NAIROBI (AFP) - US coffee giant Starbucks announced plans to promote environmentally sensitive coffee cultivation in Kenya and Tanzania, where the industry has faced difficulty despite recent price spikes.

Starbucks said it would team up with the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), under a program dubbed "Coffee for Conservation" based on its corporate conduct code unveiled after criticism that its mammoth operation was hurting farmers.

"Starbucks remains passionately committed to ensuring the success of coffee farms," Starbucks' senior Vice President Dub Hay said in a statement released here after the program was unveiled at a US-Africa business summit in Maryland.

The three-year program, to be launched first in Kenya and then in Tanzania, will train farmers to produce high-quality coffee that earns maximum revenue while ensuring they conserve natural resources on and around their plantations.

The project is aimed at selected co-operatives in the countries and will be funded by Starbucks and managed by the AWF under the Seattle-based firm's Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices (CAFE) guidelines.

"The partnership will benefit both the people and the wildlife in Africa," said AWF President Patrick Bergin, "It is only when we work to find solutions that benefit both that conservation can be successful."

The deal was announced as world coffee prices reached their highest levels in more than five years, owing mainly to capricious weather in main growing regions.

Bad weather has raised fears about poor yields for next season's crop particularly in Brazil and Vietnam, the two biggest producers of the arabica and robusta varieties of coffee, contributing to price spikes of between 20 and 60 percent since the beginning of the year.

In Kenya, the developments have seen an uptick in the coffee sector following poor performances in the 1990s after the collapse of quotas in 1989 prompted Brazil and Vietnam to massively increase exports.

Kenya's coffee production fell from 130,000 tonnes in 1986 -- when the commodity was the highest forex earner at about 25 percent -- to about 55,000 in the mid-1990s, according to the Coffee Board of Kenya (CBK).

CBK has however said the prices have started to pick up and would notch higher in the coming months.

Starbucks, a worldwide operation that has come to symbolize what critics deride as corporate globalization, and other similar large concerns have been accused in recent years of exploiting poor coffee formers for profits.

In 2003, the British charity Oxfam charged that firms like Starbucks were deliberately manipulating the world coffee market at the expense of some 25 million poor farmers around the globe.

In response to that and earlier complaints, Starbucks and others launched corporate responsibility programs aimed at assisting farmers and small coffee co-operatives.