The Sustainable Development Goal for Water This weekend, the UN will launch the new Sustainable Development Goals. These goals build from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were a driver for the world’s development priorities from 1990-2015. MDG #7 focused on the environment with a sub-target devoted to water, including a target to “halve, by 2015, the […]
Blessed is the Machete A machete makes a wonderful wedding gift. After working many years with farmers around the world, I learned to value the multiple functions a machete offers a family: it’s a knife, a lawn mower, vegetable peeler, screwdriver, tree pruner, and so much more. A few years ago, my friends Sara and […]
Blue Water and Green Water This post builds on a recent post called “We all drink downstream”. Over the past decade, a lot of water terms have been introduced to policy debates and popular media: water foot printing, virtual water, and the concepts of blue water, green water, and grey water. These concepts are important […]
Last week, SCAA gave me the opportunity to talk about water and coffee at its annual Symposium in Seattle. For my first contribution to the Coffeelands blog, I want to give a brief synthesis of last week’s presentation, which serves as a great intro to water and the coffeelands. . . WATER CRISIS In 2015, […]
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.
I have been doing a lot of thinking over the past few weeks as a result of all the coverage of water issues in coffee media–not on water so much as the nature of international development work. I am reminded that, in the words of a former colleague, the “how” of what we do may […]
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 […]
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 […]
My colleague Jefferson Shriver is an advisor on issues of agroenterprise and climate change for CRS programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. He is based in Nicaragua, where he has lived and worked on-and-off for the better part of 20 years. Over that time, he has collaborated with many of the country’s leading coffee […]
