It isn't everyday that you hear that coffee can help protect chimpanzees.
But a coffee roaster in northeastern U.S.A., working with a pioneering chimpanzee researcher, is hoping to do just that by marketing coffee produced by farmers living near the apes' premier habitat, the world-famous Gombe National Park, in western Tanzania.
The conservation concept is simple -- create an alternative source of considerable and stable income for small-scale farmers to encourage them to protect the forest in which the primates thrive.
Coffee beans flourish under the shade of a forest canopy, as the chimpanzees happily go about their wild lifestyle among broad miombo trees entwined with vines and creepers.
The world's leading chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall promoted the project to counter social and economic pressures closing in around the fertile land in the national park. An expanding human population struggling to survive has cut down large swaths of trees all around Gombe National Park.
But Gombe -- and its verdant, steep hills near the shores of Africa's deepest Lake Tanganyika -- is not the only place where Chimpanzees in the wild are being threatened by man's insatiable desire for more land.
Goodall says at the turn of the last century, about 1 million chimpanzees lived in 25 countries across western and central Africa. Today, their number has dwindled to about 150,000, with significant populations found in only four countries, she says.
Promoters hope that the taste of Gombe coffee will help protect the chimpanzees -- whose genetic make up is at least 98 percent human, making the ape the closest relative to man.
"Gombe Reserve" coffee has floral top notes and vibrant flavors of tropical fruit, according to Lindsey Bolger, director of coffee sourcing and relationships for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters that promotes the beverage.
"Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has always had a values-driven approach to coffee, believing that coffee can help the greater good. We're thrilled to work with the Jane Goodall Institute to bring this great coffee to market and, ultimately, protect the chimps," she said in a statement.