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 […]
If you wanted to make a prototype of what the future of coffee farming could look like – you’d make sure farmers had an entrepreneurial approach to farming coffee; that farmers understood and used the complex financial tools available to offset risk; and you’d imbue farmers with a sense of how to take advantage of […]
Side-selling. Side selling refers to a situation where a producer (or cooperative) does not comply with a contract and chooses to sell their coffee to someone else. This can happen in markets with rising coffee prices, when the local price for the coffee exceeds the price agreed upon in a contract. When farmers, or their […]
I’m going to be honest with all of you. I don’t have a lot of material to work with on this topic. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about this and looking all around Central America for examples of private investment in coffee farms. We all know about the pioneering work of Root […]
The U.S. Barista Championship gets underway tomorrow in Long Beach. The live broadcast of the competition will reach viewers in a place not accustomed to watching barista events. I’m not talking about Las Vegas, North Carolina. Or Holland, Michigan. Or even Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I am talking about Nariño, Colombia, where the farmers who grew Anna […]
Last week I participated in Let’s Talk Coffee, importer Sustainable Harvest’s annual value chain event, for the fifth time. The content of the event was broader the caliber of the speakers higher than at any other LTC event I remember. But the best presentation of the event—the one that still has me thinking the better […]
Kimberly Easson has been present at the creation of lots of noteworthy efforts to make the coffee trade more equitable. She was part of the original team that brought Fair Trade Certification to the U.S. coffee market in 1999 to create new market opportunities for smallolder farmers. In 2003, she co-founded the International Women’s Coffee […]
The Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) released another update on the food security situation in Central America last week. I have not been working directly on our response to coffee leaf rust in Central America, and I have not been publishing much here lately. But I felt compelled by a “lost-in-translation” moment in […]
Today we hear from my colleagues in Nicaragua in the final installment in a week-long series of comments by CRS field staff on the FEWS NET coffee rust shock report for Central America.
Editor’s Note: This post has been revised to include additonal detail about the “stressed acute food insecurity” classification applied to Guatemala and Honduras by FEWS NET. – – – – – The Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET), a USAID-funded initiative that monitors hunger in chronically food insecure countries around the world, late last week […]
