There is an urgent need to fix the coffee market: to reduce price volatility and ensure that a fairer share of coffee revenue reaches farmers and farmworkers. In a recent post, I made the point that the coffee market is unjust because farmers and farmworkers bare a disproportionate amount of risk and remain poor, while […]
In a recent post, I wrote that the C-Price for coffee is flawed and there is an urgent need for viable solutions to improve the coffee market. The post was picked up by Daily Coffee News and got a lot of attention – both positive and negative, which is well appreciated. The goal of the original post […]
“Finance overwhelms the real economy.”* This is a point from Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment and poverty. This phrase helps to explain what’s happening in the coffee sector. The “real economy” of the coffee sector consists of: millions of farmers and farmworkers who produce the world’s coffee, millers and roasters who […]
Author: Michael Kimani During a recent field trip to Uganda in June 2018, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the efforts the country is making to put itself on top of the coffee world. Word has it that Uganda might become the next Vietnam in terms of increasing the production of coffee. The targets: […]
In Blue Harvest, we have been working on improving water use efficiency and waste water treatment in wet mills, protecting water recharge areas in the farms by applying soil and water conservation practices (here and here) with a focus on regenerative coffee , as well as working with water system operators and water committees to […]
It is time to move beyond the idea of sustainable coffee. Sustaining something assumes that what we have is already good enough. Yet numerous studies have shown that if the coffee industry does not change its current “business-as-usual” approach, we will not have quality coffee in the future. And this will hurt everyone that […]
It’s Spring again… Green is starting to appear in the northern latitudes, the NBA playoffs are just around the corner, you realize that you haven’t filed your taxes yet, and the annual Specialty Coffee Association’s Expo is coming up. This year will be my fifth consecutive year attending – I’m starting to feel like a “local,” […]
In the previous few posts, I’ve been writing about our recent work in Nicaragua, improving the water use efficiency and minimizing the pollution from small coffee wet mills. You can see these posts here: Wetmill makeovers! What’s the impact of these mills? Even better than reading about the impact and the design (more posts coming […]
Back in January, we presented some models of small wet mills that were designed to maximize water use efficiency and to treat waste water that generated by coffee processing. CRS build these seven model wet mills as part of the Blue Harvest project, funded by Keurig Green Mountain and the Interamerican Development Bank. The original […]
The makeover. The ability to fix flaws and to transform, changing into a better version, the 2.0. It is a sexy premise – one that feeds tons of industries, catering to our most basic desires for improvement. What is left out of how these makeovers are presented in the media is how much work […]