Tag Archives: Fair Trade

405. It’s the market, stupid

2014-04-07 Comments Off on 405. It’s the market, stupid

Coffee may have something to learn from the mantra of the generals who ran the War Room during Bill Clinton’s 1994 campaign for president: it’s the economy market, stupid.

372. Is the coffee business broken?

2013-11-18 Comments Off on 372. Is the coffee business broken?

David Griswold, ex-President of the SCAA and co-founder of the innovative coffee importer Sustainable Harvest, asked a panel of coffee luminaries at last month’s Let’s Talk Coffee event in El Salvador if the coffee business is broken.  The answer was a resounding yes.

369. Epilogue

2013-07-15 Comments Off on 369. Epilogue

The CRS Coffeelands Blog published perspectives from the intersection of coffee and international development from 2009-2013. We launched the blog because we believe that despite a quarter-century of investment and innovation to get closer to the source of our coffee, “there are still real opportunities for discovery and growth in terms of our understanding of […]

344. FTUSA steps up on impact measurement

2013-04-05 Comments Off on 344. FTUSA steps up on impact measurement

This week, more than 15 months after it broke with Fairtrade International and rewrote the rules of Fair Trade for the U.S. marketplace with its Fair Trade for All initiative, Fair Trade USA has advanced a plan to measure the impacts of FT4All on all coffee farmers and farmworkers in the Fair Trade system.  The […]

342. Mirror, mirror on the wall

2013-03-18 Comments Off on 342. Mirror, mirror on the wall

Stephen Macatonia directs Union Hand Roasted in London, one of the UK’s leading Direct Trade roasters.  Last week he published this thoughtful piece in the Guardian — the latest contribution to the ongoing debate between advocates and practitioners of Fair Trade and Direct Trade over whose trade is fairest of them all. For our part, we […]

325. Top 10 posts of 2012

2013-01-03 Comments Off on 325. Top 10 posts of 2012

For the second year in a row, the most popular posts to the CRS Coffeelands Blog were related to our coverage of changes in the Fair Trade system: posts on Fair Trade for All took seven of the 10 top spots for 2012.  Rounding out the top 10 were posts on water resource management and […]

323. “Empowerment partnerships” for FT4All?

2012-12-04 Comments Off on 323. “Empowerment partnerships” for FT4All?

I published a series of posts last week that included observations and recommendations for the future of Fair Trade for All based on our experience in Colombia with one of the first Fair Trade Certification pilots for independent smallholder farmers.  What I didn’t include was a description of a strategy we have applied in the […]

322. Recommendations for the future of FT4All

2012-11-29 Comments Off on 322. Recommendations for the future of FT4All

The world’s first Fair Trade Certification pilots with independent smallholder coffee farmers are winding down in Colombia.  CRS supported one of those pilots. Based on that experience, we offer three recommendations for future pilots: two to ensure they generate the kind of rigorous, results-based evidence we believe should drive decisions about the future of Fair […]

321. Observations on the FT4All pilot

2012-11-27 Comments Off on 321. Observations on the FT4All pilot

This week, CRS is issuing a series of observations based on our experience in Colombia with the first Fair Trade Certification pilot with independent smallholder farmers, and recommendations for the future of Fair Trade for All.  From our perspective, the pilot has been the source of some encouragement as an approach to smallholder organization where […]

320. The future of FT4All

2012-11-26 Comments Off on 320. The future of FT4All

When we announced here back in May that CRS would support a Fair Trade for All pilot project with independent smallholder farmers in Colombia, we identified “influence” as a leading motivation: We believe we are uniquely positioned to independently document the impacts of FT4All’s pilots and influence the evolution of the Fair Trade model. Nearly […]