OREANDA-NEWS. December 17, 2015.  The following is a guest column from Craig Russell, executive vice president, Starbucks Global Coffee

Over a year ago I wrote an article about how the coffee farming community needs us now, more than ever. It was a moment of reflection as the Specialty Coffee Association gathered the industry in Seattle to talk about its future.  At the time, many of us discussed the impact we could have on farming communities around the world who were dealing with a very real challenge called La Roya – coffee rust. A fungus that grows on coffee plants, exasperated by warmer climate conditions, it was becoming a serious issue at scale.

My question at the time was how can we – as a collective – do more?

Since then, I am proud to say, Starbucks has been answering that question. In addition to announcing earlier this year that 99% of Starbucks coffee is ethically sourced, we have also more than doubled our farmer financing to \\$50M, opened our seventh farmer support center and donated thousands of rust resistant coffee seeds to the Costa Rican Coffee Institute (ICAFE). Earlier this month we also became a lead member of Conservation International’s Sustainable Coffee Challenge, a call to action for the entire industry to define a clear path forward to making coffee the first sustainably-sourced agricultural product in the world.

But we saw a chance to do something even bigger. In September, Starbucks started the One Tree for Every Bag Commitment. Every time a customer purchases a bag of coffee in one of our participating U.S. stores over the next year, we will make sure a rust-resistant coffee tree is planted on a C.A.F.E. Practices farm that needs help in Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico with plans to expand to Sumatra, Indonesia.

As of today, we will plant over five million coffee trees – but that is not enough. To help a single coffee farm thrive again they may need thousands of new trees. So, for us, this is just the beginning.

To see the impact this could have firsthand, I visited Chiapas, Mexico last month.  This wasn’t my first trip to Chiapas as we have worked with the coffee community in Mexico for nearly 20 years purchasing Arabica coffee in remote areas above 1,000 meters, from farms that have been there for multiple generations. In fact, our first famer loan project was with the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in 2000. What I saw on this trip though, was humbling. While many countries in Latin America have slowly begun to recover from the effects of coffee rust, Central America and Mexico, in particular, is still reeling. The urgency is palpable as families who once had amazing crops have to make hard choices about how to farm their land, put food on the table or have children in school. There shouldn’t have to be tradeoffs. 

At Starbucks, we are a small part of a very big industry but our hope is that by always leading with our values, knowing that our success is dependent on the success of the farmers who grow our coffee that we can, and will, create change. As I mentioned, today is a big day for us at Starbucks but it’s even bigger for farmers in Central America, and I am convinced that this work will help ensure a future for farming communities for years to come.