Country: Peru
Standard: Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), Registry Documents
Project Website: cafeselvanorte.com
Project Video:
Over the years, Peru has become the world leader in both organic and fair-trade certified coffee. The continuous improvements on the quality of their coffees combined with the development of performing producers’ cooperatives have granted the regions of Cajamarca and Amazonas, in the north of Peru, a worldwide recognition. The coffee production is booming in these regions and is cultivated mainly by small farmers.
At the landscape level, thousands of hectares of underutilized/degraded lands are available for new coffee areas, and similar numbers have been identified as having unprofitable and unproductive coffee hectares. Despite this availability, deforestation is rampant under the pressure of inefficient agriculture practices.
Project Activities
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Micro-credit for land use transition to sustainably productive coffee agroforestry systems including large-scale tree planting activities.
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Monitoring of activities, environmental impacts, and carbon offset generation for the VCS standard.
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Local Q-grading laboratory and international logistics team.
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Local state-of-the-art dry processing mill, co-owned by coops, for improved quality and traceability.
Key Project Impacts
science-based projections based on the VCS validated project description document
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4 partner coffee cooperatives, including 2,000 small holder producers involved.
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12,500 hectares of forest conserved.
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8,250 hectares converted to sustainable agroforestry.
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1.3 million metric tons of carbon reduced and sequestered.
The continuation of such harmful practices prevents the development of sustainable economic growth within these communities. And while methods are available to remedy the situation, they are often out of reach for local farmers and cooperatives due to limited economic resources and technical assistance.
The Arbor Day Foundation is working with partner Ecotierra to address these issues by replenishing exhausted soils, reforesting and managing forest canopy, and transforming degraded pastureland to forested agriculture production such as coffee and cocoa.
A strategy has been developed to address the economic and environmental issues facing coffee-producing communities that depend on these landscapes for their livelihoods. In addition to tree planting, carbon credits are generated from these newly planted forests — further supporting the incomes of landowners in these valuable areas. The project will provide technical assistance on good agroforestry management practices, calculate carbon sequestration for verified carbon credits, and provide monitoring tools for tracking progress and growth throughout the network of participating coffee cooperatives in the Cajamarca and Amazonia regions of Peru.
This project actively supports the following Global Goals for Sustainable Development:
