The Coffee Review co-founder and specialty coffee pioneer Kenneth Davids opened the 2013 edition of Let’s Talk Robusta with a tour-de-force keynote address during which he exposed “The Robusta Myth” in the U.S. specialty marketplace, offered his own “Robusta realities,” and advocated forcefully for more sensory exploration of a coffee we still don’t really know.
David Griswold, ex-President of the SCAA and co-founder of the innovative coffee importer Sustainable Harvest, asked a panel of coffee luminaries at last month’s Let’s Talk Coffee event in El Salvador if the coffee business is broken. The answer was a resounding yes.
Did I write yesterday in rebooting the blog that I will focus ruthlessly on our work in Colombia and Ecuador? Yes. And does this first post address something not directly related to our work in the field there? Absolutely. Why? Because World Coffee Development might be the single most important thing the coffee sector does—or […]
The CRS Coffeelands Blog published perspectives from the intersection of coffee and international development from 2009-2013. We launched the blog because we believe that despite a quarter-century of investment and innovation to get closer to the source of our coffee, “there are still real opportunities for discovery and growth in terms of our understanding of […]
Nariño is a coffee-growing region on Colombia’s southern border with Ecuador that is renowned for the quality of its coffee but remains the source of relatively few coffees sourced directly by roasters paying premiums for coffees of extraordinary quality. The CRS Borderlands Coffee Project has enlisted the support of an Advisory Board that includes six […]
With apologies to my doppelganger Michael Stipe for the title of this post, I cannot get this R.E.M. lyric out of my head after huddling in El Salvador for a week with colleagues from Central America to plan a response to the coffee rust epidemic. During the final day of the First International Coffee Rust […]
Three years ago during the 2010 SCAA Expo, I gave this presentation on hunger in the coffeelands. At that time, the issue did not have the kind of traction in the industry it does now. Many people in the audience were still struggling to reconcile the extraordinary success of “sustainable coffees” in the marketplace with […]
The coffee leaf rust crisis in Central America has gotten people talking about diversification. At the First International Coffee Rust Summit in Guatemala last month, participants advocated passionately (and persuasively) for diversification of coffee genetics and coffee farms. There is a third type of diversification that wasn’t discussed in depth but remains critical to the […]
The application of climate science to coffee has generated an inconvenient truth: the map of the coffeelands in Mesoamerica will be redrawn over the next 40 years, and by 2050 the specialty coffee map will likely be much smaller than it is today. Against the backdrop of the current coffee rust epidemic in Central America, […]
The program at the First International Coffee Rust Summit that recently concluded in Guatemala was filled with experts who addressed many different aspects of the current coffee rust emergency: the epidemiology of coffee rust, origins of this year’s outbreak, methods for controlling it, the social and economic implications for farmers and their communities, strategies for […]
