A new report from the nonprofit Coffee Watch says that modern coffee production in Brazil continues to be a significant driver of deforestation, with hundreds of thousands of hectares of native forest cleared inside coffee farm boundaries since 2001.
Beyond the global implications for biodiversity and climate change, the continued loss of forest in key coffee regions presents economic threats to the Brazilian coffee sector, driving a cycle of drought and yield volatility, according to the report.
“Coffee is killing the forest — and the rains. And in doing so, it’s killing itself,” the report’s executive summary states.
A Legacy of Forest Destruction
The 34-page report, “Wake Up and Smell the Deforestation,” combines satellite and land-use datasets to map coffee’s direct and indirect footprint across Brazil’s major growing regions. Among its key findings are that at least 312,803 hectares of intact forest were directly converted to coffee between 2001 and 2023, while about 737,000 hectares of forest were lost inside coffee farm boundaries over the same period.
Approximately 77% of that forest loss was in the Cerrado and 20% was in the Atlantic Forest, with the densest losses occurring in Minas Gerais, Brazil’s dominant coffee-producing state.
“Brazil’s dominance as the world’s top coffee exporter is rooted in a long history of forest destruction — and the same extractive model still underpins it,” the report states. “Coffee is not just a legacy driver of deforestation — it remains a present and growing force behind it.”
Self-Harm Within the Sector
One of the report’s foundational principles is that deforestation in Brazil is directly linked to climate changes that, in turn, affect coffee production now and in the long term. Chronic droughts over the past decade — exacerbated, the report argues, by regional forest loss — have repeatedly cut yields and rattled global markets.
“Brazil Coffee Tour” by baristahoon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
The Coffee Watch authors point to rainfall anomalies in 2014 that reached up to 50% below normal in parts of Minas Gerais, eight rainfall-deficit years over the past decade and soil-moisture declines of up to 25% in key zones by 2021.
“The 2014-2017 drought was not an outlier but a preview and a warning,” the report states. “Climate change is now accelerating this unraveling, turning rare disasters into routine shocks. This is the paradox at the heart of the industry’s success: by erasing forests, Brazil is squandering its natural coffee advantage and undermining its own future.”
Mapping a Crisis ‘in Plain Sight’
Coffee Watch led the study with strategic direction from founder and director Etelle Higonnet and mapping by researcher-cartographer Neeraj Garg Baruah, with analytical support from the sustainability nonprofit AidEnvironment.
The group compared national coffee and forest maps with widely used satellite datasets to see where forests have been cleared and where coffee has expanded. They also reviewed government land records of farm boundaries and paired those results with long-running satellite data to show how forest loss and climate stress line up across key coffee regions.
Despite frequent sustainability claims by some of the world’s largest Brazilian green coffee buyers, the study found that deforestation in Brazil’s coffee lands remains a “crisis that’s been hiding in plain sight.”
Exploring Resilience Pathways
While outlining the scale of coffee-linked deforestation and unpacking the past and potential economic fallout, the report also offers some hope for the future of the Brazilian coffee sector through the proposed adoption of agroforestry practices, in which “forests become partners, not obstacles, to profit.”
One highlight relates to soil moisture, which remained higher in agroforested coffee lands than in monocrop-cultivated lands during periods of drought. The report presents agroforestry as a potential “scalable resilience pathway,” yet says adoption is lagging. The authors estimate regenerative-agroforestry adoption at less than 1% across key coffee lands of Minas Gerais and São Paulo.
“The coffee industry must face this reckoning,” the report states. “It can no longer hide behind outdated numbers, indirect impacts or greenwashed pledges. It must account for its past, change its present and safeguard its future — by acknowledging historical deforestation, ending all new forest loss (direct or indirect), restoring degraded ecosystems and transitioning toward regenerative agroforestry, starting in the most at-risk regions.”
Ahead of EUDR
The timing of the report is notable, coming just one day after European legislators signaled an intention to yet again soften requirements associated with the European deforestation-free supply chain law, known as EUDR. The law remains scheduled to take effect among large EU coffee companies at the end of this year, a reality that the Coffee Watch report says the Brazilian sector must further reckon with.
“Without large-scale agroforestry adoption, Brazil’s coffee sector risks economic decline, stranded assets and exclusion from key markets like the EU,” the report states.
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Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
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