As Brazil prepares to host the UN’s climate conference next month, its coffee industry is under growing scrutiny for fuelling massive deforestation – and for threatening the very crop that made the country famous.
While the damage caused by cattle ranching and soy farming is well known, coffee’s role in deforestation has gone largely unnoticed. Yet between 1990 and 2023, the area planted with coffee in Brazil more than doubled – from 600,000 to 1.23 million hectares.
