Ialways found it amusing that New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio—"Joltin Joe," as the sportscasters dubbed him—went on after retirement to stump for kitchen coffee makers. But one thing Mr. Coffee never jolted us with were the real facts about America's favorite hot beverage. As you'll read in our revealing cover story this issue, coffee is second only to oil in terms of dollars traded worldwide, yet the smiling faces on the packaging give no hint that the popular drink is linked to a host of social and en-vironmental ills. These include widespread deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and substantial impact on the lives of indigenous people who make up a large part of the world's 25 million small-scale coffee farmers. They have an extremely hard time earning a decent income because of painfully low prices for their crops. And their lands are often destroyed by chemical-intensive, large-scale industrial coffee plantations that use enormous amounts of water and produce toxic runoff that poisons the fish and streams they rely on.
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