Sustainable Harvest today released its 2011 Impact Report — the latest of the company’s notable efforts to measure the impact of its trading model at origin.
Beginning next month, more than 40 agronomists and community organizers will fan out across the highlands of Nariño, Colombia, and along the agricultural frontier in Ecuador’s northern Amazon region to collect baseline data from more than 1,000 smallholder farmers participating in our Borderlands Coffee Project. We began working in earnest on the baseline survey back […]
Counter Culture Coffee raised the bar on transparency two years ago when it published its inaugural Direct Trade Certified Transparency Report. Now Counter Culture is at it again, this time with a pioneering effort to assess the impact on smallholder farmers of the microlot approach to sourcing that is so central to the Direct Trade […]
Last week I asked whether it is better for roasters and importers to reinvest at origin individually or collaboratively. Those who do choose to reinvest at origin may ask the same question when they are deciding how to assess the social return on their investments.
Recent discussions here on the topic of assessing impact at origin have mapped into broader currents of conversation within the specialty coffee industry and society at large about how increasing data flows affect our day-to-day decision-making. Or don’t.
Today, a belated New Year’s resolution regarding our coffee programming: “mo’ better” monitoring and evaluation in 2012.
I had a long conversation last week with a specialty coffee luminary that ended in a surprising statement about how little the industry really understands about its impact at origin after all these years. We talked about the state of sustainability in the coffee industry in general, and the current controversy in the Fair Trade […]
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 […]
Many moons ago, I suggested that microlots can help everyone in the coffee trade, even farmers who don’t produce them and roasters who don’t buy them. The argument is that by better understanding the quality of the coffee they have to offer — a skill that is developed naturally in the pursuit of microlots — […]
Last week I posted some final sales data from our recently concluded CAFE Livelihoods project. It provoked some thoughtful comments and rich discussion, most of which centered around the flaws in the presentation of the data. I look forward to revisiting the issue of assessing impact at origin in the New Year. In the meantime, […]
