Can Coffee Drinkers Save the Rainforest?
A U G U S T 1 9 9 9 Much of the coffee you drink is “technified”; “sustainable” coffee often tastes better, besides being a lot better for the environment by Jennifer Bingham Hull IT’S a sunny summer morning as three Americans clamber out of the back of a gray pickup truck, following a tall Guatemalan farmer named Martin Keller toward a row of coffee plants. Armed with notebooks, the Americans scribble furiously as the Guatemalan points with pride to the plants’ bright-green cherries. Like a number of Guatemala’s large coffee farmers, Keller is of German descent; three generations of his family worked Finca Santa Isabel before him. High in the hills in the department of Santa Rosa, southeast of Guatemala City, the air is cool and sweet and the setting picturesque, with soaring cedar trees sheltering a ravine thick with laurel, cuernavaca, oak, and inga. For a week David Griswold, Lindsey Bolger, and Betsy Buckley, all coffee buyers, have been scouring the hills of Costa Rica and Guatem
