much as 90% of next year’s coffee crop in Brazil’s extreme south.

To farmers, Bastos is a ray of hope in a region still reeling from the double whammy of plunging cocoa prices on world markets and the devastation wreaked by witch’s broom disease--a cocoa-destroying fungus that arrived in the early 1990s.

An Area of Incomparable Richness

But what pleases farmers worries environmentalists.

“In Espirito Santo [Bastos’ home state] coffee was a disaster, the plants provoked excessive erosion and the areas became infested with termites,” said Demonstenes Carvalho, forestry director for the government’s Cocoa Research Center.

Making matters worse, environmentalists say, Bastos has set up shop in southern Bahia state, which contains some of the last swatches of Atlantic rain forest--and some of the richest.

In 1996, a team of scientists working in the region discovered a 2 1/2-acre plot containing 476 tree species, more than any spot of similar size ever studied. By comparison, a similar patch of North American temperate forest contains from two to 20 tree species.

Conservation International recently declared the Atlantic rain forest, which once covered 4,500 square miles along Brazil’s eastern coast, one of the 25 most threatened ecosystems on Earth. Only 3% of the rain forest remains.

In April, UNESCO declared the Atlantic rain forest as a World Heritage site with an eye toward preserving the 10,000 plant species, 400 bird species and 171 reptile and mammal species that inhabit it.

If the region seems almost as lush today as it must have when the Portuguese arrived 500 years ago, that is largely because of the way cocoa is grown--under the shade of the forest canopy.

While cocoa forests are considerably less dense than virgin forest, they are still home to a host of rare plants and creatures and provide vital corridors allowing animals to travel between untouched areas.

Environmentalists fear the introduction of coffee could change that very quickly.

Coffee’s Spread Seen as Inevitable

Bastos has already been fined by Brazil’s Environmental Protection Agency for unauthorized tree cutting.

But he contends he’s not the threat environmentalists make him out to be. He says he encourages farmers to leave a lot of trees standing, not because the environmentalists demand it, but to provide shade, block wind and prevent erosion. The trees also attract ants and other insects away from the coffee plants, he says.

Luiz Alberto Mattos da Silva, a botany professor who heads UNESCO’s Atlantic Rainforest Biosphere subcommittee for the Southern Bahia region, concedes that coffee in itself is not a problem.

Bastos “has spent a lot of money on fertilizer and the whole operation looks very good, but he’s really interested in selling seedlings, and I doubt the other farmers will take the same care,” da Silva says.

For many in the region, coffee may be the only solution.

“In 1990 I harvested 1,750 bags of cocoa. Last year’s harvest was just five bags. I don’t see that I have much of a choice,” said Amulio Loureiro, whose family has been growing cocoa for three generations.

Besides, Loureiro says, an acre of cocoa brings only a little over 300 reals, or about $170, at today’s prices, compared with $910 for an acre of coffee.

Ruy Rocha, who heads the Institute for Social-Environmental Studies, argues that it is inevitable that coffee-growing will expand in the region. He says farmers need to be encouraged to plant the kind of shade-grown organic coffee popular in specialty markets abroad, so they can make an even greater profit while keeping the forest intact at the same time.

It’s an idea Bastos finds appealing, although he has some concerns about whether the region’s soil can support that kind of coffee.

Even if that doesn’t work out, Bastos agrees with Rocha’s basic premise.

“As long as there are poor people, if there’s a tree somewhere that will fetch them 2,000 reals, you think it’s going to stay there?” he asks.

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World Wildlife Fund site on Atlantic rain forest: https://www.wwf.org.br/wwfeng/evec04.htm