Tag Archives: Fair Trade USA

Beyond business as usual at La Revancha

2015-10-21 Comments Off on Beyond business as usual at La Revancha

The tools coffee companies use most commonly to identify and address challenges related to farm labor in their supply chains are certifications and third-party verifications.  There has been generally very little engagement by market actors beyond those approaches.  That’s what makes La Revancha, a coffee estate in Nicaragua, so extraordinary.  Ownership, management and labor at […]

407. “A dignified life”

2014-05-01 Comments Off on 407. “A dignified life”

Today is International Workers Day, also known as Labor Day throughout the coffeelands of Latin America.  Seems like an appropriate day for me to share some reflections on the farmworker conversation I had the privilege to moderate during last week’s SCAA Expo. The post is unusually long because the conversation was uncommonly rich. Of all […]

396. SCAA Expo: The view from the coffeelands

2014-03-10 Comments Off on 396. SCAA Expo: The view from the coffeelands

SCAA’s 2014 Expo opens in a little more than a month, which means it’s time for the annual CRS Coffeelands Blog SCAA preview.  After a careful review of the lecture program, I wonder whether this year’s Expo may the best ever for folks like me coming in from the coffeelands.

383. Stumptown releases Borderlands microlot

2014-02-06 Comments Off on 383. Stumptown releases Borderlands microlot

Stumptown Coffee yesterday released its first microlot from our Borderlands project in Colombia, comprised of small lots from four farms in Nariño. If you are interested in exceptional coffee, where it comes from, or both, we humbly suggest three actions: READ the post below for more detail about the amazing growers behind this amazing coffee; […]

369. Epilogue

2013-07-15 Comments Off on 369. Epilogue

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 […]

344. FTUSA steps up on impact measurement

2013-04-05 Comments Off on 344. FTUSA steps up on impact measurement

This week, more than 15 months after it broke with Fairtrade International and rewrote the rules of Fair Trade for the U.S. marketplace with its Fair Trade for All initiative, Fair Trade USA has advanced a plan to measure the impacts of FT4All on all coffee farmers and farmworkers in the Fair Trade system.  The […]

325. Top 10 posts of 2012

2013-01-03 Comments Off on 325. Top 10 posts of 2012

For the second year in a row, the most popular posts to the CRS Coffeelands Blog were related to our coverage of changes in the Fair Trade system: posts on Fair Trade for All took seven of the 10 top spots for 2012.  Rounding out the top 10 were posts on water resource management and […]

322. Recommendations for the future of FT4All

2012-11-29 Comments Off on 322. Recommendations for the future of FT4All

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 […]

321. Observations on the FT4All pilot

2012-11-27 Comments Off on 321. Observations on the FT4All pilot

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 […]