From 2008-2011, I was involved in a CRS coffee project in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua called CAFE Livelihoods. In late 2008, I convened the project teams from each of the four countries for the first time in Managua. To open the first session, I paired each person with a colleague from another country […]
This week my colleagues and I have been sharing perspectives on the FEWS NET Special Report on coffee leaf rust and food insecurity in Central America. Today: El Salvador.
When I published this list of New Year’s resolutions earlier this month, there was one I forgot: create a cupping form for farmers.
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, […]
My first job with CRS back in 2002 was a one-year fellowship. I was one of 15 fellows who were assigned to different countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. I didn’t know it at the time, but my assignment to the Philippines was a lucky break: there I worked with Paul Hicks, who has […]
Today I resume this summer’s series on coffee and water resource management with a question: If there are affordable technologies out there that have a smaller water footprint than traditional wet mills, why aren’t they more widely used? Here are some ideas.
Today the 5 de junio cooperative celebrates a birthday. The coop, comprised of some 500 determined farmers in the rugged Nicaraguan highland town of Las Sabanas, was a CRS partner under the CAFE Livelihoods project. Counter Culture is helping to mark the occasion by telling the 5 de junio story and making 5 de junio’s […]
Today we sent Fair Trade USA some comments on its proposed Independent Smallholder Standard. The comments include contributions from CRS experts in the areas of Fair Trade, coffee, agriculture, smallholder trade, environmental sustainability and labor rights. They were drafted in a spirit of constructive criticism, and in the hope of improving the Standard and its […]
Today, a belated New Year’s resolution regarding our coffee programming: “mo’ better” monitoring and evaluation in 2012.
Our CAFE Livelihoods project closed on 30 September 2011 after three years of work with more than 7,000 smallholder farmers in Mexico and Central America. Since then, we have been collecting and analyzing the final data from the project, and recently submitted the CAFE Livelihoods Final Report to the donor. We also asked researchers at […]
