World Coffee Research has spoken. Lempira, a high-yielding, popular variety planted throughout Honduras is no longer what thousands of farmers hoped that it would be: resistant to coffee leaf rust. While there is not yet any conclusive scientific evidence that la roya has evolved into a new race or strain, all indications are pointing to […]
Right in the build up to the SCA, there popped up a bit of news out of Honduras that caught my attention. Like the villain in the in a cheesy horror movie, coffee leaf rust, better known as la roya, just won’t go away. Initial reports in late March said that there was an outbreak […]
Dear Coffeelands readers, Our regular transmissions were interrupted this week. No, we did not decide to start hustling pills to supplement our NGO salaries; on the contrary, we were hacked by somebody who decided to use our platform for nefarious purposes. We apologize for unwittingly filling your inbox with spam and hope you didn’t purchase […]
If you have been following us in this space, you know that one of the topics that has been at the front of my mind has been Price Risk Management (PRM). PRM refers to a set of strategies and practices for farmer organizations that minimizes the negative impact of drastic changes in the global price […]
We are 3 months into another year, and we’re about to start the convention/summit/expo/meeting season. This year the schedule is a bit different for Coffeelands. This is the first year that we are going to the National Coffee Association Convention. Over here in Coffeelands, we are big fans of Bill Murray, the CEO and […]
A few weeks ago, Kickapoo Coffee Roasters publicly committed to paying farmers in their supply chain a minimum of $2.75 FOB per lb. FOB (FOB stands for Free on Board, which means this is the price of the coffee ready for export) for all of Kickapoo’s green coffee purchases. Their press release says that it […]
We are temporary actors in the Coffeelands. Although CRS has been working for years in coffee origin countries (over 50 years of continued presence in Central America), projects are by their nature time bound interventions that are meant to create short and medium term benefits. Yet, our mission and the “big” goals of our work […]
In the past week, lots from the 2016 Borderlands harvest starting hitting stores in a big way. The Borderlands lot is the featured coffee on Counter Culture’s landing page, which is a mixed lot from two different communities. https://counterculturecoffee.com/ Just a few days later, Intelligentsia celebrated the opening of a roasting and training facility […]
I work for a non-profit-organization whose mission is to support communities in becoming more resilient and improving the management of their natural resources to become more sustainable. We do this in part by helping farmers to earn living incomes – this means helping to ensure that all household members have a decent standard of living […]
(Influenced heavily by these fantastic reference pieces Trading Practices for a Sustainable Coffee Sector – IISD, Jason Potts, with Guido Fernandez and Chris Wunderlich and by the International Trade Center’s – The Coffee Exporter’s Guide) Recently, we’ve been working with the cooperatives participating in the Blue Harvest project in Central America to improve the commercialization […]
