Study highlights environmental and economic benefits of agroforestry for DRC coffee crops (2024)

Growing coffee in a forest with other trees and plants—a system known as agroforestry—can be as productive as growing it in a monoculture field, but it’s much less harmful, according to research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Cultivated agroforestry systems in the DRC support 19 times higher biodiversity and store twice as much carbon as monoculture systems, according to the upcoming study.

The research aimed to quantify the trade-offs among yield, carbon storage and biodiversity “to see whether agroforestry could be a pragmatic solution for farmers instead of merely a solution proposed by scientists, conservationists and development cooperation actors,” co-author, Ieben Broeckhoven, a researcher at Belgian university KU Leuven, told Mongabay. Agroforestry is a method of agroecology which combines annual or perennial crops like coffee in a system with beneficial trees and shrubs that provide shade, moisture and nutrients to the main crop while providing carbon storage plus food and habitat for bugs, bats, birds and more.

Analyzing 79 plots covering an area equal to about 192 tennis courts (50,000 square meters or 538,000 square feet), scientists compared coffee yield, woody species biodiversity and organic carbon both aboveground and in the soil, across four different coffee growing systems in the DRC.

The two highest coffee yields, of almost a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of green beans per plant, came from both monoculture and cultivated agroforestry. In the monoculture plots, farmers cleared land to only grow coffee trees. While in the agroforestry farm, coffee was grown alongside other useful, native tree species.

Growing coffee naturally in the rainforest yielded just 2 grams (0.07 ounces) of beans per plant. But this system, not surprisingly, easily beat the rest ecologically, supporting 90% more biodiversity and storing three times as much carbon as agroforestry systems.

Sustainability issues

Humans drink more than 3 billion cups of coffee a day. This massive daily ritual drives a $200 billion-a-year industry, supporting the livelihoods of more than 100 million people. An astonishing 80% of coffee is grown by 25 million small-scale farmers, according to a 2019 report from the International Coffee Organization.

But this has been ecologically catastrophic in the DRC and other parts of the world. More than 90% of deforestation in the Central African nation is due to slash-and-burn clearing to grow monoculture crops, such as coffee, by small-scale farmers, according to research in Science in 2018.

Growing coffee as sustainably as possible is all very well in theory, but actually changing how it is produced requires buy-in from the small-holder farmers who grow it, according to Broeckhoven.

“It’s a question of considering the farmers’ needs and trying to work with them,” he said. The DRC is mired in extreme poverty, almost 75% of the population lived on under $2.15 US dollars per day in 2023, according to a World Bank overview. So, Broeckhoven said, “a ‘solution’ or regenerative practice will never work if it negatively impacts immediate to short-term agricultural production and farmers’ income.”

Lack of sustainability in the coffee industry “is the problem of the coffee drinker and the ones making most of the money on coffee,” Niels Anten, a professor of crop and weed ecology at the Centre for Crop Systems Analysis at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told Mongabay. He says he believes the global community should think harder about “who takes responsibility for what.”

You simply can’t have lots of coffee and lots of biodiversity and carbon storage. To put it another way, the coffee systems that protect the most biodiversity and store lots of carbon — natural systems — have lower yields and therefore profit.

But this study tells us that, in the DRC, you can have some biodiversity, quite a lot of carbon storage and just as much coffee.

A key motivator of the research was equipping policy-makers, the coffee industry and coffee drinkers with the tools to make educated, sustainable decisions, Boerkhoven said.

“We should be asking ourselves whether the multiple needs of human well-being, agricultural productivity, biodiversity, carbon, might not be better met if we take a more inclusive point of view on agriculture, forestry and nature conservation.”

Crucial local buy-in

Agroforestry will only become locally important to farmers who want to “pay their bills and bring their children to a higher economic level” if it makes a real contribution to their livelihoods, Anten said, adding, “If it is just used to produce ‘guilt-free’ coffee for consumers in rich countries, it has no local value.”

However, agroforestry can also provide secondary revenue streams, because there is scope to grow other trees and plants for fruits, spices or edible caterpillars among the coffee trees. This could make cultivated agroforestry actually more profitable than monoculture systems, Broeckhoven said.

After spending time with more than 50 farmers in the region, Broeckhoven said farmers “feel a certain level of distrust” toward the DRC’s National Agricultural Study and Research Institute, foreign researchers and investors.

“They comment, rightfully, that it is not up to us to say that they should or should not be clearing the rainforest … the forest that has been under the custody of their clan for generations,” Broeckhoven said.

The farmers told Broeckhoven that their main challenges are the time lag (3-4 years) between planting coffee and the first harvest, a lack of regular local coffee buyers and too little state support.

Temporal issues

The results of the DRC coffee systems research were no surprise to Alain Retiere, who works with government, science, business and civil society to reduce land degradation, including in the DRC, under the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification.

Lack of access to long-term investment is the main problem in establishing sustainable agrosystems, he told Mongabay.

“Agroforestry and sustainable land management are highly profitable, but in the long run,” he said. Trees within cultivated agroforestry systems can take years to mature, and “public investors have less and less resources to finance projects at scale, and the private sector hates risking the needed capital and favors short investment cycles,” he added.

Coffee brokers and consumers should make sure they “carefully verify that what they buy does not come from areas under active deforestation, large, open, shadow-less fields or natural forests,” Retiere said.

He cautioned against readers interpreting the results of the study “as an incentive to step into natural forest ecosystems to grow coffee and progressively cut the native trees to reduce shadowing.” An approach that considers the sustainability of the landscape itself is most important, he said, and coffee growing must fit in with that.

However, we choose to grow coffee, and “the livelihood, well-being and economic perspective of the small-holder producer needs to be absolutely at the front of our mind,” Anten said. “The moment it gets mixed up with guilt about drinking coffee, or the wish of coffee companies to maintain their business, we are in serious danger of maintaining a system where rich people enjoy coffee and large corporations make lots of money with very little ending up with those that need it most.”

Banner image: Coffee bean harvesting in Yangambi DRC. Image courtesy of Axel Fassio/CIFOR_ICRAF.

Citations:

Broeckhoven, I., Depecker, J., Muliwambene, Trésor, K., Honnay, O., Merckx, R., Verbist, B. (2024). Synergies and Trade-Offs between Robusta Yield, Carbon Stocks and Biodiversity Across Coffee Systems in the Dr Congo. Available at SSRN:https://ssrn.com/abstract=4788401orhttp://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4788401.

Tyukavina,A., Hansen,M.C., Potapov,P., Parker,D., Okpa,C., Stehman,S.V., … Turubanova,S. (2018). Congo basin forest loss dominated by increasing smallholder clearing. Science Advances, 4(11). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aat2993