We are drinking the Earth, too

Not so long ago, the Central Highlands of Vietnam were blanketed by forests so dense they blotted out the sun. The American soldiers who slogged through the area during the Vietnam War complained about leeches, mosquitoes, and snakes, but those triple-canopy jungles also teemed with tigers, elephants, and monkeys. The unrelenting darkness and tropical monsoons that made the highland woodlands so inhospitable to humans made them excellent habitat for wildlife.

But now they’re blanketed by coffee farms.

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but your morning buzz kills nature. Agriculture is by far the leading driver of deforestation, and coffee is the sixth-leading driver of agricultural deforestation; coffee farms are also parching the aquifers and ravaging the soils they’ll need to sustain future harvests. A new report by the nonprofit Coffee Watch documents that in Vietnam, which grows about one of every five coffee beans on Earth, about half a million acres of Central Highlands forest have been cleared for coffee since 1990, an area the size of Luxembourg. There are no longer any wild tigers in the region, and very few elephants; the saola, an adorable local antelope known as the ​“Asian unicorn,” is feared to be extinct.

Again, I apologize for being a Debbie Downer. But while it’s fairly common knowledge that carbon-belching coal plants and gas-guzzling SUVs are environmental menaces, people should know that our diets also degrade our planet, causing most global water shortages, nutrient pollution, and habitat destruction while generating a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture has overrun nearly half of our habitable land, and it replaces more forests, wetlands, and other wildlands every day. That’s why I wrote ​“We Are Eating the Earth” — and as Coffee Watch founder and director Etelle Higonnet reminded me, we are drinking the earth, too.

“Most people are good people; they’d never dream of going to Starbucks and ordering a latte plus a dead elephant,” Higonnet said. ​“But that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re raping and poisoning the planet with every cup we drink.”

Vietnam is now the No. 2 coffee-growing nation, behind Brazil; and it’s the leading producer of the cheaper ​“robusta” beans used for most instant coffee, serving nearly 40% of the global market. And over the last generation, Vietnam has had one of the world’s fastest deforestation rates; the Coffee Watch report used satellite imagery and other records to show that in the Central Highlands, forest cover has shrunk by a third, while coffee’s footprint has expanded fourteenfold. Traditional jungle provinces like Dak Lak and Dak Nong and Gia Lai have seen less destruction in recent years, but only because there’s so little jungle left to cut.

At the same time, intensive irrigation is lowering the region’s water table, forcing farmers to extend wells as deep as 150 feet, while intensive chemical use is depleting soils, putting farmers on a ​“nutrient treadmill” in which they have to spray even more fertilizer and pesticide to maintain their yields. And when natural forests are cleared, the ecological services they provide — recharging groundwater, controlling erosion, buffering extreme temperatures — are lost with their trees. ​“The production system is eroding the ecological foundations on which it depends,” the report concluded. Droughts are already creating bean shortages, which contributed to record-high coffee prices last year, and as the climate warms, scientists believe half the area’s coffee acres might be unviable by midcentury. That could mean even more deforestation, as production expands elsewhere, and even higher prices.

“If this system collapses, shock waves will be felt in every supermarket and every café,” Higonnet said.

Higonnet is a badass do-gooder, a Yale Law School graduate who was a human rights activist for Amnesty International before joining Greenpeace to focus on climate. She got frustrated by Greenpeace’s exclusive focus on the four most prominent deforestation commodities — beef, soy, palm oil, and wood/​paper — so she helped found a well-respected organization called Mighty Earth that works on rubber and cocoa as well as the Big Four; she was knighted by the French government for her efforts to stop child labor and slavery along with deforestation. But she always wanted to expose coffee farming, which also has extreme labor and poverty problems as well as environmental problems, so she started Coffee Watch in late 2024. Coffee is responsible for only about 1% of deforestation, but as she points out, it receives way less than 1% of the attention paid to deforestation.

The Coffee Watch report does make a compelling case that the world’s coffee addiction has destructive consequences for nature. There’s something depressing about losing a Luxembourg-sized jungle to farmland in a generation. Then again, Luxembourg is just about the size of Rhode Island; around the world, coffee has replaced about a New Jersey–sized swath of forest. That’s certainly not nothing, but cattle replaced an entire California-size area of forest between 2000 and 2015, more than 200 times what’s been lost in Vietnam, and twice as much as what was lost to all other commodities combined. Globally, pastures now cover an area about twice the size of South America. In the United States, we use about half our agricultural land to produce beef, which only provides about 3% of our calories.

So yes, we are drinking a bit of the Earth, but nowhere near as much of it as we’re eating; the 1% of current deforestation driven by coffee is a drop in the pot, compared with the 40% by cattle or the 18% by soy and oil palm. I did some crude calculations using this emissions data, and it looks like drinking a cup of coffee every morning contributes about as much to global warming as driving a gasoline car 100 miles — maybe twice as much if you add milk, but that’s just another reminder that cattle are the real climate menaces. They’re coal plants with tails.

Of course, coffee’s relatively modest impact is no consolation to the Asian unicorn. It would be better for the planet if people drank less coffee. Since that probably won’t happen, because people love coffee, and since lab-grown coffee isn’t ready for prime time, there ought to be more pressure on major coffee buyers to green their supply chains. Coffee grows well in the shade of other trees, and while most of the world’s beans come from monocultures, about 20% are now grown through more sustainable agroforestry practices that combine reforestation with production, like planting ​“doughnuts” or ​“zebra stripes” of trees around or through plantations. Brazil has also reduced deforestation by helping farmers get more efficient; in one generation, they’ve doubled production while reducing their land footprint, and Nestlé is developing new climate-resilient varieties that could boost yields even further. Governments can also encourage farmers to use less irrigation water and fertilizer, or ban imports of coffee grown on recently deforested land.

From a policy perspective, though, it makes more sense to focus on beef, even if nobody wants to hear that just before firing up the grill on July 4. We need to get the rich world to eat less beef, even if that means eating more chicken and pork, and helping ranchers produce more beef on less land. We have to go hunting where the ducks are. The real lesson of the transformation of the Central Highlands is not that drinking coffee is uniquely damaging to the climate or the environment. It’s that everything we consume does at least some damage — and until we start taking that seriously, our diets and our farms will keep ravaging the natural world.