Tag Archives: Fair Trade

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 […]

CRS Coffeelands Blog Year in Review

2016-01-19 Comments Off on CRS Coffeelands Blog Year in Review

Today, the annual review of the Coffeelands content you liked best over the past year. .

Third-Rail Communications

2015-11-25 Comments Off on Third-Rail Communications

The Direct Trade-v-Fair Trade debate resurfaced here last week.  I weighed in on that debate here yesterday. Today I want to explore a related idea: that the leading proponents of these two trading models may have communicated themselves into corners from which they can’t easily extricate themselves even though they desperately need to. Direct Trade […]

Apples and Oranges

2015-11-24 Comments Off on Apples and Oranges

When the Fair World Project published this comparison of select brands in the U.S. coffee market last year, I was sorely tempted to respond here. To explain publicly what was happening privately: that I was being asked by Fair Trade roasters in the upper tiers to arrange meetings with Direct Trade roasters in lower tiers […]

You got the vocab?

2015-09-15 Comments Off on You got the vocab?

In this post yesterday, I mentioned the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2015, a bill currently in committee in both houses of Congress.  The proposed legislation includes detailed requirements on what and how U.S. companies with more than $100 million in annual sales revenues would be required to publicly disclose […]

Mythbusting farm labor in the coffeelands

2015-08-25 Comments Off on Mythbusting farm labor in the coffeelands

Over the past two years, we have been working with colleagues in the coffee and nonprofit sectors to better understand farmworker issues in the coffeelands.  In the process, we have boosted our farmworker IQ and busted some commonly held myths about farm labor in the coffee sector, like this one: MYTH: Farm labor is only […]

439. The best of Coffeelands: 2014 in review

2014-12-30 Comments Off on 439. The best of Coffeelands: 2014 in review

The CRS Coffeelands Blog turned five in November. Here is the content from the blog’s fifth year that you, the readers, liked the best. Or rather, it is is the content you read the most, since in some cases you did not care too much for what I had to say.

415. Upon further reflection

2014-07-10 Comments Off on 415. Upon further reflection

I have been writing for a long time. Extensively. As a student, a journalist, a researcher and a blogger. Since the mid-1990s, when I did a few brief stints at newspapers in Latin America, that writing has often been for external audiences. In writing, I take great care in choosing my words. On this blog, […]

413. Farmworkers and Fair Trade

2014-07-01 Comments Off on 413. Farmworkers and Fair Trade

In May, researchers at the Fairtrade, Employment and Poverty Reduction program at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London released a report based on four years of intensive field research in Ethiopia an Uganda whose findings were critical of Fair Trade’s record on farmworkers.   I only just got around to reading the full […]

412. Farmworkers on the record

2014-06-30 Comments Off on 412. Farmworkers on the record

When I was an undergraduate, I watched more C-Span than I cared to admit.  The parliamentary protocols of the U.S. House of Representatives became almost as familiar to me as the rites of the Catholic Mass, and the language members used as they rose to deliver comments on the floor etched itself in my memory: […]