The town of Mesa de los Santos lies on a treeless, 5,400-foot (1,650-meter) -high savanna so dry that little more than scrub survives. Most farmers in this part of the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes in Santander state long ago packed their bags. Those that remain pump their tomato patches with chemical fertilizers or raise chickens in coops needing neither rainfall nor fertile soil. But as Oswaldo Acevedo, a fourth-generation coffee farmer, surveys his land from the porch of his red-roofed 19th-century hacienda, he is content, even cheerful.

“We’re paying a high cost to introduce organic, shade-grown coffee into these arid conditions because our buyers like the taste,” he says. “It’s coffee with enormous potential—a sleeping giant, I’d say.”

Since 1995, when Acevedo decided to expand the small, 100-acre (40-hectare) coffee farm founded by his great-grandfather in 1872 to 500 acres (200 hectares) and move into the organic, shade- coffee market, he has sought to prod that giant.

He now cultivates three varieties of arabica coffee, the standard for gourmet coffee around the world. He has planted 45,000 trees, including 48 varieties of hardwoods, fruit and banana trees to cover his coffee bushes. And he has created a multi-layered canopy of forest that reaches up to 100 feet (30 meters) high and provides refuge for bats, frogs, and snakes as well as 119 species of migratory and resident birds including warblers, woodpeckers and wrens.

Those efforts, accompanied by a strict organic regime that includes only natural fertilizers and pesticides, have transformed Acevedo’s farm beyond recognition. They also have earned his Café Mesa de los Santos a leading position among so-called sustainable coffees—those organic, shade-grown, or fair-price varieties that bring in extra dollars for promoting environmental and social progress. His 310,000 pounds (140,000 kilos) of annual coffee exports—with their gourmet quality and green seals from international certifiers—command more than double the standard price in the United States and Britain.

“This kind of coffee is good for the consumer, good for the environment, and good for coffee growers,” he says. “If it’s a bit more costly to produce, it also generates higher incomes.”

Sales of gourmet and sustainable coffees in 2001 represented $7.8 billion in the $18.5-billion U.S. coffee market, according to a study done by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), an industry group. Still, with awareness of such coffees low, producers ranging from subsistence farmers in the Andes to Kogui Indians in the high Sierra Nevada hope the sector will speed beyond its 5% to 10% annual growth rate. They want relief to a decade-long coffee crisis that has seen coffee prices plummet to their lowest levels in a century and driven an estimated 200,000 coffee farmers out of work.

Conservationists say the switch to shade-grown plantations, which host biodiversity second only to virgin forests, will revive biological corridors, restore habitat for migratory birds and resurrect watersheds degraded by erosion. “This is an extremely important development from a biological and environmental point of view,” says Andrés Dickers, director of the Conservation Coffee program at Conservation International (CI), which is promoting shade-coffee farming in the northeastern Andes and Colombia’s Pacific coast. “It holds out the possibility of cleaner production and incomes sufficient for growers to avoid switching to environmentally-damaging ranching or drug cultivation.”

Industry experts estimate that less than 1% of Colombia’s 570,000 coffee growers produce certified, organic or shade-grown coffee. That pales compared to Mexico or Peru, the world’s largest organic producers. But environmentalists are optimistic.

“Colombia, the world’s second largest producer overall, could sell 30% to 50% of its coffees as sustainable coffees within the next five to ten years,” says Dickers. “It is entirely feasible.”

Colombian growers traditionally produced their coffee under a dense canopy of trees that provided habitat for dozens of species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects and maintained an unbroken corridor of Andean forest. But in the 1970s and 1980s, growers panicked at the appearance of a fungal disease known as the coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix), which had devastated India and Sri Lanka in the 19th century. So they ripped up their shade-trees and replaced them with plantations that were directly exposed to the sun and less vulnerable to outbreaks of disease.

The new plantations, often described as “green deserts,” had real economic advantages. They featured tightly packed rows with a far greater concentration of bushes than traditional plots. They also had new varieties of coffee that yielded up to three times the usual production. In a world of high prices, they seemed the ticket to the future.

But the modernization drive—repeated throughout Latin American and the Caribbean with help from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—also had its downside. Sun-coffee plants, with enhanced photosynthesis rates, quickly depleted nutrients in the soil and required massive amounts of chemical fertilizers. They had far shorter life spans. And they drastically reduced the habitat for wildlife, including beneficial insects and spiders that kept harmful pests at bay and reduced the need for pesticides.

Industry experts, meanwhile, complained that sun-coffee plants produced a boring cup. Compared to coffee from shade plantations—which matures slowly and naturally, producing a sweet, complex flavor—so-called chemically-accelerated, technified coffee tends to be bland, with little texture or aftertaste.

Worse still, the new varieties devastated Colombia’s wilderness. As the TV-advertisement character Juan Valdez prodded his mule down woodland trails to tout the virtues of “mountain coffee,” Colombian growers were hacking down trees, shrinking Andean forests. In the process, they not only dealt a blow to local wildlife, they eliminated habitat for many U.S. and Canadian bird species that winter in northern Latin America.

Conservation groups and socially conscious roasters racked their brains for a solution. Between the destruction wrought by coffee, ranching, drug production and other agriculture, the Andean forests had shrunk by 78% by the mid-1990s. It was time to turn back the clock, they decided.

Today on Colombia’s Pacific coast, Conservation International, in collaboration with Starbucks and the Colombian National Federation of Coffee Growers (Federacafe), assists 350 coffee farmers in replanting native species of shade trees. The group seeks to restore the Choco-Manabí biological corridor, which runs from Panama to Ecuador and features some of the planet’s wettest rainforests, 210 species of endemic amphibians and the richest bird fauna in the world.

The effort unites key coffee players. Starbucks buys the coffee for its Conservation Coffee label at double the price of conventional coffee, sending most of the income directly to farmers. But a small percentage of the money goes to a fund that assists growers with technical aspects of organic production such as composting, pesticide reduction and waste management. Growers learn, for example, how to reduce organic waste traditionally dumped in rivers, depriving them of essential oxygen.

Coffee drinkers pick up the tab. Educated in the benefits to farmers and the environment of sustainable coffees by CI and Starbucks publicity campaigns, the consumer—generally well-educated, well-to-do and politically liberal, according to industry surveys—pays a premium to support a cause he or she believes in.

“This income helps struggling farmers avoid more profitable but environmentally-damaging activities like cattle ranching and sugar cane production,” says Jaime Salazar, director of CI’s Choco-Manabí Conservation Program. “It is crucial to restoring watersheds and forests.”

On Colombia’s Atlantic coast, a marijuana boom in the 1970s wiped out up to 70% of the Andean cloud forests in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the world’s highest coastal range. Today, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas battle over coca crops, further despoiling the wilderness by felling trees and dumping drug-processing chemicals into rivers. The region, one of the nation’s principle sources of water and home to some of the world’s rarest plants and birds, is at risk.

But Federacafe, which once facilitated the move to sun coffee, now is contributing to a solution. It is sponsoring projects involving around 2,000 producers and more than 10,000 indirect jobs in transportation and picking, generating extra earnings for cooperatives comprising peasant farmers and Kogui and Arhuaco Indians.

Communities transformed

The cooperatives use the money to plant shade trees that relieve pressure on the many threatened migratory birds and mammals of the region. They finance roads, health clinics and schools. They extend organic techniques to the production of honey, cacao, raspberries, and beans. The result is an economic and environmental transformation of entire communities. As containers of organic coffee depart from the nearby port of Santa Marta for sale abroad, coffee growers create new forests as well as the infrastructure and crop-diversification necessary to survive even in times of coffee crisis.

“This is about more than organic production; it’s about creating communities that value life and the environment and are strong enough to resist the combatants in their midst,” says Edgar Ramírez, technical director of the local coffee-growers’ committee.

Oswaldo Acevedo, the owner of Café Mesa de los Santos, has not had to battle guerrillas or paramilitaries. But he has struggled against an inhospitable environment, and, in the process, learned to turn it into an ally. The success of his coffee, bought by 80 different distributors in the United States, has earned him influence among coffee growers as not only the first, but the most recognized of Colombia’s organic, gourmet producers.

A tour of Acevedo’s farm shows why. A visitor passes a small weather station, which resembles a large birdhouse and measures such key variables as rainfall, sunlight, wind speed and humidity, and a processing plant where new techniques eliminate the water contamination usually caused by the separation of the commercial product, or bean, from its outer layers. The visitor crosses a field where workers use shovels to stir discarded coffee husks with chicken manure and earthworms, speeding the mixture’s conversion into natural fertilizer. And he passes a nursery, where rows containing thousands of small coffee and shade trees are interspersed with natural insecticides, such as lemon balm and mint.

Rich variety of tree species

Then he enters the plantation itself. This is a towering, multi-layered canopy of forest where nine varieties of guamo (inga) alternate with dozens of other tree species, including cedar, walnut and oak, to supply shade as well as fine timber.

Acevedo explains that the trees fix growth-enhancing nitrogen in the soil and bind the earth, preventing soil erosion and retaining precious water. Their leaves fall to the ground, adding tons of enriching fertilizer, or mulch.

Camilo Peraza, a professor of ornithology at the Javeriana University in Bogotá, has studied Acevedo’s farm. He describes Acevedo’s trees as catalysts of regeneration, saying that as they have grown over the last four years, the number of bat species present in the area has increased to 11 from 7 and the quantity of bird species has risen to 119 from 74. “These shade plantations make a huge difference in otherwise denuded areas in helping to preserve bird and animal species that depend on the forests for food and shelter,” Peraza says.

The Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington, D.C. has awarded Acevedo’s coffee its “bird friendly” seal, which allows him to sell at a premium in shops at the Animal Kingdom section of Disneyland and Disneyworld. While symbolic in commercial terms, that endorsement is an acknowledgement of the rich habitat Acevedo’s farm has created.

Acevedo has a more personal way of looking at it. He says he wakes up on his farm, once abandoned by the animal world, to see rabbits, foxes, frogs and dozens of feathered companions ranging from cowbirds and cuckoos to orioles, falcons, finches and rushes.

“I sit back on my porch, look out over my land and think, ‘This is paradise,’ ” he says.