Towards Climate-Resilient Coffee in India: The Case for Conserving Native Shade Trees

Coffee under native shade trees

Forty-three-year-old Basamma earns a livelihood growing coffee on her one-and-a-half-acre farm in the secluded Biligirirangan (BR) Hills in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She is dependent on moderate temperatures and timely rainfall for a good harvest, but the past few years have brought neither. In 2023, the yield from her robusta plants more than halved as a drought swept across the state. The year before, incessant rains caused premature coffee berries to drop and rot before she could pick them. And for three straight years between 2018 and 2020, her crops were damaged by three devastating floods.

To safeguard growers like her against an increasingly uncertain future, agri-scientists, ecologists, and grassroots coffee companies are looking for ways to mitigate climate impacts. At the centre of their efforts are two elements integral to coffee cultivation in India: native shade trees and local biodiversity.

‘India has always had coffee forests, not farms’

Most of India’s coffee is grown by smallholder growers like Basamma, typically cultivating half to five acres of land. Coffee is a climate-sensitive crop; rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, frequent and severe droughts, and floods have taken a toll on yields, berry quality, and growers’ incomes. “We are seeing more leaf shedding and pest attacks because of hotter summers and prolonged droughts. Extreme cold is making plants flower late and producing low quality berries while unseasonal rains are causing berries to burst and drop prematurely,” Basamma says. “If it rains before the harvest, our berries don’t dry on time.”

Traditionally, India has grown coffee under the shade of diverse native trees, Arshiya Bose, founder of specialty roaster and retailer Black Baza Coffee explains to me in an interview. This is particularly true of smallholder farmers like Basamma who grow their coffee bushes interspersed among forest trees. This system of coffee agroforestry is an outcome of the surrounding terrain. 90percent of India’s coffee is grown on low-elevation mountain ranges known as the Western Ghats, which is home to vast expanses of tropical rainforests and one of the world’s eight ‘hottest hotspots’ for biodiversity. In the three largest coffee-growing states of Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, smaller farms as well as larger plantations lie either within or at the edges of these rainforests, which also makes them thriving habitats for insects, birds, and small mammals. When left unfenced, smaller coffee farms are also porous to passing wildlife such as elephants, tigers, deer, and bison. “Essentially, we're talking about coffee forests, not coffee farms,” Bose quips.

There are several ecological advantages of growing coffee this way. Tree canopies protect coffee plants from harsh sunlight, and provide a favourable microclimate during prolonged periods of drought by regulating temperature and humidity. During floods and landslides, forest trees mitigate soil erosion and limit the damage to crops. A host of local fauna, some of which are instrumental in the pollination of coffee, make their home in the tree canopies. What’s more, these ‘coffee forests’ sequester carbon — by some accounts as much as 70–80 tonnes per hectare — which aids in climate change mitigation.

Despite these advantages, the ubiquity of shade-grown coffee began to shift in the 1970s as infrastructure development, illegal logging, and the expansion of coffee plantations led to massive deforestation in the Western Ghats. Around the same time, the Coffee Board of India started encouraging growers to reduce the number of shade trees on their farms to ramp up production. Things came to a head in the 1990s when India opened to the international market, exposing growers to intense price fluctuations. Fruits forming on coffee plants drops on when shade cover is above 48 percent, therefore removing shade quickly brings up coffee yield, a practice growers used to survive periods of low prices.  

A coffee farm moving from shade to sun grown

The 650 smallholder coffee growers that Bose’s Black Baza Coffee works with have not been immune to these changes. The Bangalore-based roaster has been sourcing high-altitude arabicas from Wayanad in Kerala and low-lying robustas from the BR Hills in Karnataka and the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu since the mid-2010s. “In each of these areas, smallholder coffee farms have become significantly less shade-grown over the past few years,” Bose tells me. The statistics from India’s largest coffee-growing district of Kodagu is particularly revealing – the region lost 77,000 hectares (or 30 percent) of its natural forests between 1977 and 1997 even as the area under coffee cultivation doubled. A further 10,600 hectares of forest cover was lost between 2005 and 2017.

“Then, there are other complexities like the replacement of native trees with the exotic silver oak”, Bose adds.

Too many silver oaks, too little biodiversity

A coffee farm with only silver oak as shade

Introduced in India in the 1860s by British colonial planters, R Siddappa Setty, Senior Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), explains to me how these trees are of value to smallholder growers. Whilst India’s forest laws require permits and duties to fell, transport and sell native trees, fast-growing silver oaks have no such restrictions and so are high-value timber. And, because they grow straight and tall, they serve as a support for pepper vines to grow up, a useful cash crop for farmers.

Replacing native trees with silver oak may not significantly alter the shade cover, but it does affect the diversity of native trees. This has implications for coffee quality and yields. In 2017, a joint study by scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and the College of Forestry in Kodagu found that coffee plantations dominated by silver oak tend to be less resistant to berry borer and other pests because of fewer natural predators such as ants and birds that are supported by native trees. Plantations with lower native tree diversity may also have fewer pollinators. In an interview, Maike Nesper, the lead author of the 2017 study said, “Giant honeybees – important for pollination of the coffee flowers – need broad canopy native trees to build their hives, so fewer of them means lesser pollination.” Insufficient pollination, in turn, means fewer coffee berries per plant and lower cup quality.

To guard against such eventualities, Black Baza Coffee asks the growers it partners with to ensure biodiversity of trees. “You could have silver oak but it cannot be more than 20 percent of the total number of trees that you have on your farm,” Bose says. As a form of active restoration, one of the villages the company sources coffee beans from has committed to never plant silver oak again. “Once their existing silver oaks mature, they want to harvest them and plant native trees back,” she adds. In addition, growers commit to maintaining over 120 trees per acre, at least 22 different species of native trees overall, and a 60 percent canopy cover.

ATREE is similarly helping small growers in the BR Hills transition from silver oak to high-yielding native fruit trees. “These trees will offer economic benefit as well as nutritional security to their households and younger generations”, says Setty.

“[Silver oak] leaves are thick and not palatable for earthworms and other organisms, which inhibits soil microbial activity,” says ATREE’s Setty, meaning they don’t compost as quickly as native trees. This makes the soil less fertile and porous. During periods of incessant rain and floods, low-porosity soil is particularly prone to water runoff and nutrient loss, which reduces the productivity of coffee crops. Diverse tree systems with fewer silver oaks help mitigate such impacts, and the leaf litter from diverse native trees serves as a ready source of natural fertiliser and mulch for small growers, keeping their input costs low while ensuring the health of the soil on their farms.

Incentivising growers and tapping into traditional knowledge systems

Shade coffee is a refuge for wildlife

Many smallholder coffee growers are keenly aware of the ecosystem benefits of native trees. Both Bose and Setty cite the example of indigenous communities like the Soligas, who have been cultivating coffee only for the past 30-35 years but have lived and practised shifting cultivation in the forests for millennia. That gives them immense traditional know-how of what an ecologically healthy forest is and what the different elements of an ecologically healthy coffee farm would be. The problem is that the Soligas, like most smallholder coffee growers, are socioeconomically marginalised with little direct access to the market. They rarely receive a fair price for their produce from the local traders who act as intermediaries between them and coffee companies. As such, they have little short-term incentive to pursue the environmentally sustainable growing practices they had traditionally followed.

By promising to buy their produce at the end of each season and paying them a sizeable premium over the market price of coffee, Black Baza ensures that its grower partners don’t have to supplement their incomes by cutting down trees for timber or replacing native trees with silver oak. Setty suggests an additional incentive for small growers in the form of government policies that grant them tenurial rights for the native trees on their farm. Currently, the lack of tree rights creates perverse incentives to replace native trees with exotic species, he points out.

The urgency of such measures can scarcely be overstated given the extent of forest cover loss and land degradation in the Western Ghats. One study showed that the southern Western Ghats lost 25.6 percent of its forest cover between 1973 and 1995. According to a more recent estimate, the forest cover shrank from 16 to 11 percent between 1985 and 2018. This rapid rate of loss has created a vicious cycle of climate insecurities, crop losses, and declining productivity, not to mention declining biodiversity. The trend of alternating droughts and floods that India’s largest coffee-growing regions have witnessed in the past decade will likely exacerbate in the coming years, as temperatures are projected to rise to 26.8-27.5 degree Celsius and the number and intensity of rainy days are expected to increase significantly in the Western Ghats. All of this will have – indeed already has had – devastating consequences for the region’s coffee growers.

One way to safeguard them against such climate risks is to incentivise growers to restore and improve the native tree cover on their farms. Especially small growers, whose livelihoods are most at stake, are crucial stakeholders in the process. “Unlike larger plantations where coffee becomes the focus and you do whatever is needed to ensure the maximum possible yield, there is a very profound understanding among the smallholder communities where we work that their farm is just one part of a much larger ecosystem,” says Bose. “That’s the philosophy we need to tap into if we want to move towards climate resilience.”

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Sohel Sarkar is an independent journalist, editor, and feminist researcher currently based in Bengaluru, India. Her work has appeared in Whetstone Magazine, Eaten Magazine, Goya Journal and Sliced, among others. You can find her on Twitter as @SohelS28 and on Instagram as @sarkar.sohel10.

 All photos curtesy of Black Baza Coffee