As a principle, I believe that we learn better from direct experience than from books and data and graphics. And as a matter of experience, I know that traveling to the coffeelands can be a source of endless illumination about the secret lives of coffee farmers. Nothing helps us understand the vulnerability of poor households […]
Our work in the coffeelands over the past 10 years has focused on small-scale family farmers, but we recognize that the seasonal laborers who pick coffee, often migrants, are arguably the most vulnerable actors in the coffee chain. And there are a lot of them. According to PROMECAFE data, more than 1.7 million people work […]
With apologies to my doppelganger Michael Stipe for the title of this post, I cannot get this R.E.M. lyric out of my head after huddling in El Salvador for a week with colleagues from Central America to plan a response to the coffee rust epidemic. During the final day of the First International Coffee Rust […]
Three years ago during the 2010 SCAA Expo, I gave this presentation on hunger in the coffeelands. At that time, the issue did not have the kind of traction in the industry it does now. Many people in the audience were still struggling to reconcile the extraordinary success of “sustainable coffees” in the marketplace with […]
The application of climate science to coffee has generated an inconvenient truth: the map of the coffeelands in Mesoamerica will be redrawn over the next 40 years, and by 2050 the specialty coffee map will likely be much smaller than it is today. Against the backdrop of the current coffee rust epidemic in Central America, […]
CRS is collecting data from smallholder farmers in Central America on the impacts of coffee rust. So far we have gathered information from 13 cooperatives with more than 6,800 members. I presented some of the preliminary results yesterday at the coffee rust summit here in Guatemala. They were not encouraging: production is down by 31 […]
Last week, agricultural authorities and coffee organizations from Central America holed up in Panama for two days with research institutes, regional banks and UN agencies to try to hammer out a plan for responding to the coffee leaf rust outbreak. As I trolled the web for news of the meeting’s results, I came across this […]
CRS works with more than 35,000 smallholder coffee farmers in 12 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. The Coffeelands Portrait Project will introduce you to some of them. Today’s post explains the project’s origins and approach; today’s inaugural gallery features 10 gorgeous portraits of farmers participating in our Borderlands Coffee Project in Colombia. [slidepress […]
Yesterday I participated in an online forum on the future of smallholder Fair Trade hosted by the Fair Trade Resource Nework. My presentation, in synthesis, went something like this: Fair Trade and Fair Trade Certification have catalyzed smallholder farmer organization and empowerment over the past decade through their support for farmer-led cooperatives. But there are […]
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 […]
