Five ways to make your shop more sustainable

The research report is to provide a clear understanding of the methodology used by the Africa Great Lakes Region Coffee Support project (AGLC) to determine the cost of production (CoP) for coffee farmers in Rwanda. In documenting how the CoP data were collected and the estimates derived, users will be equipped to use the findings of this research confidently and appropriately as they incorporate them into planning and decision making in the coffee sector. It is intended for this report to also assist research purposes and program implementation elsewhere in the Africa Great Lakes region and beyond.

This study looks at the impact sustainability standards have on income, food security and nutrition in Uganda. There is a growing body of literature that looks at sustainability standards, most commonly Fairtrade and Organic and UTZ and the positive and negative impacts on smallholder farmers in developing nations. This study uses instrumental variable models and simultaneous equation systems to show the relationship between certification and increased calorie and micronutrient consumption. The specific impacts have been measured by the output price levels and farm profits, as well as the overall household income and poverty rate. The motivation for this study was to address concerns of food safety and the environmental and social repercussions of agricultural production. Sustainability standards were introduced to address these concerns, as well as for market differentiation. The authors address the disconnect between what sustainable consumption means in consuming countries versus producing countries, however this study alludes to a positive correlation. While the concrete results differ, due to specific institutions playing a significant role, the overall conclusion is that smallholder farmers can indeed raise their income levels through greater participation in sustainability certification. It was also found that in houses with certifications, women have greater control of both coffee production and finances.

This research article focuses on understanding the determinants and drivers of Third-party Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) adoption. The analysis presents a supply chain investigation aimed at identifying the reasons behind the adoption of VSS systems. Moreover, it includes a thorough analysis of the leverage of local and transnational actors in driving farmers’ certification, as well as the geographic distribution of certified farms in a three-country scenario: Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. In addition, the authors present interesting results on the difference in geographical distribution of VSS programs regarding the altitude of coffee production and the size of the certified farms presenting a comprehensive assessment in the three countries. The study comprises a general overview of the coffee supply chain and policy-driven production system in Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala, followed by a thorough literature review, one-to-one expert interviews and spatial mapping analyses. This research article is of particular interest for researchers and sustainability experts evaluating certifications schemes and studying their impacts into the coffee value chain as a whole.

Welcome to the Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. (Keurig) fiscal 2016 sustainability report. As a company founded on social responsibility, we are committed to using the power of business to Brew a Better World. This report highlights our efforts, including our progress toward our 2020 sustainability targets. Our work focuses on three key areas: our commitment to Environmental Responsibility, including development of the recyclable K-Cup pod; creating Strong Supply Chains; and supporting Our People and Communities. An important theme to our work is Clean Water, a cross-cutting topic that impacts much of what we do.

Rie Makita opens her paper by asking the question, what role does Fair Trade certification have in encouraging producers to adopt environmentally sound practices on their farms? Fair Trade was created to address social and economic inequities, but has many tie-ins to the environmental component of sustainability, as Makita explains. Ultimately, Makita determines that Fair Trade can at times act as a linkage institution, connecting small farmers to markets but also to the resources they need to adopt sustainable farm practices. She examines many nuances of this idea, including the fact that Fair Trade and Organic certifications are often linked and their impacts cannot always be easily separated. Readers with an interest in improving Fair Trade certification, improving Organic certification, Fair Trade beyond the coffee industry, and South Asian cooperatives will find this article particularly useful.

In the summer of 2013, we learned that inspectors from Brazil's Ministry of Labor found evidence that 15 coffee farms had employed workers under what the country calls "conditions analogous to slavery." It was a shocking revelation, and one that raised lots of questions: What does "slavery" mean in Brazil in 2013? How widespread is the practice in the coffee sector? What does it look like? And, perhaps most importantly, what can be done to address it?

Farm certification is rapidly becoming a sine qua non for access to specialty coffee markets. At the centre of these changes are smallholder coffee producers, responsible for 80% of global coffee production. Although rural households are known to depend on more than agricultural production alone, the literature on specialty coffee and certification has rather narrowly focused on coffee income and production. In this study, broader impacts are explicitly taken into account. Household income was decomposed into categories corresponding to specific income-generating activities and coffee income was broken down into price, yield and area effects. Results show that coffee certification encourages farmers to specialise in coffee production, increasing coffee income but not total household income, at least not in the short run. The time and effort required to attain the higher coffee income offered by certified production means farmers have to give up other activities. This substitution effect cancels out the income effect, such that there is no increase in total household income. The lack of an effect on total household income suggests the return to the additional labour effort required for certified coffee production is not higher than in other activities, questioning the benefits of certification for small-scale producers.

The Colombia Sensory Trial was a cross-sector collaboration coordinated by CRS and joined by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the Sensory Analysis Center at Kansas State University, the World Coffee Research program at Texas A&M's Norman Borlaug Institute, and cuppers from eight influential coffee organizations: Counter Culture Coffee, Federacion Nacional de Cafeteros, George Howell Coffee, Intelligentsia Coffee, Keurig Green Mountain, Red Fox Coffee Merchants, Starbucks and Stumptown Coffee. The Trial enlisted all of these organizations to contribute to rigorous, independent research on the comparative cup quality of Castillo and Caturra samples collected from 25 farms in Narino during the 2014 harvest.

After the Crisis of the Rust in 2011-2012 the lack of information available about the options of coffee varieties resistant to rust and practices of agronomic management of rust became evident. In order to face this last WCR and USAID, a collaboration with CATIE was finalized to take advantage of CATIE's extensive experience and library in order to collect the best agronomic practices for the management of coffee rust known through a condensed manual. comprehensive and accessible that can be used by researchers and technicians to make recommendations for agronomic management of rust control for coffee growers. The Manual of Good Agricultural Practices is divided into sections that describe the disease, the organism, and the various methods of control, as well as the way to transmit this information to the producers.

Cultivation of Coffea arabica is highly sensitive to and has been shown to be negatively impacted by progressive climatic changes. Previous research contributed little to support forward-looking adaptation. Agro-ecological zoning is a common tool to identify homologous
environments and prioritize research. We demonstrate here a pragmatic approach to describe spatial changes in agro-climatic zones suitable for coffee under current and future climates. We defined agro-ecological zones suitable to produce arabica coffee by clustering
geo-referenced coffee occurrence locations based on bio-climatic variables. We used random forest classification of climate data layers to model the spatial distribution of these agro-ecological zones. We used these zones to identify spatially explicit impact scenarios
and to choose locations for the long-term evaluation of adaptation measures as climate changes. We found that in zones currently classified as hot and dry, climate change will impact arabica more than those that are better suited to it. Research in these zones should
therefore focus on expanding arabica's environmental limits. Zones that currently have climates better suited for arabica will migrate upwards by about 500m in elevation. In these zones the up-slope migration will be gradual, but will likely have negative ecosystem
impacts. Additionally, we identified locations that with high probability will not change their climatic characteristics and are suitable to evaluate C. arabica germplasm in the face of climate change. These locations should be used to investigate long term adaptation strategies
to production systems.

This study empirically provides evidence of diversity of rural coffee farm-households and climate vulnerabilities in Uganda. We specifically characterized farm-household systems in the coffee-based farming systems; identified perceived climate risks; identified generalized landscape-level and specific farm-household system-level adaptation practices; and determined socio-economic drivers that impacted uptake of adaptation practices. 688 farm-households were surveyed and asked what they perceived as major climate risks, and how they adapted to experienced shocks/stresses in Eastern (Arabica) and Central (Robusta) Uganda

In this article we analyse Fair Trade as a form of non-state regulation, building on the literature on
the internal politics and governance of Fair Trade International (FTI) certification. We focus on recent developments in the FTI certification system, including the split of Fair Trade USA from FTI and the emergence of the Small Producer's Symbol (SPP) as an alternative to FTI certification. We highlight the role of the three regional Producer Networks, in particular the Latin American Producer Network, the CLAC, in the politics and governance of the FTI system. In order to analyse these issues we employ an alternative reading of Karl Polanyi's work in relation to Fair Trade. We problematise the claim made by some in the literature that FTI certification is an example of Polanyi's concept of re-embedding. Instead, we draw on Polanyi's concept of oversight to analyse Fair Trade certification. We argue that the emergence of the SPP out of the CLAC shows promise for being a mechanism of oversight more reflective of Polanyian re-embedding than FTI certification. We also emphasise how the growth of the SPP and the pressure from the Producer Networks have prompted governance reform within the FTI system.

This report presents an overview of the different strategies existing on the market for low-carbon emission coffees. First, the author includes a review of different sustainable coffees schemes, comprising sustainability certifications and direct trade. Secondly, she presents an overview of the coffee production in Costa Rica as a pivotal example of sustainability. Grabs focuses on Costa Rica for its key role in the enforcement of specific sustainable-driven regulations and the presence of private-owned low-emission projects, which makes this country the leader in sustainable coffee production. Finally, she presents the different marketing strategies for low-emission coffee existing in the market. On the one hand, she focuses on third-party regulatory schemes such as climate certifications in producing and consuming countries, generation of carbon credits systems, and the possible creation of national law-emission product label. On the other hand, she presents the opportunity to focus on marketing strategies connected with an independent communication focused on direct trade and other independent schemes. This report is of particular interest to all the actors involved in certifications and sustainability schemes, particularly focused on low-carbon emission coffees.

This paper provides an overview of some potential impacts of climate change to the coffee value chain. It also examines some of the work being done by industry and community leaders in case studies on mitigation and adaptation strategies, and it makes recommendations for how all stakeholders in the industry can participate in building a more resilient coffee sector.