Yesterday I highlighted some high-profile initiatives announced last week by specialty roasters in the United States. The Keurig Green Mountain water stewardship work, in my mind, is particularly impressive for the degree to which it is embedded in the company’s core business: it sees water as both central to its business model and as a […]
Water seemed to be everywhere in the coffee news last week, and the biggest headlines were reserved for TOMS, which is expanding from shoes and fashion accessories into specialty coffee, and bringing its One-for-One approach with it: for each bag of coffee it sells, TOMS will deliver a week of water to a person in […]
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 […]
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 […]
This post was contributed by my colleague Robyn Fieser, the Regional Information Officer for CRS in Latin America and the Caribbean. – – – – – Running a 500-acre, organic coffee farm deep in western El Salvador’s mountains has posed plenty of challenges over the years for the 89 members of Las Colinas coffee cooperative. […]
Tomorrow I travel to Houston for the annual gathering of the SCAA. CRS has participated in some capacity in every SCAA since 2004, but this year is special. It marks our first time participating in Symposium, our first time with a booth on the show floor (#441) and the largest CRS delegation ever. With new […]
The Las Colinas cooperative manages natural spring that provides water to thousands of its neighbors. Caring for it is a responsibility that Las Colinas takes seriously.
Throughout Central America, thousands of smallholder farmers who were brought up in coffee as workers on large coffee estates have taken the reins of those farms and are running them as cooperative businesses. In some cases, cooperatives are still learning to fly on their own even 30 years after they formed.
