In this series, you can find 3 blogposts that shortly explain our main impact pillars, economic, social, and environmental impact or Factories – Farmers – Forests.
It’s called ‘Let’s Fix the Future!’ because a lot needs to be fixed. COVID-19 raised all sorts of havoc, but maybe most of all it unveiled society’s deep social riffs and the ever-rising inequality that is leading to ever-greater poverty, deforestation and climate change. One thing is clear: now more than ever we need better business models designed to solve these problems rather than continue to add to them.
With FairChain and Moyee, we’re building our company around Economic, Social and Environmental impact. How this is impacting us and, well, you, is in the report. We hope we can inspire you to make a difference, and please feel free to give us your feedback.
Thanks for supporting us over the years and…. Let’s Fix the Future together.
Cheers!
Guido & Team Moyee
When talking environmental goals, the figure our stakeholders care about most is our carbon footprint.
Broken down, we see our carbon footprint is lowest at the farmer level. This is because our farmers hand-pick the cherries and avoid pesticides and artificial fertilizers. A recent win in our journey to reduce the footprint of our coffee was shipped to Ethiopia in 2020: a container full of solar panels. We will use these panels to replace the diesel generator at our Ethiopian wet mill, which will immediately lower our carbon footprint.
To measure the environmental impact of FairChain we’ve created a fairly simple framework with three main impact indicators:
Most coffees have a carbon footprint of 8 or 9 kg of CO2 for every 1kg bag of coffee, but with Moyee our carbon footprint is 5.4 kg. We still believe we can radically improve on this.
But our supply chain also enjoys a carbon surplus of 795 tons, which means we absorb 95 tons more CO2 than we emit. Uniquely, this surplus is largely the result of our own ambitious carbon insetting program at our farm in Mizan where we are protecting 373 hectares of natural forest tree planting in Ethiopia. Soon we’ll be able to increase our surplus even more by planting 400,000 coffee trees, which will absorb a further 1,900 tons of CO2.
Over the last few years Moyee has been working hard to redesign our business model to not only battle deforestation, but to win back the forests already lost, to enable our coffee farmers to earn a living income from their beans while rewarding and celebrating their agroforestry coffee production.
As we learned more about the challenges our farmers faced, it became massively clear to us how intertwined their futures were with our futures. As forest dwellers, our farmers are on the frontline of climate change. Their environmentally-friendly farming methods protect forests – forests necessary for our own survival in the west.
That said, over the last 20 years Ethiopia has lost approximately 18% of its forests, the equivalent of 71,100 thousand hectares, enough trees to absorb the entire annual CO2 emissions of The Netherlands. Each year, Ethiopia loses another 140,000 hectares to deforestation.
By working in the coffee industry, we’ve become climate activists out of necessity. At Moyee, we believe the root cause of deforestation – and the climate change deforestation catalyzes – is poverty. When coffee production revenue is too low to support farming families, farmers swap their semi agroforestry coffee production for cattle or food production that can feed their children.
This is the great conundrum of the global coffee industry today.
Big Coffee companies generate huge profits for themselves while at the same time push millions of farmers under the poverty level, resulting in even more deforestation and even greater climate change. It’s one of the most vicious circles of our time.
Our goal is to prove a business model possible that turns negative externalities into positive externalities. In addition to signing a pledge for net zero emissions
Do you have any questions, feedback or suggestions? We look forward to hearing from you!
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