World’s Best Coffee Brands Take Coffee Illegally Grown in Tiger Home

By Kyodo News International, Tokyo

Jan. 17–JAKARTA — International companies producing the world’s best coffee brands, including Japan’s Marubeni Corp., have used coffee grown illegally in Indonesia in the habitat of Sumatran tigers, elephants and rhinos, which are on the brink of extinction, the World Wildlife Fund said Wednesday.

In an investigative report, the WWF revealed that the illegally grown coffee has been mixed by local traders with legal coffee beans and later exported from the country to companies such as Kraft Foods, Nestle, Lavazza and Marubeni.

By using satellite imaging, interviewing coffee farmers and monitoring coffee trade routes, the global environmental organization discovered that robusta coffee has been illegally cultivated inside the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park on Sumatra Island.

Bukit Barisan Selatan is a World Heritage Site located in Lampung Province on the southern tip of Sumatra Island.

The park has lost nearly 20 percent of its forest due to land clearing to open plantations. It is one of the few protected areas where Sumatran tigers, Sumatran elephants and Sumatran rhinos coexist.

“If this trend of clearing park land for coffee isn’t halted, the rhinos and tigers will be locally extinct in less than a decade,” said Nazir Foead, WWF-Indonesia’s director of policy and corporate engagement.

“We think even the world’s most committed coffee drinkers will find this an unacceptable price to pay for their daily caffeine buzz,” he added.

Indonesia is the world’s second-largest exporter of robusta coffee.

According to the WWF investigative report, farmers have been growing coffee on more than 45,000 hectares of the park’s land, producing more than 19,600 tons of coffee annually. The coffee is exported to at least 52 countries.

The nongovernmental organization further said that most of the companies buying the coffee likely were unaware of its illegal origins and that it has provided draft copies of the report’s findings to the top recipients of Lampung coffee tainted with illegal beans from Bukit Barisan Selatan.

Some companies, according to the WWF, have been in discussions with the organization on how to avoid purchases of the tainted coffee, boost the production of sustainably grown coffee and restore the park’s wildlife habitat.

“The WWF doesn’t want to shut down the coffee industry in Lampung Province,” Foead said.

“We are asking national and multinational coffee companies to help build sustainable coffee production around the National Park while implementing rigorous chain-of-custody controls that exclude all illegally grown coffee from their supplies,” he added.

The WWF also recommended the park’s authorities and local governments to act to prevent further encroachment into the park, including by creating regulations to prevent illegally grown coffee from infiltrating international trade.

—–

To see more of Kyodo News International, go to http://www.kyodonews.com

Copyright (c) 2007, Kyodo News International, Tokyo

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

MARUY, 8002,