Starbucks pledges 100m new coffee trees by 2025

Starbucks Coffee Company has announced that it will make sure 100 million healthy coffee trees get into the hands of coffee farmers that need them by 2025. The new effort is part of the company’s ongoing commitment to provide comprehensive support to farmers around the world ,which includes open-source agronomy research, farmer financing and access to information. The expanded commitment builds on Starbucks One Tree for Every Bag initiative, which launched in September 2015, ensuring that a coffee tree is planted for every bag of coffee purchased in a participating US stores. The seedlings will replace trees that are declining in productivity due to age and disease, such as coffee leaf rust, which is perpetuated because of a warmer climate. More than 25 million trees have been donated thus far. Having already built a successful tree distribution network and as one of the largest purchasers of Arabica coffee, Starbucks can now integrate the purchase of healthy, rust-resistant coffee trees into its green coffee buying program. By working with long-term suppliers, the company will seamlessly ensure that a total of 10 Million coffee tree seedlings per year are available to farmers in need. The company will continue its relationship with supplier nurseries set up in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador as well as look to develop new supplier nurseries in additional coffee regions that would benefit from re-planting. Starbucks expects at least 100 million trees to get to farmers by 2025. This effort will have an amplified effect when added to the work of The Sustainable Coffee Challenge that recently announced an industry wide effort to replant 1 billion coffee trees, to ensure positive outcomes for both productivity and the environment. The Sustainable Coffee Challenge is a joint initiative of more than 60 partners including corporations, governments, NGOs and research organisations working together to make coffee the first sustainable agricultural product.  A key tenet of the Challenge is to encourage partners to tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing the coffee sector – both individually and via collective action. This replanting effort will be one of the organisation’s Collective Action Networks and in addition to Starbucks is supported by non-profits, government agencies and coffee roasters.