Coffee lovers drinking illegally grown coffee

Grrrrr! Bad Starbucks. It bought coffee grown illegally in Indonesia in 2004.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has released its latest report called Gone In An Instant (pdf, 7.4mb). The report says that coffee lovers around the world are unknowingly drinking coffee that was illegally grown inside Indonesia's remote Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (BBS), one of the world's most important national parks for tigers, elephants and rhinos.

BBS, a World Heritage Site has already lost nearly 30 percent of its forest cover to illegal agriculture, most of which is for coffee production. WWF's investigation found farmers growing coffee on more than 173 square miles of park land (about two-thirds the size of Chicago) and producing more than 19,600 tons of coffee there each year. Most wildlife has already abandoned the sections of the park that have been illegally converted to coffee plantations. Further loss of forest will be a threat to the endangered tiger, rhino and elephant populations.

Illegally grown coffee from BBS is exported to at least 52 countries, with most of the companies buying the coffee likely to be unaware of its illegal origins. These illegally grown coffee is mixed by local traders with legally grown coffee beans and sold to the companies like Kraft Foods, Nestle and Starbucks among other major companies in the U.S. and abroad.