Many grocery stores today are beginning to carry shade grown coffee, but the average customer in the store - including well-informed progressive democrats - have no idea what's so special about them. What they don’t realize is that coffee is traditionally grown in an agro-forestry cultivated environment, where shady trees shelter the coffee plant from direct sunlight. Starting in the 1970s, a number of large commercial plantations introduced new varieties of sunlight tolerant coffee plants. It is now believed that the loss of forested lands to open field coffee plantations in many parts of Latin America has led to a significant decline in migratory songbirds in the Western Hemisphere.
The advantage of open field cultivation is increased yield of coffee beans, thus providing the producer with higher profit margins. However, such practices have increased the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, while reducing the habitats of many bird species (see link to Smithsonian fact sheets)
. . . because of recent changes in coffee production and marketing, shade coffee plantations are a threatened habitat. In the past twenty years, coffee has begun to be grown with no shade canopy at all. While this manner of cultivation produces substantially increased yields, these cannot be sustained for many years without intensive management (additions of chemical fertilizers and a range of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides); they are also subject to premature death in environments possessing a marked dry season, and they need to be renovated (plants replaced) much more frequently than the shade varieties.
Aside from the agronomic risks, sun coffee production has resulted in major habitat change for migratory birds in the past two decades. Of the permanent cropland planted in coffee, the amount under modern, reduced-shade coffee systems ranges from 17% in Mexico to 40% in Costa Rica and 69% in Colombia. The few studies that have been conducted have found that the diversity of migratory birds plummets when coffee is converted from shade to sun. One study found a decrease from 10 to 4 common species of migratory birds. As for the overall avifauna, studies in Colombia and Mexico found 94-97% fewer bird species in sun grown coffee than in shade grown coffee. This comes as no surprise since over two-thirds of the birds are found in the canopy of shade plantations and less than 10% are found foraging in coffee plants.
As a general rule of thumb for the discerning consumer, coffee raised in most Central American region - Southern Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama - are still mostly shade grown, while coffee exported from Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica are largely sun-grown today. Also coffee beans shipped from Ethiopia, Sumatra, Timor and New Guinea are more likely to be shade grown. (see link)