Coffee Beans And Pesticides: Is Coffee Clean Or Is It Contaminated?

Coffee is commonly dubbed the most popular psychoactive drug in the world, and it is. Despite its reputation of giving people heart palpitations, coffee can actually be a healthy beverage for acne, due to its high levels of antioxidants like chlorogenic acid, cafestol and kahweol.

The caffeine is a problem, since this natural alkaloid spikes the stress hormone cortisol, but that can be avoided by keeping your coffee intake moderately restricted. Simpy avoid becoming a creature of pure coffee and your skin will be OK.

But what about the pesticides? Fruits like strawberries and apples are among the healthiest for acne, but I never recommend buying them non-organically. Their huge levels of agrochemical (fungicide, pesticide, insecticide) contamination can cause hormonal disruption and antioxidant depletion. On the other hand, acne-friendly sweet potatoes and asparagus contain almost no pesticides.

What’s the situation with coffee? Do you have to buy it organically in order to push your acne-clearing efforts to the maximum? 

 

The truth about coffee’s pesticides

The short answer is that coffee beans are among the most heavily sprayed crops in the world.

Coffee beans are drenched in pesticides, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides of all kinds, ranging from mild to highly controversial. Only 1.1% of Starbucks coffee is organic, while worldwide, approximately 8.5% of coffee beans are organic.

Over 52 different countries grow coffee and it’s estimated that 26 million people are employed in the business worldwide. There’s no room for error when people have families to feed, and it happens that coffee beans are a particularly vulnerable crop to environmental hazards. They’re not like garlic or asparagus, which pests refuse to eat.

The nature of the business is particularly important. Coffee’s millions of fans don’t drink it for their health, and poor farmers in Peru know it. Compare this to maca root. This herbal supplement is also a vital part of Peru’s economy, but because its appeal depends specifically on its health giving properties, improving female fertility in this case, it’s in the governments interest to heavily regulate the agrochemicals farmers use.

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Meanwhile, workers on their daily commute drink coffee to stay awake in the morning, while bankers and revising students drink it to stay awake at night. Others see coffee as a complex-tasting drink to be savoured and enjoyed, but only a small group drink coffee for its antioxidants and heart protecting chlorogenic acid.

Consequently, over 250 pounds of chemicals can be applied to one acre of conventional coffee fields. The USA has no maximum reside limits (MRL) for pesticides in coffee.

Several of the most toxic agrochemicals are banned in the USA and EU, but nevertheless, coffee beans may be imported from developing countries like Brazil and Kenya where the exact same chemicals are perfectly legal. Each individual coffee growing country has their own regulations and permitted agrochemicals.

While the EU is banning many chemicals these days, developing countries are often embracing them, in a rush to expand their economies. Brazil, for example, has expanded their usage of chemical pesticides by 800% across all agriculture, without significantly increasing their usable agricultural land.

Just look at the farmers. In eastern Jamaica, coffee farms employ 52,000 locals and raise 7% of the country’s agricultural earnings. In a recent study, analysing 82 Jamaican coffee farms, 78 percent of the workers experienced side effects connected to pesticides, including dizziness, difficulty breathing, headaches and chest tightness.

There’s some flaws: the farmers may have been poorly trained in handling the chemicals, and in four instances, every single farmer was missing facemasks and rubber gloves, but this reinforces just how chemical-filled these farms are.

Many local farms in poor countries may be virtually organic, with official certification basically impossible. However, Kenya has a national system of bean pooling, meaning that Kenya’s pesticide-drenched beans, of which there are many, will ultimately be combined with the traditionally grown beans.

The wild popularity of coffee only exacerbates things, because the density of crops drains the soil of nutrients, and when coffee beans are less nutritious, they’re much more susceptible to fungi.

 

Why agrochemicals are so abused

What are the technical reasons behind coffee’s high chemical levels? Firstly, a word that sends shivers down farmers’ spines: the coffee rust fungus (hemileia vastatrix).

Scientists believe that coffee rust originated in Ethiopia, but during the last 100 years, the fungi has spread to the entire coffee producing world. Around 1825, the British Empire began dedicating most of Sri Lanka’s agricultural land to vast coffee plantations. Nowadays, 90% of coffee is grown in the Western hemisphere, but by 1870, Sri Lanka was the world’s greatest producer of coffee…

…until the coffee rust fungus arrived. The first symptoms of coffee rust are white spots on leaves, and by that point, the deal is done: photosynthesis ends, leaves die, and the coffee beans shrivel up. The fungi is extremely infectious and contagious. A single tiny pustule on a coffee leaf can create over 150,000 spores. The fungi moves between coffee plants easily, and travels long distances while barely degenerating.

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In Sri Lanka, there were no fungicides, nor knowledge of natural remedies against coffee rust. There was one choice, felling the plantations, crippling the economy, and replacing them with tea plantations in the nick of time.

In 1870, Sri Lanka was exporting 100 million pounds of coffee beans per year. After 19 years of turmoil, Sri Lanka in 1889 was exporting just 5 million pounds. Since the 1700s, Jamaica and other Caribbean Islands had kept steady coffee plantations, and with their fungi-free fields, they reclaimed their crown. Brazilians, Peruvians and Colombians also cashed in. All the while, they put huge efforts into preventing coffee rust from reaching their countries, but by 1970, the battle was won, as the first white pustules had shown up on Brazilian coffee leaves.

It’s not known how the dust spores spread. The light spores could have blown across the ocean, but a possible scenario is that an international coffee businessman foolishly travelled from an infected plantation in Ethiopia to a clean one in Brazil.

Regardless, Brazilian coffee farmers now had no choice but to drench the plant with fungicides.

South American governments tried to quarantine the fungi, including digging up all infected trees, but the natural dispersal of spores was impossible to manage and the same story was repeated in Colombia, Peru and Jamaica.

The two main coffee plants are c. arabica and c. robusta, and rust-resistant strains of both exist, but the beans are much poorer quality. Geneticists haven’t manage to combine resistance and the correct tasting coffee beans into one perfect plant yet.

To eliminate coffee rust manually you would have to fell the entire coffee plantation, and replace it over the course of 2 years, and even then, the spores would probably blow back in from your next door neighbor’s field, probably at the exact moment you were having a proud ceremony declaring the rust to be defeated.

The worldwide phenomenon of coffee rust is a major reason why coffee beans are so drenched in chemical fungicides.

 

Coffee – a plant which most insects love

As for pesticides and insecticides, they have their own mascot: the coffee berry borer. This 2mm long beetle devastated African coffee crops in the early 20th century, and by 1913, it had arrived in Brazil via beans imported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

By 1924, the beetle was devastating South America’s coffee crops, and today, it causes an estimated $215-358 million of lost revenue for Brazilian coffee farmers annually. The coffee berry borer spends most of its life hiding inside the coffee bean; the mothers bore into the berry and lay their eggs, which can hatch to create up to 300 young beetles within one bean.

As the swarms consume the inside, the bean dies and drops off of the tree. Like coffee rust, the coffee berry borer has been reported in almost every coffee producing country.

Then you have the coffee leaf miner, not a miner with a pickaxe, but a moth which feasts on the coffee plant’s leaves, crippling its photosynthesis and its ability to survive. This insect is native to Africa, and luckily, it hasn’t spread as far, but it’s being blasted with high levels of insecticides within Africa. Another global pest is the black twig borer (Xylosandrus compactus), which also wrecks cocoa beans and avocado crops.

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Then there’s much more common pests like mealybugs, which attack every part of the coffee plant, including the leaves, branches, roots and beans. Furthermore, they secrete a sticky honeydew which attracts extra pests like ants, creating a feeding frenzy. This honeydew also creates a black sooty mould after a while, infecting the plant. Mealybugs enjoy both robusta coffee and arabica coffee.

Red spider mites (tetranychus urticae) are an interesting case; these minuscule reddish-orange insects of just 275 microns don’t directly feed on the plant themselves, but instead transmit viruses to them, including the coffee ringspot virus. They congregate near the branches and coffee fruits, turning both red and causing their untimely death. An epidemic of red spider mites contributed to a massive downturn in Columbia’s coffee output in 2012.

We also have the green scale (coccus viridis), a green and black spotted insect. This pest lays hundreds of eggs on coffee plant branches, which can hatch within hours, and like mealybugs, produces an ant-attracting, mould-creating honeydew. Green scales are vulnerable to several types of pesticides and farmes have no objection to using them.

 

The sun versus the shade

The global popularity of coffee also encourages tree felling in places like Kenya, in an attempt to boost yields, but removing shade actually increases the need for agrochemicals. Coffee beans evolved under dark forest canopies, and open fields with no vegetation in between are the perfect opportunity for moulds to grow and predators to strike.

For example, having a diverse and dense forest of trees surrounding the coffee plant increases the population of birds, which are happy to eat pests for the farmers free of charge (unless they smarten up that is).

A Jamaican study even observed a 70% increase in the coffee berry boorer beetle when birds were excluded from the surrounding environment. Similarly, a Mexican study observed a 30-64% increase in coffee chewing caterpillars when birds were rare.

The shade itself also suppresses some pests, like mealybugs, which can be suppressed by 30% level shade for arabica plants and 25% shade for robusta coffee plants. One common pest, the coffee white stem borer, is known to be much more active in sunlight as an adult.

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Shade can also starve moulds of the conditions they need; the dreaded coffee brown-eye spot (Cercospora coffeicola), which can cause premature ripening of coffee beans, is much less prominent in shade grown coffee plants.

Since coffee plants evolved in these forested, shady conditions, there’s bound to be many more subtle factors which improve the bean’s natural survival chances there.

In Ethiopia, there’s three levels of coffee farming: standard sun exposed monocultures, shade grown coffee, and coffee which is close to wild picked. Since Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world, an inevitable shift is happening towards sun-grown coffee, and more pesticides. Once the trees have been felled, it takes years to regrow them, making switching back a suicide mission for farmers.

Schoolboy errors have also played a role. In response to increased American and European demand for shade grown coffee, Costa Rican farmers once decided to plant giant eucalyptus trees from Australia (the koala’s favourite food) near their plantations. The problem was that the eucalyptus tree isn’t native fauna, so their plan didn’t work. Furthermore, the tree is greedy, sucking up nutrients from the soil. The end result was that Costa Rican farmers had to use even more artificial fertilisers.

 

What types of pesticides are used on coffee?

Overall, it’s estimated that 40 different agrochemicals are used on coffee crops around the world. Some are banned in the EU, some are banned in America, and some are legal almost everywhere.

One insecticide is aldicarb, used to eradicate the coffee leaf miner moth. Aldicarb is illegal in the EU and the USA, due to causing dizziness and headaches, and even death by respiratory paralysis in high doses, but in Brazil it’s perfectly legal.

Another insecticide used against the coffee leaf miner is thiamethoxam, used against a wide variety of pests. This invention is legal in the USA, but the EU has banned thiamethoxam for outdoor usage, only allowing it in enclosed greenhouses. Brazil has no problem with thiamethoxam.

Still clinging on to life is carbofuran, used to kill the coffee root-knot nematode. This insecticide is particularly deadly, because it’s a systemic insecticide, meaning that when it’s sprayed onto the soil, the coffee plants’ roots can absorb it and distribute it to every part of the plant. Washing and roasting won’t do a thing to this villain; it’s the most cunning insecticide of all.

Carbofuran is a hormone disruptor in humans, and once caused the deaths of many innocent lions in Kenya; it’s banned in the EU and Canada, but legal in Brazil and Kenya.

Another villain is propiconazole, a fungicide used against coffee rust, and terbufos, a highly toxic insecticide which is banned in the EU, but not Brazil. Fenpropathrin is specifically used against red spider mites, but is banned in the EU yet legal in Brazil once again; fenpropathrin is a proven neurotoxin which makes your brain cells shrivel up and die.

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The news isn’t completely grim though. The most extreme agrochemical was probably endosulfan, which was the last ditch resort for tackling the stubborn coffee berry borer beetle. Endosulfan is so convincingly linked to hormone disruption and neurotoxicity that a global ban was negotiated in 2011. It was also banned early in Columbia due to a big controversy over sick workers back in 2002.

A particular problem with endosulfan was the craftiness of the beetle. Because berry borers spend their time inside the bean, farmers had to spray endosulfan intensively to even make marginal contact with them. Endosulfan can still be imported illegally to third world countries like Ethiopia, but its days are numbered.

 

But do the coffee bean’s pesticides survive?

At the end of the day though, this chemical warfare might not matter. An apple and a coffee bean plucked from a conventionally grown tree are both a toxic minefield, but an apple, strawberries, raspberries, or celery are eaten raw, while coffee beans are roasted.

In a Japanese study, the effect of roasting was tested on several pesticides. After pesticide-covered green beans were roasted, y-BHC was completely obliterated, becoming undetectable. Chlordane lost 90% of its numbers, while heptachlor levels fell by 99.28%. Atrazine, a particularly controversial pesticide, was obliterated, unsurprisingly given that it lacks resistance to heat. Piperonyl butoxide suffered the same fate as chlordane.

An even better study tested agrochemicals from Ethiopia. Coffee beans were spiked with numerous agrochemicals, mimicking poor quality farming conditions, and then subject to traditional Ethiopian coffee preparation techniques, including washing, roasting and brewing.

Washing the coffee beans decreased the total pesticide contamination by 30-58%, useful but not game changing. However, roasting the beans decreased total agrochemical counts by 99.8%.

Another great feature of this study is its scope, testing 12 different pesticides and reducing the chances of the tested chemicals being outliers which were particularly vulnerable to heat.

 

The analysis

What to make of these results? On one hand, not every coffee agrochemical found in plantations around the globe was tested. Additionally, the chemicals could have broken down into unpredictable, undetectable byproducts with equally toxic effects.

On the other hand, if pesticide levels really fell by 99.8%, then a poor person would easily get more benefit from coffee’s antioxidants and phytonutrients than downsides from such tiny levels of chemicals. Then again, antioxidants don’t actually directly counteract hormone-disrupting chemicals.

We also know that some agrochemicals like carbofuran are systemic, absorbed through the roots and constructed into the plant’s very tissues. That’s an important factor, because the pesticides in the studies were sprayed onto the beans before testing, whereas on a coffee plantation, agrochemicals are sprayed for weeks and weeks, meaning that they’re more likely to be absorbed into the plant rather than linger on the surface. The studies didn’t mimic real world circumstances. With such a chemical barrage, caution is always superior.

Like strawberries, organic coffee is also slightly more nutritious, richer in heart protecting chlorogenic acid according to this study. Some of coffee’s other antioxidants are almost guaranteed to be higher too.

The same argument remains though: a poor person would get much more benefit from adding conventional broccoli or conventional sweet potatoes (both low in pesticides) to their diet.

 

Conclusion

My final verdict is that if you’re trying to get amazing skin using an intricate dietary strategy, but are short of money, then organic coffee is not worth the benefit.

For acne, you should be restricted to two or three cups per day anyway, since coffee is skin-friendly in moderate dosages, and that amount won’t flood your body with chemicals if the roasting studies above are correct. For anybody with cash to spare, I would recommend choosing organic coffee to be extra cautious.

Additionally, if the rest of your diet is very low in pesticides, through careful arrangement, you can easily cope with a small amount of coffee. The same is true if your detoxification systems have the ingredients they need, like glutathione-s-transferase with magnesium and glycine.

A final bonus strategy is to stick with arabica coffee. The most popular species of coffee (C. arabica) worldwide is grown at much higher altitudes, in places like the Honduras mountains. Because the coffee rust fungus, various pests and other moulds thrive in warmer weather, arabica is blasted with far less agrochemicals than robusta coffee, and the beneficial roasting process is no different.

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Thanks for reading!