Utz Kapeh certification

Fair Trade, organic, Rainforest Alliance, and Smithsonian Bird Friendly are the most frequently seen coffee certifications. Another seal is becoming more familiar. Utz Kapeh (now called Utz Certified) certifies "socially and environmentally responsible" coffee, requiring adherence to their Code of Conduct.

Let's delve right into how this certification might help a consumer pick a coffee grown in a manner that helps preserve biodiversity. The Utz Kapeh Code is a list of "control points" which are ranked into levels: major (must comply for certification), minor (must comply with 95% of them), and recommended (not taken into account for certification).

Utz Kapeh has the least stringent environmental criteria of any of the major certification programs

Only one of the 21 environmental criteria is ranked "major," and thus required for certification: Deforestation is prohibited without "compensation to plant new fields."  Since compensatory replacement of forests or other intact ecosystems rarely succeeds in creating truly functioning habitats (and if we can't do it here, the failure rate is bound to be dismal in the third world), this criteria doesn't instill much faith that biodiversity preservation is a high priority in this scheme.

The minor points are even more anemic, such as if a farmer uses shade trees, they should "preferably" be native, and the farmer should protect endangered species (hey, it's always good to advise people to comply with the law!).

There are more major criteria for crop protection, which includes chemical pesticides, but the point that farmers should only use products that are of least toxicity to people, flora, and fauna is only a recommendation.  You can read all the points in the English version (PDF) here.

Thus, Utz Kapeh (which is Mayan for "good coffee") has the least stringent environmental criteria of any of the major certification programs, weak enough to be basically useless if what you are looking for is ecologically-friendly coffee. 

I've not gone through all their other criteria, but it sounds from what I've read that one of the strengths of this certification is its transparency system. Utz Kapeh emphasizes recordkeeping and it's said that Utz Kapeh certified coffee is traceable from grower to roaster. I don't know how much detail this requires, but it doesn't appear much data is accessible and useful to consumers. But Utz Kapeh is one of the fastest-growing certification programs in the world, at least in part because of its generous (broad? loose?) criteria.  Utz Kapeh certified coffee is not extremely common in the U.S., but expect that to change as the big corporate coffee pushers continue to look for ways to exploit the ethical coffee market.

Comments

[Dane]

Utz Kapeh has recently changed its name and logo to UTZ CERTIFIED 'Good Inside' (www.utzcertified.org)