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 […]
There seem to be very few conversations in coffee these days that are not influenced in some way by the coffee rust crisis in Central America. And there are other long-standing conversations that seem to be assuming renewed importance in the current context. One of these is the return on the investments that farmers make […]
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 […]
The estimates of productive and economic losses to coffee leaf rust in Central America are nothing short of staggering. Half of all coffee affected. Hundreds of millions of pounds of production losses projected. Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. Economic losses running into the billions of dollars. Against this backdrop, we should not be surprised […]
