By Allison Aubrey, National Public Radio (NPR) If you’re a coffee drinker, chances are the cup of java you drank this morning was made from beans that were produced or harvested by women. Women’s handprints can be found at every point in coffee production. In fact, on family-owned coffee farms in Africa, about 70 percent …
By Emma Sage, SCAA Coffee Science Manager By now you have likely heard of the new scientific study published last week in the online peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE that has sparked a flurry of doomsday headlines for coffee. The study is a collaborative effort between researchers at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London and the …
By Emilio Lopez Diaz, Coffee Producer, Cuatro M Single Origin Coffees Long gone are the days when coffee was just a commodity, when only big corporations would have access to coffee at origin, and when just a few exporters had access to roasters. There had to come a crash in the industry for many to …
By Peter Giuliano, Director of Coffee and Co-Owner at Counter Culture Coffee I was a young coffee person when the concept of sustainability became big news in coffee. In those days—the roaring ’90s of coffee—the idea of thinking in the long-term about agriculture and about industry seemed fresh, exciting and different. The concept of acting in …
By Warren E. Armstrong The SCAA Sustainability Council serves as a “think tank” for sustainability–related ideas and as a liaison to other industry, professional and NGO organizations. As part of its work, the Council has defined several critical issues at origin to promote the long-term livelihood interests for a quality coffee value chain. A quality …
By Tracy Ging, Deputy Executive Director, SCAA Corporate Social Responsibility is defined as the voluntary commitment of businesses to include in their corporate practices economic, social, and environmental criteria and actions, which are above and beyond legislative requirements and related to a broader range of stakeholders—everyone influenced by their activities. When we …
Story by Majka Burhardt Photos by Travis Horn/Coffee Story Ethiopia Coffee can erase a famine. Agree? Disagree? Wonder just how literally I mean for that statement to be? How about this one: Coffee can create greater global understanding. If you’re reading this, you’re involved with coffee. If more than one billion cups of coffee are …
By Emma Sage, Coffee Science Manager, SCAA As the specialty coffee industry grows more concerned with sustainable practices at origin, we often find ourselves in conversations about shade-grown coffee. No one will argue that shade-grown coffee is less sustainable than growing coffee in full sun plantations, but what scientific information exists to support …
By Michael Sheridan Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of working with smallholder coffee farmers in Central and South America as a project manager for Catholic Relief Services (CRS). Our projects have helped farmers increase coffee productivity, improve coffee quality and raise coffee incomes, but one thing they haven’t done is eradicate …
By Tracy Ging, Deputy Executive Director, SCAA Feeling the Effects There is an axiom, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Without hard data, there is a tendency to gravitate to what is in front of us, the more visible. Related to climate change, what has been abundantly visible the last …