At a meeting late last year with the Colombia’s National Coffee Growers Federation, I noticed a calendar on the wall declaring November “The Month of Coffee Leaf Rust Control” in Colombia. What is coffee leaf rust and why it is the cause of so much concern in Colombia?
Over the past decade, the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help Colombia eradicate coca production. The campaign has eliminated millions of acres of coca and been the source of considerable debate. Opponents charge that aerial spraying — a controversial approach to eradication employed only in Colombia — has displaced farmers, […]
The single-serve café may be the innovation that has most refined the presentation of specialty coffee in recent years, but the single-cup brewing system for home use has unquestionably been the innovation that has most disrupted it. To borrow from the lexicon of American political discourse, single-cup technologies have been embraced from Wall Street, where […]
I published a series of posts last week that included observations and recommendations for the future of Fair Trade for All based on our experience in Colombia with one of the first Fair Trade Certification pilots for independent smallholder farmers. What I didn’t include was a description of a strategy we have applied in the […]
The world’s first Fair Trade Certification pilots with independent smallholder coffee farmers are winding down in Colombia. CRS supported one of those pilots. Based on that experience, we offer three recommendations for future pilots: two to ensure they generate the kind of rigorous, results-based evidence we believe should drive decisions about the future of Fair […]
This week, CRS is issuing a series of observations based on our experience in Colombia with the first Fair Trade Certification pilot with independent smallholder farmers, and recommendations for the future of Fair Trade for All. From our perspective, the pilot has been the source of some encouragement as an approach to smallholder organization where […]
When we announced here back in May that CRS would support a Fair Trade for All pilot project with independent smallholder farmers in Colombia, we identified “influence” as a leading motivation: We believe we are uniquely positioned to independently document the impacts of FT4All’s pilots and influence the evolution of the Fair Trade model. Nearly […]
Today I travel to Medellín with 20 CRS colleagues, partners and project participants from Colombia, Ecuador and Haiti for Let’s Talk Coffee – the annual coffee value chain event that Sustainable Harvest created 10 years ago. The first Let’s Talk Coffee was a groundbreaking innovation, creating an annual space for face-to-face communications among farmer organizations […]
In the development projects I have been involved with, some of the best thinking is done in the car, during the countless hours spent in long rides to and from the field. Or in the evenings after a day with farmers, which invariably educates and provokes new ideas. When I was working on the […]
Last week we announced here that we are getting involved in a Fair Trade for All pilot project with independent smallholder farmers in Nariño, Colombia. Since then the suggestion has been made, both online and off, that our involvement in the project constitutes an endorsement of the overarching vision behind FT4All. Today we set the […]
