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 […]
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 […]
Yesterday I shared some data showing how Castillo and Caturra samples performed as part of the baseline survey for our Borderlands Coffee Project. As I reflected on the quantitative results, which showed a narrow but persistent advantage for Caturra and a slightly higher upper bound, I wondered whether there was a quantitative difference between the […]
I recently concluded a series that examined the current campaign by Colombia’s coffee authorities to replace the country’s traditional coffee cultivars with the disease-resistant Castillo hybrid as part of their response to the coffee leaf rust epidemic. As part of that series, I wrote: At the risk of oversimplification, the debate has been framed by […]
One overcast Sunday last September, Nick Cho published this searching reflection on the relationship between coffee quality and social impact. Somehow it managed to escape my notice until this past weekend. Nick’s post is beautiful in its candor, frankly acknowledging the limitations of specialty coffee and honestly exploring “the true human condition of the coffee […]
When our CAFE Livelihoods project in Mexico and Central America ended in 2011, several people asked me what I considered the signature successes of the project. I was sitting on three years of data from 4,633 farms tracking changes in productivity, income, coffee quality, access to infrastructure, etc. But instead of citing these data, I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
As readers of this blog will know, recently we decided to get involved in a Fair Trade for All pilot project in Colombia, in part because we want to understand and document the impacts of Fair Trade on independent smallholder farmers. As part of our effort to design a strong impact assessment, I have been […]
