Last week we announced here that we are getting involved in a Fair Trade for All pilot project with independent smallholder farmers in Nariño, Colombia. Since then the suggestion has been made, both online and off, that our involvement in the project constitutes an endorsement of the overarching vision behind FT4All. Today we set the […]
On Tuesday, I announced here our involvement in an FT4All innovation pilot with independent smallholder farmers in Nariño, Colombia. Yesterday, I explained here how our involvement came to pass. Today, I discuss why Nariño might be the best imaginable place in the world for this pilot. And why it might be the worst.
CRS is getting involved in a Fair Trade for All pilot project with independent smallholder farmers in Nariño, Colombia. Here’s why.
Beginning next month, more than 40 agronomists and community organizers will fan out across the highlands of Nariño, Colombia, and along the agricultural frontier in Ecuador’s northern Amazon region to collect baseline data from more than 1,000 smallholder farmers participating in our Borderlands Coffee Project. We began working in earnest on the baseline survey back […]
In my last post I mentioned that we are hiring a director for the Borderlands Coffee Project, which will serve more than 3,000 farmers on both sides of the Colombia-Ecuador border. Earlier this month, I visited with partners and farmers in a half-dozen communities on the Colombia side as part of our project start-up activities. […]
A few weeks after I published a post on Nariño’s domination of the 2010 Colombia Cup of Excellence, the coffee website Sprudge ran an excellent, in-depth piece on the controversy around the varietal of the lot that won the COE.
The Colombia Cup of Excellence competition held earlier this month may have marked the coronation of Nariño as the source of the country’s finest coffee. Farmers from Nariño claimed the first six spots and eight of the top ten. Such dominance leaves little doubt that the center of Colombian coffee has shifted definitively to Nariño.
