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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I have been so busy preparing for and participating in Sustainable Harvest’s 10th annual Let’s Talk Coffee in Colombia last week that I am just getting caught up on some recent news in coffee. Here are some of the biggest stories in specialty coffee from the last month.
As I reflect more on The Nation’s excellent article on the split in the Fair Trade movement, I am reminded of a product review by Ritual Coffee, the iconic San Francisco roaster, that included this passage: “Did we once tell you that the Hario Hand Mills were the best hand grinders available? Yes. Are we […]
Empowerment is a popular term in the fields of international development and Fair Trade. It has been mentioned many times in the current debate over changes to the Fair Trade system — including several times on this blog — by people who are both for FT4All and against it: Ed Canty buys Fair Trade Certified […]
It is turning out to be a Green Mountain week. On Monday, I published this guest post by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Fair Trade coffee buyer Ed Canty on the company’s approach to the Fair Trade for All pilots with independent smallholder farmers and estates. And today, the Burlington Free Press — the Green Mountain […]
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters became the world’s largest Fair Trade coffee buyer in 2010, when it purchased over 26 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee. The person responsible for all those purchases is Ed Canty, the company’s certified coffee buyer. But Ed isn’t only in charge of Fair Trade coffee buying for GMCR. He […]
