Coffee part 3

Coffee has some problems when it is not shade-grown. These coffee plants need direct sunlight to grow and are 3X as productive as shade grown coffee, which makes it extremely attractive to companies or plantation owners. Since there is no need for forests with this kind of coffee, often times jungles are cut down to create land in order to grow this coffee. This isn't just bad because of the deforestation, erosion of the soil due to lack of deep tree roots, and elimination of diversity of flora and fauna, but also because sungrown coffee needs pesticides which may end up draining into local rivers and polluting the groundwater. Over 2/3rds of land under pasture in Costa Rica (meaning plantations or fields) is subject to high erosion risk. When you consider how much of the economy is based on agriculture, that adds up to be a signficant amount of erroded soil that can't be helped due to the original deforestation used to clear the land for the agricultural plants. Also, as we learned at Cafe Britt, more than 70% of the coffee bean is actually discarded, including multiple layers of shells and other non-edible parts, which often ended up as waste in streams. As the bean is processed, it is soaked in water for a day to get the gelatinous coating off of the bean. Sometimes, this water was disposed of incorrectly into local streams causing pulp buildup in streams surrounding plantations and sugar to be in the water which ends up taking some oxygen out of the water, killing everything that was living. Thankfully, the Costa Rican government decided to enact a pollution control law in 1995 that makes sure that solid and liquid waste are properly disposed of.