During the opening session of last week’s Coffee Rust Summit in Guatemala, the director of Central America’s coffee institute suggested that coffee rust is a symptom of underlying problems in the region’s coffee sector. More specifically, he noted that the coffeelands in Central America are filled with aging plantations that are poorly managed. What he […]
The story of specialty coffee has been tightly woven around the ideas of sustainability and origin. The coffee rust epidemic in Central America will put those ideas to the test.
The first day of the First International Coffee Rust Summit is in the books. My plans to Tweet from the event were foiled by connectivity problems. Will try again on day two. Meantime, here are some of the quotes and notes that stood out for me from the first full day of proceedings.
CRS is collecting data from smallholder farmers in Central America on the impacts of coffee rust. So far we have gathered information from 13 cooperatives with more than 6,800 members. I presented some of the preliminary results yesterday at the coffee rust summit here in Guatemala. They were not encouraging: production is down by 31 […]
CRS began working in coffee just over 10 years ago in response to a crisis. Today the coffee sector finds itself coping with another crisis. As I prepare for four days of meetings here in Guatemala to plan a coordinated response to the coffee rust epidemic in Central America, I try to remember that challenges […]
This afternoon I will travel to Guatemala City to participate in four days of discussions around coffee rust convened by World Coffee Research and PROMECAFE, a network of national coffee programs in Central America and the Caribbean. The objective of the meeting is to develop a more detailed strategy for responding to the coffee rust […]
The coffee rust epidemic in Central America has been widely covered in industry and mainstream media. But for all the ink that has been spilled on coffee rust, there has been relatively little information about its social and economic impacts at the household level on coffee growing families. Fortunately, that information gap is beginning to […]
Long before and quite apart from the coffee rust outbreak in Central America, I proposed a presentation for this year’s SCAA Expo on what we have been calling “the productivity gap” — the difference between what smallholder farmers CAN produce and what they actually DO produce. The productivity gap is big, and its effect on […]
During last year’s SCAA Symposium, Liam Brody of Root Capital urged participants to be “pathologically collaborative” in addressing the ills that continue to ail specialty coffee. Peter Giuliano suggested soon afterward that Liam had “blown up the Twitterverse” with the memorable call to cooperation. But the full echo of that call may only be sounding […]
Yesterday I referred here to some recent salvoes in the escalating debate over the appropriate role for Robusta coffees in the U.S. specialty market. Today, some reflections on our modest role in support of the fine Robusta project.
