The Forecast is Bleak: Inside the 2018 Coffee Barometer
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An increasingly consolidated, profit-driven coffee industry
in leading consumer markets like the United States and Europe is failing to
respond to serious sustainability threats. In this failure — in which the
short-term pursuit of profit is prioritized over long-term sustainable
practices — the coffee industry is rapidly headed towards its own peril.
Most-Vulnerable Farmers Being Left Out of Certifications,
Geographic Analysis Shows
“Certification appears to be concentrated in areas important
for biodiversity conservation, but not in those areas most in need of poverty
alleviation, although there were exceptions to each of these patterns,” a group
of researchers from the U.K. and U.S. wrote in a recent paper in the journal
“Biological Conservation” called “Where are commodity crops certified, and what
does it mean for conservation and poverty alleviation?”
New Policy Report Tackles Voluntary Sustainability Standards
in Coffee
The proliferation of the most popular third-party
sustainability certifications in coffee has led to modest benefits to coffee
producers overall, though many of the world’s poorest farmers lack the
resources to participate, and supply of certified coffee may be outpacing
demand.
Public Consultation is Open for Rainforest Alliance’s
Sweeping New Standard
At first glance, two of the biggest differences in the new
standards appear to be a mechanism by which producers can more easily work
towards certification within the contexts of their given farms, and more
individualized and data-driven auditing mechanisms both for producers and RA.
Coffee leaf rust swept over Latin America in 2012, and the
economic reverberations continue to be felt today. Photo courtesy of World
Coffee Research.
Coffee is Rapidly Losing Its Resistance to Rust, Says WCR
Science Director
The coffee industry has traditionally and conveniently
placed coffee varieties and cultivars into one of two simple categories when
considering plants’ natural resistance to leaf rust disease: 1) resistant, or
2) susceptible. The line between the two blurred in a publicly revelatory way
when the Arabica variety lempira, which was widely planted throughout Honduras,
was discovered last year to have lost its resistance to leaf rust.
Starbucks Committing $20 Million to Farmer Assistance Amid
Price Crisis
Starbucks has become the first major global coffee company
to publicly put some big money where its mouth is, announcing today the
commitment of up to $20 million in relief funds to coffee farmers being
affected by the price crisis on the commodities market.
Five-Year, $36.4 Million Effort to Boost Coffee and Cocoa in
Latin America
The international development nonprofit TechnoServe is
leading the coffee-related efforts in a five-year, $36.4 million initiative
designed to revive and bolster the coffee and cocoa sectors in six Latin
American coffee-growing countries.
James Hoffmann Let's Talk Coffee
James Hoffmann speaking at the 2018 Let’s Talk Coffee Global
event in Cartagena, Colombia. Photo by Bryan Clifton, courtesy of Sustainable
Harvest/Let’s Talk Coffee.
A Radical New Social Contract Concept from James Hoffmann
Despite all of the best intentions and practical efforts of
the specialty coffee sector’s progressive leaders, it seems little has changed
in terms of the coffee trade’s fundamental dynamics of power and risk, Hoffmann
contended. Hoffmann’s perspective here stems in part from his origin-focused
country-by-country research for “The World Atlas of Coffee.”
New ‘Useful Plants Indicator’ Shows Conservation Lacking in
Coffee
Coffee is behind in the ongoing race to protect wild plant
species biodiversity as the earth faces increasing climate change, loss of
habitat and other natural and man-made challenges, according to a new
conservation research study.
Birds Are Good with Robusta or Arabica, As Long As There Are
Trees
While the prevailing choice among discerning coffee drinkers
is for arabica over robusta, birds seem equally fine with either, so long as
adequate canopy cover is in place and pesticides are kept to a minimum.
coffee processing wet mill wastewater
From Coffee Wastewater to Clean Water and Electricity: Fuel
Cell Gets Boost
Wastewater from coffee processing remains a persistent
polluter, affecting waterways, soil health and entire coffee-growing
communities. In the case of small, farm-level mills — like those found
throughout Colombia and other Latin American coffee countries — coffee
wastewater is often filled with with organic matter, it’s extremely acidic, and
it has high biochemical oxygen demand.
Starbucks Committing $10 Million to Recyclable Cup Solutions
Paradoxically, the company is now investing in solutions to
an environmental sustainability problem that it has long recognized, yet
willfully perpetuates to this day. For example, Starbucks proudly trumpets the
release of its annual holiday cups, mentioning neither the resources used to
produce them nor the fact that the vast majority of them are to end up in
landfills.
Ranking Certifications: German Rersearchers Create VSS Index
for Coffee
In general, the index (called VOCSI) showed that third-party
certifications, particularly those with support from NGOs, outperformed
standards utilizing self-assessment. Examples of the former include UTZ,
Rainforest Alliance and Fair Trade USA, while examples of the latter include
Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. Practices and Nespresso AAA.
