Tag Archives: Equal Exchange

260. Brewing change: Rick Peyser and the rise of sustainability in specialty coffee

2012-04-18 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Every year the SCAA’s “big event” plays host to countless “small events” — receptions, fundraisers, competitions, press releases, big announcements, etc. One of the “small events” I am looking forward to most eagerly this year is the release of “Brewing Change,” a new book about Green Mountain’s Director of Coffee Community Outreach and Social Advocacy […]

240. FTUSA’s Independent Smallholders Standard: The empowerment agenda

2012-02-13 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Opponents of FTUSA’s Fair Trade for All initiative have focused in their public communications on the participation of coffee estates in the U.S. Fair Trade market, and characterized their resistance as a stand for smallholders. They have mostly ignored the fact that FT4All also opens the door to independent smallholder farmers. On the rare occasions […]

237. The future of smallholder Fair Trade

2012-02-01 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

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 […]

235. Online discussion: The future of Fair Trade

2012-01-23 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

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 […]

232. And on the seventh day…

2012-01-07 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

…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 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

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 […]

224. Beauty and brains – Fair Trade infographics

2011-12-07 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Last night, a grad student from the pioneering agroecology department at UC Santa Cruz turned me on to some recently published infographics on the Fair Trade system. (Thanks, Nick.) I am publishing a link to the graphs here because they are a pleasure to behold. And they also help, at a time of great upheaval […]

202. CAFE Livelihoods draws to a close

2011-09-30 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

Today, the CAFE Livelihoods project that I have been working on in one capacity or another since late 2007 draws to a close. As we prepare the final project report in the coming weeks, I will share some of the more notable project outcomes here. Meantime, I want to thank everyone who contributed to the […]

148. El Pinal – Heads in the clouds, feet on the ground

2011-04-13 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

The members of the El Pinal cooperative have their heads in the clouds, literally. Their offices and their mill are perched on a narrow peak of the Cordillera del Bálsamo that is as often as not wrapped in mist and clouds. But the organization is seeing its future clearly and thinking in ways they haven’t […]

144. APECAFORM – Coffee between volcanoes

2011-04-11 Coffeelands Staff Comments Off

APECAFORM’s name tells you a lot about the organization’s members. APECAFORM is the Maya-Mam Association of Smallholder Organic Coffee Farmers. Its 472 members are Maya indigenous people who speak predominantly Mam, one of more than 20 languages spoken in Guatemala. They are also smallholder coffee farmers committed to organic shade farming. What the name doesn’t […]