In my travels in the coffeelands, I hear a familiar concern echoed by coffee growers: relevo generacional. All over the Americas, aging farmers are watching their children leave the farm for the city to pursue higher education and employment opportunities. With the coffee leaf rust epidemic, volatile market prices, a changing climate, low productivity, limited […]
Coffee may have something to learn from the mantra of the generals who ran the War Room during Bill Clinton’s 1994 campaign for president: it’s the economy market, stupid.
This post is a featured comment from Thomas Oberthur, a Ph.D. who has been involved in ground-breaking research on a broad range of issues in coffee. He was part of the research team at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) that worked with Green Mountain to reveal the scope of seasonal hunger in the […]
At the top of our list of New Year’s resolutions for 2014 is a comparative cupping of leading Colombian varieties. In a snarky Tweet earlier this month that invoked the glorious Latin American tradition of lucha libre, I referred to it as a “steel cage match” between Castillo and Caturra. But this is not a […]
It’s that time of year again — the time we all make New Year’s resolutions that are destined to be broken. So here are three from the coffeelands: Generate more results-based evidence. Help the coffee sector navigate uncharted waters. Borrow a page from the microfinance playbook. Only we plan on keeping these.
During the SCAA Strategic Leadership Summit in Seattle back in September, I noticed that Mark Stell of Portland Roasting was wearing a red plastic slap bracelet. I am not a particular fan of plastic accessories, even when they are used to raise funds or awareness for a worthy cause. I assume they mostly wind up […]
Manuel Díaz is an independent consultant who helped CQI create its new R standards, which aim to do for Robustas what the Q standards have done for Arabicas. His presentation on Day Two of the 2013 edition of Let’s Talk Robusta reinforced the central appeal of the brilliant keynote delivered on Day One by Ken […]
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 […]
Focusing on the little things during three days in the field in Nariño. [slidepress gallery=’coffeelands-details’]
