For more than a week we have been writing here about Brazil’s extraordinary effort to eradicate modern slavery, and how that effort relates to the country’s coffee sector. Today is the eighth, final, and perhaps most important post in the series. The one that answers the question, “So, what?” So, now we know this terrible […]
For the second year in a row, SCAA Executive Director Ric Rhinehart included specific reference to farmworkers in his opening comments to the SCAA Symposium. And for the second year in a row, farmworker issues were discussed during a panel at The SCAA Event. The time has come for proactive engagement on farmworker issues in […]
You guessed it: POLICY. Ric Rhinehart spoke during the 2014 Let’s Talk Coffee event to the importance of public policy in shaping the composition of the coffee sector in growing countries. (Ric and I further explored the implications of policy for the future of coffee in Mesoamerica in an illuminating conversation here.) More recently, I […]
The sustainability conversation in specialty coffee has evolved in important ways since I first tuned in more than 10 years ago. I find it to be more robust. More nuanced. More mature. And, well…just more. The list of topics on the industry’s sustainability agenda is longer than it was a decade ago. One topic that […]
Today: how representatives of six leading specialty coffee companies who share our commitment to transform the coffee chain in Nariño, Colombia, are helping us create opportunities for smallholder farmers and developing new sources of extraordinary coffee.
The CRS Coffeelands Blog turned five in November. Here is the content from the blog’s fifth year that you, the readers, liked the best. Or rather, it is is the content you read the most, since in some cases you did not care too much for what I had to say.
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 […]
When I was an undergraduate, I watched more C-Span than I cared to admit. The parliamentary protocols of the U.S. House of Representatives became almost as familiar to me as the rites of the Catholic Mass, and the language members used as they rose to deliver comments on the floor etched itself in my memory: […]
Last month I published a post under the snarky title “It’s the market, stupid” along with snide Tweets like this one: Hey, market: you want quality, heirloom varieties, water stewardship, farmworker rights? Create incentives for them. http://t.co/8mGFcRnJ2F — Michael Sheridan (@coffeelands) April 7, 2014 I suggested that the best way to understand what […]
As an SCAA member, I receive every issue of the SCAA Chronicle. As an international aid worker based in Ecuador, I get my copy several weeks after everyone else, since it is sent first to our headquarters in Baltimore then batched and sent along with other mail every few weeks to our office in Quito. […]
