The short version. Zambia's coffee grows on a plateau inside the miombo, the largest dry woodland on earth, somewhere between 1.9 and 2.7 million square kilometres of Brachystegia and Julbernardia trees depending on who draws the boundary. The woodland is losing ground to charcoal, and the coffee estates near Kasama are irrigated plantation coffee with conservation buffers, not forest-shade coffee, so we will not pretend otherwise. What the woodland does for the cup is quieter: it feeds the wild bees that raise coffee yields, it holds the rivers that fill the irrigation dams, and it is the reason the honey from the same woodland is some of the best in Africa. "Imvelo" means nature. This is what the word obliges us to.
In 2004 four scientists, from WWF, Stanford and the University of Kansas, put a price on a piece of forest. Two patches of tropical woodland, 46 and 111 hectares, sat next to Finca Santa Fe, a 1,065-hectare coffee farm in the Valle General of Costa Rica. The team, led by Taylor Ricketts, ran pollination experiments along lines running away from the trees.
Within about a kilometre of the forest, wild bees raised coffee yields by 20 per cent. They also cut the share of peaberries, the small, misshapen single seeds, by 27 per cent. Over the 2000 to 2003 seasons the two patches were worth about US$60,000 a year to the farm. The paper, "Economic value of tropical forest to coffee production", ran in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that August.
Coffea arabica can pollinate itself. It does better with help.
The woodland
Miombo is the local name for Brachystegia trees, and by extension for the whole belt of woodland those trees dominate, with Julbernardia and Isoberlinia beside them, across Angola, Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The FAO puts it at close to 2.7 million square kilometres, following Frost's 1996 estimate. WWF says about 2.4 million. Mongabay, reporting on the Miombo Initiative in September 2024, gives 1.9 million, and adds that about 800,000 square kilometres went between 1980 and 2020, nearly a third of the cover.
The three figures draw the boundary in different places and count different years. None of them is small. Whichever line you take, it is the most extensive dry tropical forest on earth and the one fewest people have heard of.
Zambia had about 35 million hectares of natural forest in 2020, close to half the country on Global Forest Watch's count, and most of it is miombo. It dominates everything north of Lusaka: the Copperbelt, the Northern Province, the Kasama plateau. The trees are deciduous. They drop their leaves in the long dry season, seven months in the north, and flush new leaves in red and copper before the rains. The ground between them is broken by dambos, grassy wetlands that can cover as much as 40 per cent of the land in places and act as the plateau's sponges, letting water out into rivers like the Luombe and the Chambeshi through the dry months.
The woodland is under pressure. Wood fuel supplies about three-quarters of the energy used across the miombo region, on WWF's figure, and the charcoal sacks stacked along the Great North Road towards Lusaka are the visible end of it. The Zambian government's own estimate of the country's deforestation runs to between 250,000 and 300,000 hectares a year. This is the context in which any Zambian brand with "nature" in its name has to operate honestly.
What the estates actually are
So, honestly. The coffee near Kasama is not grown under the miombo canopy.
The five estates run by Northern Coffee Corporation are plantation coffee: rows of Catimor, Castillo and Java in open sun, irrigated from dams, canals and reservoirs built on the plateau's rivers, with about 2,171 hectares under trees in 2022 on the company's figures. On the two Kasama estates whose profile the importer Covoya publishes, Kateshi and Ngoli, 1,039 hectares are planted, near enough the size of the whole Costa Rican farm in the Ricketts study, and 687 hectares are held as conservation areas and buffer zones. The estates carry Rainforest Alliance certification, which sets rules on water, chemicals and habitat, and which belongs to the estates, not to us.
That is a respectable footprint for a commercial farm. It is not forest coffee, and the difference matters, because the world's best-known story of coffee as conservation is precisely the other kind.
The mountain next door
Two countries east, in Mozambique, Gorongosa National Park has spent a decade planting arabica under native hardwoods on Mount Gorongosa, a massif whose highest point is 1,863 metres and whose rainforest had been cut back hard for decades. The idea came from the park's warden, Pedro Muagura, in 2014. Farmers plant coffee between saplings of native trees; the trees shade the coffee and, over time, become the forest again.
The park's scientists have measured what grows back. Coffee plots eight years old are about 60 per cent similar in composition to the natural forest. They shelter 82 species of birds, 22 of them forest-interior species that will not live anywhere disturbed, and those birds carry the seeds of 51 native tree species. An endemic bat, the Gorongosa horseshoe bat, roosts in them. More than 2,200 farming families now grow for the project on more than 300 hectares.
I spent a while trying to hang this piece on Gorongosa and dropped it. Gorongosa is the model everyone means when they say coffee can save a forest, and it is small, mountain, rain-fed and shade-grown. Kasama is none of those things. I would rather say so than borrow the halo.
What the woodland does for the cup anyway
Pollination first. The Ricketts result has been tested again and again since. In 2024 a team led by Natalia Aristizábal, with Ricketts among the authors, ran controlled pollination trials in Tarrazú, Costa Rica, and found that bee visits raised final fruit set by 9 per cent and improved the aroma scores of the cup, while the pollinated berries weighed 7 per cent less. More fruit, better smell, slightly smaller beans: the trade-offs are real, and the direction is not in doubt. Kasama's estates sit inside the miombo, with 687 hectares of retained woodland on Kateshi and Ngoli alone. The bees are there.
They are there in numbers, because the miombo is one of the great honey woodlands of the world. Brachystegia spiciformis and Julbernardia paniculata, the two commonest miombo trees, are the two trees Zambian forest beekeepers strip for the cylindrical bark hives they hang high in the canopy. The bees are wild Apis mellifera. They occupy the hive on their own, forage on tree nectar and pollen, and the beekeeper collects from October to December, when the woodland flowers. Forest Fruits, the Mwinilunga company behind the Zambezi Gold brand, was certified organic in 2004 and by 2016 was buying close to 1,000 tonnes of honey a year from 3,000 registered bark-hive beekeepers; it now works with about 7,000. Organic, because the bees forage where nobody has ever sprayed anything.
Coffee flowers after the first good rain, or after irrigation stands in for it. A wild bee that spends the spring on Brachystegia and the next weeks on coffee is doing, unpaid, what the Costa Rican study priced at US$60,000 a year.
Water second. The irrigation that lets the estates carry five and a half million trees through a seven-month dry season comes from dams on rivers the woodland feeds. Clear the plateau of its trees and dambos and the dams follow. The estates' 687 hectares of buffer are not decoration; they are the top of the catchment.
What the name obliges us to
Imvelo means nature, in Zulu. We chose the word and we do not get to use it as wallpaper.
Here is what we can say truthfully today. The coffee is grown on Rainforest Alliance certified estates that keep woodland buffers inside the miombo. It is roasted in Lusaka rather than shipped green across an ocean and roasted abroad, which takes one long leg out of its life; I have no figure for what that saves and will not invent one. Five per cent of what we earn goes to Zambian artists through Imvelo Studios, our residency in Lusaka.
Here is what we do not do. We have no woodland project on the plateau where the coffee grows, and no beekeeping partner there either. That is the honest position on the day this is published, and I would rather write it down than let the word on the bag imply otherwise.
A brand named for nature, roasting a crop that depends on wild bees and woodland rivers, in a country losing its woodland to charcoal, has an obvious first project. It is not a certification logo. It is hives, or trees, or both, on the plateau where the coffee grows. I want the next piece under this heading to say which.
From the plateau, inside the woodland.
Shop the Zambian single origin
More from this series: Kasama, the town behind the cup and the two dates on every bag.
Frequently asked questions
What is the miombo? The belt of dry deciduous woodland dominated by Brachystegia, Julbernardia and Isoberlinia trees that covers much of central and southern Africa, including roughly half of Zambia. It is the largest dry tropical forest type on earth.
Is Zambian coffee shade-grown? The main estates near Kasama are open-sun, irrigated plantation coffee with retained woodland buffers and Rainforest Alliance certification, not shade-grown forest coffee.
Do bees matter to coffee? Yes. Arabica self-pollinates but sets more and better fruit with bee visits. The landmark Costa Rican study found wild bees from nearby forest raised yields by 20 per cent within about a kilometre of the trees.
What does "Imvelo" mean? Nature, in Zulu.
Sources
Ricketts, T. H., Daily, G. C., Ehrlich, P. R. and Michener, C. D., "Economic value of tropical forest to coffee production", PNAS 101(34), August 2004. Aristizábal, N. et al., "Bee pollination affects coffee quality, yield, and trade-offs within them", Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 2024. FAO, "Sustainable management of Miombo woodlands"; WWF, "Miombo Woodlands, Africa"; Mongabay, "Meet the Miombo, the largest forest you've never heard of", September 2024; Global Forest Watch, Zambia dashboard (forest cover 2020). Government of Zambia, National Strategy to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (deforestation estimate). Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, "Understanding the Livelihood Implications of Reliable Honey Trade in the Miombo Woodlands in Zambia", February 2020; Zambezi Gold / Forest Fruits Ltd, company pages. Mongabay, "Gorongosa National Park is being reforested via coffee and agroforestry", October 2020; Sprudge Special Projects, "In Mozambique, The Gorongosa Coffee Project Is Changing Lives (And Saving Forests)", 2025; Fresh Cup, "How Mozambique Used Coffee To Reclaim the Deforested Gorongosa National Park". Times of Zambia, August 2022, and Covoya Coffee's estate profile for the Kasama estate figures. Imvelo Studios, the five per cent pledge.