CIRAD
To Cut Pesticide Use On Coffee Farms
April 21 - 2021
Coffee Geography Magazine
CIRAD,
the French tropical agricultural research institution with the help of the Agropolis Foundation
initiated the Ecoffee R&D program.
Big
US and European roasting companies joined this initiative. The group includes
Nestlé, Starbucks, Illycaffè, Lavazza Group, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Tchibo and
Paulig. There is also Ecom, Mercon and Olam - large green coffee roasters that also
joined the program.

Some
agricultural research institutions also joining Ecoffee are the Brazilian
Universidade Federal de Viçosa, the NicaFrance Foundation focused on Nicaragua
and the Vietnam Western Highlands Agriculture & Forestry Science Institute.
The
long-term goal of these organizations is to get rid of pesticide usage —
including herbicides, fungicides and insecticides in the coffee farming
industry.
In
their announcement of the initiative, CIRAD said that Ecoffee's main goal is to
aid the environment, biodiversity and people involved in coffee farming.
Right
now the Ecoffee timeline and governance are "still in development",
but in general they plan to engage industry actors and researchers to perform a
course of baseline studies that can be used as an audit of pesticide usage in
today's coffee farming industry. Four "representative" countries were
chosen to perform such researches: Mexico, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Brazil.
As
CIRAD announced on the product launch, "We expect significant results from
this new research and hope that it shortly became a new standard for the whole
coffee sector."
CIRAD
also plans to create an international network of farms and researchers to study
non-pesticide farming concepts. They will cooperate with large sustainability
platforms and create organized workshops to engage leading experts in finding
current and potential pesticide-reducing solutions.