Monthly Archives: January 2012

236. 2012: The year of the impact-at-origin baseline?

2012-01-31 Comments Off on 236. 2012: The year of the impact-at-origin baseline?

I had a long conversation last week with a specialty coffee luminary that ended in a surprising statement about how little the industry really understands about its impact at origin after all these years. We talked about the state of sustainability in the coffee industry in general, and the current controversy in the Fair Trade […]

235. Online discussion: The future of Fair Trade

2012-01-23 Comments Off on 235. Online discussion: The future of Fair Trade

The good folks at the Fair Trade Resource Network have invited me to participate in an online discussion on the future of Fair Trade, along with Rodney North from Equal Exchange.  The webinar is scheduled to start at 1 pm Eastern and you can register here. Rodney and Equal Exchange have been among the leading […]

234. Coffee, water and conflict in El Salvador

2012-01-16 Comments Off on 234. Coffee, water and conflict in El Salvador

Back in November, my colleague Robyn Fieser reported here on a success story from our CAFE Livelihoods project in El Salvador – how we helped the Las Colinas cooperative comply with national environmental regulations and avoid a forced closure of its wet mill by financing the installation of a wastewater treatment system. Today, I share […]

233. 10 million missing farmers

2012-01-09 Comments Off on 233. 10 million missing farmers

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning development economist, wrote an influential essay more than 20 years ago suggesting that “More than 100 million women are missing” due to systematic neglect and mortality of girls in patriarchal societies. With apologies to the great Dr. Sen for the title of this post, I am writing to gently […]

232. And on the seventh day…

2012-01-07 Comments Off on 232. And on the seventh day…

…there was silence.  The U.S. Fair Trade movement as we knew it ended on New Year’s Day, when FTUSA’s split from FLO took effect and its new certification went live.  But a week after the dawn of the FT4All era, there have been no official statements of any kind from Fair Trade USA, or new […]

231. Top posts of 2011

2012-01-04 Comments Off on 231. Top posts of 2011

The final data for the CRS Coffeelands Blog for 2011 are in.  Google Analyticator tells me that the Fair Trade USA split from Fairtrade International was the year’s top storyline — related posts took the top five spots. Here are the 10 posts that were most frequently visited in 2011: 1.  Paul Rice makes the […]