Category: Miscellanea

Coffee Futures – Investor Behavior Overwhelms Market Fundamentals

2018-10-23 Comments Off on Coffee Futures – Investor Behavior Overwhelms Market Fundamentals

Note: This post is an interview with Andrew Sargent, the Director of the CRS Coffeelands Program. Andrew and I have had an intense online discussion over the past month on my series of posts on the “Scandal of the C-Price”. We’ve re-constructed this exchange as a Q&A. It’s a long post, but worth reading to […]

The Price of Distortion – speculation and alternative trade models in coffee

2018-10-16 Comments Off on The Price of Distortion – speculation and alternative trade models in coffee

After my recent posts on the Scandal of the C-Price, I reached out to Adam Kline, founder and CEO of Coffee Unified, for his insights. Adam has a career in the coffee trade: as an importer, coffee buyer, and now as a development entrepreneur in the coffee sector with Coffee Unified. We’ve edited our many […]

Proposing an alternative benchmark for coffee prices: The C-5

2018-09-25 Comments Off on Proposing an alternative benchmark for coffee prices: The C-5

There is an urgent need to fix the coffee market: to reduce price volatility and ensure that a fairer share of coffee revenue reaches farmers and farmworkers. In a recent post, I made the point that the coffee market is unjust because farmers and farmworkers bare a disproportionate amount of risk and remain poor, while […]

Extreme Price Volatility Undermines the Coffee Sector

2018-09-19 Comments Off on Extreme Price Volatility Undermines the Coffee Sector

In a recent post, I wrote that the C-Price for coffee is flawed and there is an urgent need for viable solutions to improve the coffee market. The post was picked up by Daily Coffee News and got a lot of attention – both positive and negative, which is well appreciated. The goal of the original post […]

Scandal of the C-Price

2018-09-13 Comments Off on Scandal of the C-Price

“Finance overwhelms the real economy.”* This is a point from Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment and poverty. This phrase helps to explain what’s happening in the coffee sector. The “real economy” of the coffee sector consists of: millions of farmers and farmworkers who produce the world’s coffee, millers and roasters who […]

Uganda Plots Major Coffee Sector Growth

2018-07-11 Comments Off on Uganda Plots Major Coffee Sector Growth

Author: Michael Kimani During a recent field trip to Uganda in June 2018, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the efforts the country is making to put itself on top of the coffee world. Word has it that Uganda might become the next Vietnam in terms of increasing the production of coffee. The targets: […]

Win-win: Blue Harvest providing solutions that help cooperatives get back on their feet while PROTECTING WATER

2018-04-30 Comments Off on Win-win: Blue Harvest providing solutions that help cooperatives get back on their feet while PROTECTING WATER

In Blue Harvest, we have been working on improving water use efficiency and waste water treatment in wet mills, protecting water recharge areas in the farms by applying soil and water conservation practices (here and here) with a focus on regenerative coffee , as well as working with water system operators and water committees to […]

Saving water with new ecological wet mill designs

2018-03-06 Comments Off on Saving water with new ecological wet mill designs

Back in January, we presented some models of small wet mills that were designed to maximize water use efficiency and to treat waste water that generated by coffee processing.  CRS build these seven model wet mills as part of the Blue Harvest project, funded by Keurig Green Mountain and the Interamerican Development Bank. The original […]

Celebrating the public launch of the Spanish language Water Smart Agriculture blog by CRS – Agua Verde

2017-08-02 Comments Off on Celebrating the public launch of the Spanish language Water Smart Agriculture blog by CRS – Agua Verde

One of the biggest deficiencies of the Coffeelands blog is that we have only published in English to a broad, sector wide audience.  We here at the blog report, analyze and opine on issues relevant to origin (with a very Latin-American centric perspective due to where we are all based); yet when these same discussions […]

First the DNC, now Coffeelands!

2017-04-24 Comments Off on First the DNC, now Coffeelands!

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 […]