Can we have our coffee and our happy planet too? Etelle Higonnet, COFFEE WATCH

Happy Planet Wednesday!

You might want to listen to this podcast before you pour yourself that cherished morning cup of coffee....

Our guest today is Etelle Higonnet, a French-born, Yale Law School graduate, living in Denmark, who set out to make coffee more environmentally friendly through her organization COFFEE WATCH. 

What she discovered was that environmental degradation was just the tip of the iceberg. The coffee industry is fraught with human injustices as well including human trafficking, child labor, and slavery. 

Despite these horrors, Etelle is confident that she can make a difference by getting all of us to vote with our pocketbooks and put pressure on our local governments. 

Can we have our coffee and our happy planet too? Tune in to hear it from Etelle.

Coffee Watch
Etelle Higonnet

Transcript

Abigail: 0:05

Welcome to the podcast where we celebrate innovation for a happy planet. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. You might wanna listen to this podcast before you pour yourself that cherished morning cup of coffee. Our guest today is Atel hie, a French born Yale Law School graduate, living in Denmark, who set out to make the coffee industry more environmentally friendly through her organization Coffee Watch. What she discovered, however, was that environmental degradation was just the tip of the iceberg. The coffee industry is fraught with human injustices as well, including human trafficking, child labor, and slavery. Despite these horrors, ITEL is confident that she can make a difference by getting all of us to vote with our pocketbooks and put pressure on our local governments. Can we have our coffee and our happy planet too. Let's hear it from a tell. Welcome to the program Mattel.

Etelle: 1:13

It's so great to be here. Thank you. Having me on.

Abigail: 1:17

Well, I am, I'm delighted to have you on, although I must say you've made me have to really question my role in the world when every morning I get up and I look forward to my first cup of coffee of the day.

Etelle: 1:33

So many people, me, I've ruined their

Abigail: 1:36

you may have ruined my life, but, you know I I still appreciate it. So you have started an organization called Coffee Watch tell me about your organization and what problem you're trying to solve here.

Etelle: 1:50

Yeah, so Coffee Watch. I guess the easiest way to describe it, it's as if Greenpeace and Amnesty International got together and had a baby, and that baby just wanted to work on coffee. I say this in part because I used to work at Green Fees and Amnesty, so I'm very influenced by that. But you know, really my dream is just to end environmental and social abuses and coffee and transform the industry so that it makes the world a better place with every cup. You know, without all this deforestation and pesticides soaked monoculture and slavery and human trafficking and rape, and child labor and poverty, we don't need to have those in our coffee. We can absolutely have ethical, sustainable coffee. And that's kind of my North Star.

Abigail: 2:39

Wow. Okay. You just used a lot of big words there. Slavery, deforestation, exploitation. Like how bad is this situation?

Etelle: 2:50

Abigail, it's so bad. I didn't even realize how bad it was until I got geared up to launch Coffee Watch. I knew. Coffee was the number six driver of deforestation in the world. Like that is actually why I wanted to start coffee watches.'cause I thought, oh, you know, scientists are telling us we don't have much time. We have to save all these forests before it's too late. Coffee is one of the top drivers. You know, there's seven big, big drivers of deforestation in the world. We've gotta really change those and turn them around and coffee's one of them and it gets very short shrift. I mean really, basically almost nobody works to. Combat, deforestation, coffee to name and shame be kind of a watchdog.

Abigail: 3:32

Sorry to interrupt, but why? Why is it deforest? Like what are, what's the mechanics? Why is coffee contributing to deforestation?

Etelle: 3:40

Oh yeah, great question. Essentially, Abigail, let's say you are a company or a farmer you know. You're living in wherever. Could be Colombia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico. It could be Vietnam. You buy a plot of forested land, usually that's the sort of cheapest land.

Abigail: 4:00

Yeah.

Etelle: 4:01

You chop it down and you plant coffee there.

Abigail: 4:04

Okay.

Etelle: 4:05

That's full sun monoculture robust. Or you buy a plot of forested land, you keep some trees, you chop a lot of them down, and you plant like agroforestry, Arabica kind of coffee. And then over time, as the coffee gets stronger, you chop more and more trees and it gets to be less and less shady. And those, those ways of growing coffee are very common. That's like the old schools, your business as usual, unethical unsustainable, modus operandi that's characterized. Most, most of coffee comes at at the expense of forests. It, it grows on what used to be forested land, but it doesn't have to be that way. Right? We can grow coffee on degraded lands. We can find degraded lands, in fact and like regenerate them by putting agroforestry coffee. You plant coffee and they put lots of trees in, and among the coffee and the coffee kind of the allows you financially to make an agro forest. That is healing the soil. That's like, there's this company called Slow Forest Coffee, that that's their whole business model. They buy trashed soil that's destroyed and then they plant agroforestry coffee there to heal the ecosystem.

Abigail: 5:16

Interesting. So there are these questions, the United States and Canada, other places where we have solar farms, I've actually read articles that saying like agriculture grown under the solar panels that are on the fields does very well'cause it actually traps in some of the humidity. But maybe coffee doesn't need that humidity. I don't know.

Etelle: 5:38

No coffee does need humidity, so you're right. I mean, the beautiful thing about these solar farms is actually you can marry them with agriculture. So I, I love wine. I'm French, you know, part of my ancestors had a vineyard back in the day. I have a, a wine enthusiast, I guess you could say, and I

Abigail: 5:54

you're French too, so

Etelle: 5:56

And I was very lucky to be able to be one of the founding members of the sustainable Wine round tables that I kind of stay plugged into news about sustainable wine. It turns out solar and wine love each other. I guess you could say Dion, ISIS and Apollo are like best buds. Because you're right that, you know when you have, especially in, in the southern Mediterranean region where it's very hot and you have these heat domes and you can have like droughts when you mix. Solar panels and vines, it can be incredibly beneficial for the vines and really good for the quality of the Y.

Abigail: 6:31

Interesting. So there is a way to do this on an environmental way that is

Etelle: 6:35

Oh, totally. Oh yeah,

Abigail: 6:38

and it's just not the cheapest way.

Etelle: 6:40

It's not necessarily the cheapest way, but you know, you're a hundred percent right. We can absolutely do this. An environmental way, like there are two paths. We've chosen a garbage path and there's an environmentally sound path, and we can just shift from one to the other. And essentially, coffee for the most part, loves trees because if one thing that you said, it's moisture, coffee likes air moisture, and it likes rainfall. Coffee is a very finicky sensitive plant that does not like heat domes and superstorms and droughts and climate chaos. It is very finicky. It doesn't like that at all. And trees actually not only keep air moisture, they keep soil moisture, they keep soil health. They act as like giant straws and sponges that suck up water when there's been a superstorm, but they also maintain moisture and coolness when you have like a super hot drought. So trees are awesome for most coffee. We have kind of weirdly decided to develop this full and robust strain, which is kind of a stupid, weird, bad human idea that we. Maybe you shouldn't revisit.

Abigail: 7:43

Is that because of harvesting? Because the trees would get in the way, in the way of like machinery. I mean, I know that's a problem with crops. Like why you,

Etelle: 7:51

If you wanna do highly mechanized, yes, a hundred percent. If you wanna do highly

Abigail: 7:55

need are new machines.

Etelle: 7:57

Yeah.

Abigail: 7:58

Yeah.

Etelle: 7:59

Yeah. Solar. Yeah. These huge plantations that are full sun robusta. They lend themselves much better to highly mechanized agriculture.

Abigail: 8:09

Yeah. So, so the deforestation, the environmental part of this is one thing that, that coffee watch is taking on, but you also talk about just basically human exploitation and, we've talked about slavery. Tell me about the human component here and, we have these international rules about slavery and things like that. How can this be happening today in 2025?

Etelle: 8:38

It's crazy. It just batshit crazy. I, this is sounds like a real downer and it will get better afterwards, I promise, because I'll talk about solutions and we can make it better. Let me just be very blunt. Pretty much every time you drink a cup of coffee, you're drinking poverty, probably extreme poverty, and many times that you drink a cup of coffee, you are drinking child labor or slavery, or dead bondage or human trafficking, or some weird toxic combination of that.

Abigail: 9:19

Hmm.

Etelle: 9:20

And I say this because. There are millions of kids working at coffee, like millions. Literally there the, there's no one fantastically methodologically sound, really good meta study of child labor and coffee. Like we have something like that in cocoa actually, that was done by these incredible scholars at Newark and before that, Tulane, it was paid for by the Department of Labor before it got dozed by Mr. Musk. Thank you. And so we don't have something quite like that for coffee. What we have is the best studies that. The most methodologically impressive scholars, either NGO or university folks have done in different places. So here's just like three examples, but I could go on all night. But you know, in the interest of time, it's really, really important. Study was done on Ethiopia by these scholars from Scandinavian universities, some of whom are of Ethiopian origin. It focused on Ethiopian coffee farmers and child labor. They found that around 91% of coffee farmer families were using child labor. Then there's another study that was done also actually funded by US Department of Labor before it got do thank you, Mr. Musk Trump. And that study in Columbia found that around 74% of coffee farming families in that country use child labor. They're studying Honduras 64% basically. Every country you look at where there's been any studies, they all tell us that we are talking about the majority of coffee farming families using child labor. They don't do that because they're sadistic whackadoodles.

Abigail: 10:59

Mm.

Etelle: 10:59

They do that because they're extremely poor and they often have no choice. Starve and go to school or come outta school and work in coffee, and then we can all eat maybe. So they're so food insecure. That is why they're sending their kids to do what is backbreaking difficult work that they do not want their kids to do. You know, when you talk to them, parents will tell you, if this breaks my heart, I hate it. I do not wanna do this. I have

Abigail: 11:26

They want better for their children and you know, as, as all parents.

Etelle: 11:29

of course. But so basically when you do the math, you start to realize. Hundreds of thousands here. Millions there. Millions. Year and a half here. Tens of thousands. Ba We are talking about millions of kids in coffee. That is why I say if you drink coffee and you are not paying attention, you're definitely drinking child labor.

Abigail: 11:54

I saw some, brands that didn't really surprise me. The Starbucks, the Nestle's with the, you know, is it just them? Or is this really broad spread to kind of all, or let's say 90% of the coffee that, that's in the supermarket today.

Etelle: 12:12

I would say, you know, there are a lot of big brands that we have caught. Over and over at Coffee Watch and investigations that we've done with Sister NGOs. You, we've only been operational for less than a year, but we manage with the help of these amazing sister NGOs to pull off investigations in China, in Yan, which is where almost other coffee's grown in Mexico, in Colombia, in Brazil. We have some more teams on the ground right now. We've found so many big brands. With a range of problems, slavery, human trafficking or labor, dead bondage, child labor, people working insane hours. And by insane hours, I mean like 18 hours a day. And I mean, people who are working, like almost all the coffee farmers that we interview, and especially the harvesters, the farm workers, they talk about working seven days a week. For three months straight. Dental desk, if not more. That's just the norm. That's not like apples or it happens occasionally. Like just imagine if somebody made you work 12 hours a day or 18 hours a day, seven days a week for three months with no sick leave. No, no, no PPE, no personal protective gear, no medical care, no. No social security, no pension. Most of these people are ghost employees. They don't even like, have proper papers. They're not really registered, so they don't get pensions, they don't get social security. We, in fact, titled a whole report coffee laundering, ghost farms, and coffee laundering, because that's just the norm. So essentially we found. Oh, so many abuses, but just to name a few. Like we, we did a petition to US customs, which hasn't yet been dod hopefully it doesn't get so. To CBP you can do something called a 3 0 7 petition, where you ask customs to block coffee tainted by slavery and for slavery from entering the us We did that and we named in our 3 0 7 complaint. Starbucks Nestle, McDonald's, JDE ili.

Abigail: 14:25

How's Dunking Donuts doing? That's a New England favorite.

Etelle: 14:28

mean, so Duncan is, is named in our 3 0 7 petition. We literally believe that they have slavery and forced labor in their coffee supply chain. We think that they're buying, I mean, of course this has to get adjudicated by customs. They're reviewing our data. They may find it in our favor. They may find against. We certainly produced a huge amount of information. I think it's one of the best cases I've ever seen. Go to CBP. A lot of experts helped us make it really top tier. But yeah, we, we suspect, we think we allege that they are buying coffee from companies that have not just a little bit of slavery, but a widespread and systematic and recurring problem of slavery over and over and over in their supply chain.

Abigail: 15:12

Oh,

Etelle: 15:13

So it's, it's one of the top drivers of slavery in Brazil. And Brazil is the number

Abigail: 15:18

I read one of your articles. Yeah. Brutal.

Etelle: 15:21

But you asked

Abigail: 15:23

Sorry.

Etelle: 15:23

question about like, does everyone have this problem? And I will just say that a lot of companies think they're so amazing and actually they tend to, a lot of them have many problems. We found so many

Abigail: 15:39

like all of the brands that are like environmentally or sustainable or,

Etelle: 15:43

yeah, there, there was, we found slavery in certified coffee farms. There's this coffee farm, it's called like the cup of Excellence. It's like the Emmy Award winner of coffee You were found connected to maybe forced slavery. Yeah.

Abigail: 16:32

So I wanna back up a little bit and before we get to hopefully a, a brighter topic of what you're doing and what we can do differently why coffee?

Etelle: 16:43

Oh, I need coffee. Just because it's one of the top seven drivers of deforestation in the world. And a lot of people work on the other drivers, you know? So when I was at Greenpeace I had a front row seat to doing this amazing work on palm oil and palm and paper. It really inspired me. It taught me so much. It got me all revved up. When I left Greenpeace and helped to get Mighty Earth going which is, you know, mostly X Greenpeace at, at the beginning X Greenpeace folks, we kept working on cattle, soy, and palm oil, which are like the top. Drivers, you know, of deforestation. But we also managed to do the first ever global campaigns on cocoa and on rubber deforestation. And we really helped turn around those industries. When I was at Miami Earth, it was like a bombshell went off in cocoa and in rubber. And it's not that, you know, these industries are perfect by any means, but the palm oil industry is night and day better to what it used to be 17 years ago, night and day. So many companies now are like, no deforestation, no Pete, no exploitation, no. They've cracked down on rape, forced labor, slavery, they've cracked down on burning fires. You know, people just like burned the forest'cause it's cheaper to do that than Oz. Which is terrible. Obviously. It's, it's ghastly. So anyways, Paulo got so much better. It taught me what we can do to win and then, yeah. In part because Mighty Earth really made deforestation and cocoa and rubber a big thing. I would say that now the other seven high risk commodities, there are folks really doing great work on all the other seven except coffee. So that's why I wanted to take on coffee.

Abigail: 18:25

yeah, it wasn't because you have a particular, do you drink coffee?

Etelle: 18:29

I do, I do. I love coffee in Brazilian. It comes from this coffee producing region, and I've seen with my own eyes, you know, they used to work for Greenpeace in Southeast Asia. I saw. Terrible stuff in coffee and Vietnam and Indonesia, and you just like, it's so extreme. Poverty is so common in coffee, and I just thought, wow, this is so disgusting and wrong and horrible. But really it was because we're in this planetary crisis where we've gotta get ahead of climate chaos and mass extinction and agriculture is like 30% of climate change and 80% of mass extinction. 80% of biodiversity losses from our agriculture system. So I thought, okay, let's try to do that for coffee. And then once I got revved up to start coffee watch, then I realized there's like slaves and kids and trafficking. Like what?

Abigail: 19:19

Oh. It's, it doesn't really surprise me. The, the abuse of the planet would go hand in hand with the abuse of its inhabitants, like it's human inhabitants. I feel like it's a, the mentality is kind of similar.

Etelle: 19:33

You are so Right. That's a very deep point actually. And you know, it's true what you say. And it actually applies also to ocean stuff like the. that are raping the ocean. You know, IU fishing, part fishing. Yeah. Destroying marine protected areas, things like that. Catching juveniles outta season. They tend to also

Abigail: 19:56

Yeah.

Etelle: 19:57

forced labor and seafood slavery. So you're right, it's like the two sides of the same coin. The way you treat mother earth and the way you treat humans. If you're awful to what, you're probably doing terrible things to both. It's true, isn't it?

Abigail: 20:12

So what do we do?

Etelle: 20:14

Oh my God, there's so much we can do. That's the good news.

Abigail: 20:17

So what are you doing? First of all? What's Coffee Watch doing? And then I wanna know how all of us listening can be part of your movement and what we can do to help.

Etelle: 20:27

Abigail, you know, no one should feel despairing and down a heartened and like doom scrolling into a place of cynicism and apathy because actually. I truly believe we can make coffee better, and I think we can do it faster than palm oil. I think in five years we could be having a totally different conversation. I'll call you up and I'll be like, oh my God, it's worked. I really, really, really believe it. I'm in it to win it. I think we can do this. So, I mean, basically that we have this immense, gorgeous power corporations, and often governments don't want you to know that, but you are so powerful. And if people really knew that, then they would tap into their power and then things would change a lot. And so maybe that's why corporations and governments don't want us to know. But for coffee, you can vote with your wallet and buy ethical coffee. It sort of depends where you live. If you're in Maine, if you're in California, if you're in South Africa or Australia or Mexico or Indonesia, there's different, like good brands that are available. You know, London Kiss the Hippo. If you're in Denmark, I would say go for slow food coffee. If you're in Indonesia, I'd say by coffee. There's, you know, a bunch of good brands all over the world and

Abigail: 21:45

we'll put those at the, in the show notes so people can get them unless you

Etelle: 21:48

yeah.

Abigail: 21:49

maybe afterwards you wanna name some,

Etelle: 21:51

We actually created this one stop shop page on our website where people can go to find all the solutions. So there's this little guide that we made towards buying responsibly sourced coffee that's like, well, ethical and sustainable, and we put all the guides that everyone has ever created to buying sustainable coffee and like what you could look for and things to keep in mind and what to be aware of. But you don't just have to buy good coffee for yourself. Like it, all it takes is one hour of research to find the brand that matches your values. You know, that's like direct trade and living income and agroforestry shade grown, all that good, good stuff. You know,

Abigail: 22:29

Can we believe those labels though? Because you just mentioned before that you know, brands that are presenting themselves as you know, sustainable aren't always

Etelle: 22:39

I would, yeah, I would not just rely on certifications.

Abigail: 22:42

yeah.

Etelle: 22:43

Notifications alone are not a guarantee really, of sustainability for the most part. But if you look at our little guide, it tells you all the things to look for that, the greenwashing to be aware of. And then all the companies that we think are doing this for real, real.

Abigail: 22:58

Yeah.

Etelle: 22:59

But basically one hour of your time, you find the right coffee company for you. Or maybe 3, 4, 5. You order a bunch of them. You decide which one is the tastiest that you love the most. Then you can just keep ordering that indefinitely. Right. And you know, the other thing I would say is not just buying from the heart and voting with your wallet for your own coffee. You can like gift sustainable coffee for brunches when you're invited for birthdays, for big holidays for. And you can tell people like, oh, Abigail, it's your birthday. I love you. I love the planet, therefore, and you love coffee. So I'm giving you like fabulous planet, loving people, friendly coffee that's not trashing farmers and forests. Happy birthday. If you want more, let me know. So basically you become like an ambassador when you do that. And I would say that's true even at a bigger scale if you're able to change your university or your school or your office. because often your consumption is kind of peanuts compared to the institutions that you're a part of, your church, your mosque, your, you know, wherever it is that you worship. So that's the whole like vote with your wallet side of things. And depending on how big you double down on that, you can become like a change maker. But then also. Don't forget, most of your listeners probably live in a democracy and not in North Korea, I would say, unless you maybe have lots in North

Abigail: 24:22

from North Korea yet, but I'll let you know if that happens.

Etelle: 24:26

You secretly have lots of Russian, north Korean, Hungarian listeners. But no. In principle, most people who are listening to your show are in a democracy. Like if you message your elected representative just once, that probably has the value of buying sustainable coffee for a year.

Abigail: 24:47

Wow.

Etelle: 24:47

And it can be on their social, it can be their email. Those people work for you and they care about what you have to say. They tabulate

Abigail: 24:56

the moment.

Etelle: 24:57

Well, it doesn't feel like that, of course, because, you know, our democratic system is a bit broken in a lot of people. Have checked out but are now checking back in. I feel huge hope that people are rising up and feeling their power and starting to play and like, look, there's a lot of folks in Congress and Senate who won't do town hall meetings anymore,

Abigail: 25:19

Oh, I know they're

Etelle: 25:20

but that's because they're scared, because like they have their right to be scared, you know, because people are so angry at them and I think, you know, the phone lines are melting down in Congress and, but. This is good, right? We have a democracy maybe in the US and other places where your listers might be like Canada. And to the extent that we have it, using it is powerful because our lawmakers can pass better laws. There are even laws on the books right now proposed that could help make coffee more sustainable. So just saying, I'm your constituent. I care about coffee. That's awesome and powerful. So voting with your wallet is really cool. Using your power as a voter and a constituent to tell your elected representative, like, I drink coffee. You drink coffee, the coffee industry sucks. Whatcha doing about it? And it can be that simple. And then I would say it's not just that we have this power with our lawmakers to some extent, they might not listen to us, but they do tabulate every single

Abigail: 26:23

Right, of course. Yeah.

Etelle: 26:25

But companies are even more sensitive. If you go into companies and certification schemes like social or you email them, they totally freak out if you talk to the manager or the barista, your favorite cafe or in your favorite restaurant and tell them like, oh, did you know this about coffee? I come here all the time. You know, I'm a regular. That registers like there's no

Abigail: 26:52

I'm sure.

Etelle: 26:53

That really registers companies are very sensitive to consumer unrest. They do not like having their consumers know that there's all these bad things like slavery and deforestation in their supply chains. That makes them very uncomfortable. And I would say besides messaging companies, messaging our representatives and voting with your wallet, there's all this like power that comes from signing petitions. So we curated on that same page, that like one stop shop, every good thing you can do for coffee, all the petitions that other people have made for sustainable coffee. And then we started two of them. And so now you can just go and click boop and that's also pretty high value because those things really scare their recipients. Yeah, we have now a hundred. Over a hundred thousand signatures on one petition, over 70,000 on another petition. That's the kind of numbers that really, it gets you like a meeting with a C-suite. It gets you CEO who feels anxious and I'm, I battled on this. That's, that's not a, an easy thing to do, but it, it's powerful. I mean, it is easy to sign petitions, but it's not an easy thing to grow your number. It's that big. But I think petitions are powerful. They're all there on that page. And you know, the last thing is that most people just don't know how bad coffee is, and you can become like a truth ambassador. I, I'm actually a kind of glass huff full person. Or maybe we should say Mug Huff full person or Cup huff, full person. Because it's coffee. I think most people are not sociopaths and are nice, fundamentally good humans. I really believe that. And if they knew how shitty their coffee was, they would not be drinking it. They would be like, what? I don't want to drink child labor in my coffee. I'm spit it out. You know? And I think that just telling people about what's going on is really powerful. And sometimes that can feel awkward or weird. So we also curated this all the best documentaries about the problems in coffee and the solutions in coffee. So if it's just like watching a film with your family. your significant other, or your friends, you know that if you screen one of these films, you're basically raising awareness in a whole other human or a whole gaggle of other people. So yeah, screening films is a fantastic way to spread the word, and none of these are made by us, but the, the filmmaker all just very kindly let us put their stuff up and some of it is extremely disturbing. And heartbreaking, but some of it's really inspirational and filled me with hope and beauty and

Abigail: 29:37

Mm.

Etelle: 29:37

energy, and I hope it does that. For any of your listeners who go look at the

Abigail: 29:42

I think this is amazing. It's amazing to hear that these things work from an insider. I mean, that I wouldn't, honestly, I, I, maybe I am cynical it. I mean, I understand the vote with your wallet problem, but I don't know that I would've thought that signing petitions really made a big difference. I don't know that I would've thought that. You know shouting out on social media would've made a difference to these companies. So I think it's really interesting to hear that and

Etelle: 30:11

Can I tell you a funny story about

Abigail: 30:13

I would love it.

Etelle: 30:14

So back when I was in Mighty Earth and I was starting these campaigns on cocoa to try to change the chocolate industry, you know, the cocoa industry, I got these wonderful folks at a petition group called Some of Us, which is rebranded now as echo. They did a petition. Hammering a chocolate company for their deforestation and the fact that they were growing everything in pesticides of monoculture and didn't even care about agroforestry at all, their carbon, their biodiversity, terrible. And for months, I'd been trying to reach that company to start a real serious negotiation to get them to like agree to no deforestation and agroforestry with time-bound implementation plan. And I just couldn't get through. I was like, I'm gonna have to sue them, like what am I gonna do? And then we did the petition, and then two days later, I got all these desperate messages in my inbox being like, oh, we'd love to have a meeting. We can't believe we missed your earlier messages. They went in our folder, they were like, when can we meet tomorrow? And then at the meeting they're like, okay, okay. No deforestation. We can do that, but Agroforestry is way too much. And I was like. Like really? They're like, okay, okay. Some is very funny. It really like unblocked this company. So yeah,

Abigail: 32:11

That is a great

Etelle: 32:12

every time. That was sort of like a best case scenario, but yeah, it totally works. People should feel so proud and energized by the fact that we have these amazing superpowers at our fingertips.

Abigail: 32:27

Hmm.

Etelle: 32:27

we just, you know, society doesn't tell us, but we are so strong and powerful. They have millions of dollars, but we have millions of people who are nice, good people who care. And that is better, you know.

Abigail: 32:41

Wow. You sent shivers up my spine. So let's, let's say you get some change. You've gotta follow up. They say, oh, we'll do a little bit of the agroforestry, but, but maybe,, they just do too little. You know what, what, how. How does Coffee watch make sure these changes are implemented once they put the pressure on these companies. And what's your follow through?

Etelle: 33:06

These are excellent questions. Essentially some things are cheap and easy and some things are really hard to follow up on. So deforestation. Amazingly, Abigail, we now have really good cheap satellite maps that allow us to thank God. Track deforestation in, in real time, like very precise. You know, it used to be so hard and now it's like one meter by one meter. You can see all the forests getting chopped down. So you know, if a company is deforesting and they have some transparency in their supply chain, like they've disclosed their supply chain, which is what we always ask down to either the. Farm Gate Polygon or the GPS point at the heart of the farm or the co-op, you know, or at least the region. So you know, if Abigail and Iett are both buying from the same village and we're the two big buyers, and then there's deforestation in the village, basically you just write to Abigail and Itan. You're like, which one of you has this deforestation? Or is both of you, you know? So basically the traceability and the satellite maps. Allow you to just check deforestation pretty easy. You don't have to do traceability over and over and over and over a million times, right? You know, once it's disclosed, unless the supply chain changes, it's there. So that helps too. Agroforestry, I think we're on the verge of these huge breakthroughs thanks to AI and ever better satellite maps where we will now be able to tell. Over time if something is reg greening, so let's say Abigail has a big bad monoculture, full sun, RIBA plantation of coffee like in Brazil or Vietnam, number one, number two, coffee producing countries. They're really addicted to that form of coffee growing.

Abigail: 34:52

Hmm.

Etelle: 34:53

we signed an agreement and Abigail's like, fine, okay, I'm gonna transition to Agroforestry. Give me 10 years. We would make like a time-bound implementation plan and. Maps would now reveal if Abigail's farm is reg greening or not. So you plant these trees in and around the coffee. It could be zebras, could be polka dots, could be donuts, could be all over. Ty, ty and over like. You know, we do stop checks every year and we can see the progress or lack thereof. That I think is, is already happening to some extent. So checking Agroforestry has been getting easier and I think will get a lot easier. What's harder is human rights violations, right? But pretty easy is whether Abigail or whatever company, you know, Nestle, latza, Aily Duncan, McDonald's, whatever, if they commit to paying a living income, then that's pretty easy to check, right? Because like. If Abigail has a firm and I'm working there, anyone can just go ask it. Dad, what do you earn? And it's not like a huge thing of trust that I have to tell you, oh, I've been raped or like, I, you know, was trafficked. Just telling you how much I earn. That's, that's kind, doable. You can even, Abigail can even pay its debt with like mobile money nowadays. That's a huge breakthrough

Abigail: 36:18

Right. Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of traceable, you

Etelle: 36:20

So I think because so much child labor comes from extreme poverty, if companies committed to living income and paid a living wage for the farm workers and living income price for the small holder farmers, then that would be pretty easy to monitor. And my guess is that then child labor would plummet. Now you'd still have to monitor it. It's not easy, but people do it. There's methodologically sound, ways to go do audits and check about slavery, trafficking, child labor, sexual gender based violence and exploitation, and, you know, inequality. We have like a five hour conversation about this. I love that stuff because it's my passion. But it is harder. You need boots on the ground. It's more expensive. It's more time consuming. It's often really great to involve local civil society groups that are trusted, so that is complicated too, because let's say, you know, if you're sourcing from 19 countries, oh, that's,

Abigail: 37:19

Right.

Etelle: 37:21

but but it's doable. It's

Abigail: 37:22

Hmm,

Etelle: 37:23

doable.

Abigail: 37:24

interesting. So well you brought up an interesting question and about paying livable wages. If the coffee companies are eradicating poverty by paying living wages, what should I be paying for a cup of coffee? Like, is there some data on that? What should a cup of coffee cost me today in the United States?

Etelle: 37:47

Okay. I think it's, it's, it's often kind of, there's this bugaboo or is it bug bear? I know one of the two that if we have a living income for coffee workers, everyone will go bankrupt up and down the supply chain and you know, the coffee will become unbearably expensive. The truth is if your listeners are in New York. And they go to a regular deli and they get like a low end, regular cup of coffee, not a fancy latte. It costs about$3 and 12 cents. And coffee farmers will only get two, three, 4 cents of that. So to pay a living income and also. Have human rights monitoring and a grievance mechanism that people can access and no deforestation, coffee, and also agroforestry. Like all those things, literally your cup of coffee would just be 2 cents more. And here's kind of the breakdown, even for a higher end cup of coffee. People just can't really believe this is true, but I swear to God it's true. Here's the breakdown of your morning cup of coffee percentages. In your cup of latte that you buy at a cafe like a chain 0.4% of the money that you pay for your cup of coffee goes to the coffee farmer. 4% of your cup goes to pay for coffee, and 0.4% goes to the coffee farmer.

Abigail: 39:18

hmm. And the truth is we wanna support these farmers. Not only do we want them to have a sustainable wage, but we wanna buy coffee so that they, these economies

Etelle: 39:28

That is all bad.

Abigail: 39:29

on that, I'm just wondering what, what have Trump tariffs done to the coffee industry and how has that changing everything?

Etelle: 39:37

Oh, it's really bad. It's so super bad for kinds of countries that grow coffee. It's bad for coffee growing countries that are extremely dependent on the United States. Because of geographical, geographical proximity, for example. So Mexico sends almost all their exports of coffee to the us, which makes sense. They're across the border, they make a lot, we drink a lot Mexican coffee. I think a little bit less than half is for internal consumption, and almost all of the exports are for the US and Nicaragua also. Is very dependent on the US market, but you know, not just Mexico and Nicaragua. Guatemala is super dependent. Columbia is super dependent. Okay? Basically geographic proximity means that if you historically just sold a lot to the United States and didn't bother to cultivate relationships with European buyers and Asian buyers and whatever. Now you're hostage to the American market, right? So that's one kind of country that's really royally screwed by Trump tariffs. And then the other kind of country that's super screwed are the countries with very high tariffs.

Abigail: 40:51

Yeah.

Etelle: 40:52

Brazil makes about a third of global coffee, and they got slapped with 50% tariffs because Trump was angry. That was nato. Was being held accountable for a coup. Maybe it's like cos of the world unite or something. I dunno. But so poor Brazil got slapped with a 50% tariff. That's insanely high.

Abigail: 41:14

Hmm.

Etelle: 41:14

Indonesia, Vietnam, Vietnam's the second biggest producer, Indonesia's the, actually, I should say Brazil was screwed. Vietnam is the number two coffee producing country. They're not so dependent on the us but they have very high tariffs, like 20%. Columbia's the third biggest coffee producing country. They are high dependency and high tariff, and Indonesia also. They're not so dependent on the US market, but very high tariffs. So the top four coffee producing countries got Ed Because they just got very high tariffs. And then some countries that are, especially in Central America very dependent on the US got F-Ed. Also because they had diet tariffs, but mostly because they're just hostage to our market. So yeah, Trump's tariffs are cataclysm for coffee farmers. They're already very poor. They're among some of the world's poorest people. Most coffee farmers earn less than$3 a day. Many of them earn less than$2 and 15 cents a day. That's the extreme poverty threshold that the world makes, that they could, ill afford to lose any money. And the countries that are growing coffee are also not rich and are in need of that revenue, and they're getting effed, it's

Abigail: 42:31

It worries me that. I know that you've said just, it's just a few cents more to have a, a workforce that's well paid and have agro forest agroforestry. But I worry that these tariffs could just be the excuse that the companies use to not make this change. And, and so how do you, how do you combat that?

Etelle: 42:53

So the tariffs are already having an impact. The price of coffee is going up, and one of the things that I've learned recently that was really disturbing is that often companies will raise the price above and beyond what they had to because of something like tariffs. They'll just tack on a little extra for profits. That tends to be more true for big companies than small. But yeah, and then they don't necessarily bring the prices down. And you also have something called Tril where you'll just get less coffee for the same price. That's again, more like big companies that are very sophisticated in their packaging and have the ability to do revamps like that where small companies might not be able to. But, i'm extremely preoccupied that entire coffee farming regions like Japa and Mexico and, and Brazil will experience major blows in terms of like economic collapse Because everything runs on coffee. That's like the lifeblood of those regions, you know, half a person coffee.

Abigail: 44:04

It makes your work all the more important.

Etelle: 44:08

We did a whole paper on coffee tariffs, kind of begging the Trump administration to exempt coffee because it's also crazy'cause you can't grow it in America. You can grow like this tiny amount of coffee in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. You'd literally, you'd have to like raise Olive Florida and. Just mow down Hawaii, you still wouldn't get enough land to grow our coffee. You know, it's it's crazy. It, it makes no sense because a tariff is usually for something that you, America would otherwise be able to

Abigail: 44:41

Right. Exactly

Etelle: 44:43

cannot grow that coffee in us.

Abigail: 44:46

That's like spot on. I wonder if he drinks coffee. He probably doesn't drink coffee.

Etelle: 44:51

does not drink coffee. No.

Abigail: 44:52

Otherwise it would matter.

Etelle: 44:55

he doesn't, but he does love McDonald's. So McDonald's is one of the biggest purveyors of coffee in the world. Maybe they'll convince him to make an exemption, his secretaries of commerce, how Howard Lutnick did go on TV on Squawk Box and announce that coffee would be exempt. But we haven't seen that. There is a petition right now that was started by Representative Ana, who's amazing. He's a California congressman. Really, really cool. He created a petition to actually ask Congress to repeal tariffs on coffee because coffee farmers are so poor. This will push entire regions into collapse. have to deal with like mass migration flows and craziness and political upheaval and violence, no doubt would ensue from economic collapse. So yeah, we, it's much better to like not have coffee tariffs for a lot of reasons.

Abigail: 45:57

so I think that should be on our list of things to do you, you know, we talked about. Contacting your elected representatives, but maybe that's a two part, like,

Etelle: 46:07

It's on our page, it's on that webpage I talked about with all the petitions. You just go click and you can sign. It will go to your, automatically, you know, you, you populate your address and it will find your representative for you.

Abigail: 46:22

All right. We wanna vote with our wallet. We wanna message our representatives. We wanna lash out on social media. We wanna sign petitions, particularly yours, on the website. And we wanna be our own ambassadors bringing, sharing the beautiful coffee brands with friends and family so that they learn that you can have your coffee and your agroforestry too.

Etelle: 46:49

Abi, can you please be my spokesperson?

Abigail: 46:57

I wanna know if you have any advice for other entrepreneurs, either of nonprofits or of profit businesses that are, that are trying to, trying to make a dent in the impact economy.

Etelle: 47:08

Yeah. You know, I do have a, a big thought about what's been going on lately. You know, USAD was put into the wood, wood chipper by Mr. Musk and the un has been under immense pressure because Trump cut basically a third of the UN budget. And so, you know, there's a lot of NGOs that are flailing and failing. You know, philanthropy just can't fill the gap, right? And so many people who wanted to be in the impact space from the NGO side of things are just desperate. I see many people that I know in human rights and humanitarian and public health and environmental space. Just experiencing layoffs and heartbreak. But I would say now is the time to be really creative, right? So, for example, lot of NGOs that were fighting plastic have been gutted. Their funding is gone. But I wish I had my shoes here with me, I have these like shoes that are made out of upcycled plastic and my handbag also, I don't have it here, otherwise I would show it, it's made out of upcycled ocean, like marine plastic, so it's very resilient and it can get wet and it's great. It's gone through several like years of an active toddler survived bad weather and it is a great bag. You know, I have socks made out of recycled plastic. My sunglasses are made out of recycled plastic. I think now is a great time to try to move to the private sector and to take over companies that were kind of leaning towards doing good and make that their core so that it's basically like how can all of these people from NGOs. And just wash into the private sector and transform companies and hijack them for good, if you will, or you know, start competitors. But the where the whole point is that it's a social enterprise and I just think like the coffee companies. Are doing good ethical coffee. Women owned, indigenous owned, organic, direct trade, living income. Regenerative. This is so important for my work because what it means is I can say there are companies out there that are doing good and doing well at the same time. This is proof positive that the industry can change or that it must change and. You will not go bankrupt if you do all these good things for farmers and forests for people in planet. This is like our moment, our generation, we are being called to step up. It's a kind of do or die inflection point. But I truly believe we can, we can do this. I think we can.

Abigail: 50:00

Wow. I think I know your answer, but I always ask if people are optimistic about the planet with respect to climate change, but you're just. Effusively optimistic, I think as a human, which is, wonderful.

Etelle: 50:15

I have little moments of despair on, but I try to hold on to hope. And there's a beautiful quote that someone told me a while ago. They said hope is not a lottery ticket that you clutch on your couch and like, you know, hold onto hope is a battering ram. You just like knock this doors down with your hope. And I think that is the kind of hope that I try. To hold onto and to embody. So I don't necessarily feel a huge amount of optimism about the way that our planet is heading in terms of climate chaos, but I feel this immense optimism that we can do better, how we must do better.