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Deforestation takes a tollAlthough public, the road into the Gemadro Estate felt private. Armed guards checked vehicles entering or leaving to prevent coffee smuggling.A row of rusty metal shacks looked like tool sheds, but were in fact worker housing. Even Shiferaw, the plantation manager, acknowledged they were not adequate."Yes, some is not. OK?" he said. "But we have a program to improve. When you see the standards of the country, it is better than most."Along the bumpy dirt road, waxy green rows of coffee trees sprouted in rows, shaded by clumps of taller trees that not long ago were part of a denser, more diverse forest.To Tadesse Gole -- an ecologist in Addis Ababa and a native Ethiopian whose doctoral thesis at the University of Bonn, Germany, focused on preservation of wild arabica coffee -- that manicured landscape is a biological calamity."This is an Afromontane rain forest -- an area of high plant diversity, of unique epiphytic plants that grow on the branches of trees," Gole said. "We lose those plant species. And we lose many of the animals, birds and insects dependent on them."Gole is the author of a recent study about the environmental and cultural impacts of coffee and tea plantations in Ethiopia, including the Gemadro Estate. The estate has spawned a wave of imitators, Gole said: smaller coffee and tea farms that are toppling more trees.The estate itself is growing, too.Last year, the Ethiopian Herald cited the plantation's project manager, Asenake Nigatu, telling the Ethiopian News Agency that Gemadro had "developed coffee on 1,000 hectares (about 2,470 acres) of land" it had obtained from the state investment bureau and had begun "activities to develop additional coffee on 1,500 hectares (about 3,700 acres) of land."
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