The issue of handling conservation and livelihood simultaneously has been a development in debate since the 1980s. The discussion brought a sustainable livelihood framework aimed at addressing livelihood, sustainability, and conservation. And later tourism was added to the sustainable livelihood model as well. This is a conceptual study to examine the potential of coffee tourism for sustainable livelihood and conservation in south-west Ethiopia. A model for sustainable coffee tourism development is proposed. The study found that forest and semi-forest coffee production system which is relatively compatible with sustainability is losing its significance due to low yield and net profit. As a result, farmers are diverting to agriculture, which is threatening the survival of the moist montane ecosystem and the gene pool of wild Arabica coffee. To solve this problem, certification for specialty forest coffee has been implemented but failed to deliver livelihood improvement though little progress has been observed in the conservation aspect. It is concluded that unless a rural development approach compatible with livelihood improvement and conservation implemented, the survival of the montane forest and the gene pool of Arabica coffee is endangered. Therefore, a sustainable livelihood model for coffee tourism compatible with conservation and livelihood improvement is recommended to make the region a niche tourism destination.

This knowledge paper describes the environmental and human rights challenges present in the coffee sector. It does that by providing contextual facts and figures of the industry and also presenting an overview of the projected challenges that might occur in the coming years. Secondly, it focuses on offering concrete and adaptable recommendations to the different actors involved on how to make this sector more sustainable. Suggestions are directed mainly to roasters, buyers and producers and express the need to understand the context of the supply chain in which the single actors are engaging, initiating a thorough analysis of the system. Then, it presents additional recommendations on how to be transparent, how to properly engage at origin, build strong relationships, engage in collaborative actions, count on certifications and be innovative. The report concludes with an interview to Paula Mejia from the Sustainable Business Unit at Neumann Kaffee Group. This paper can be particularly interesting for coffee companies working both at the first and last mile of the chain interested in initiating few concrete strategies for a more sustainable system.

What will happen, then, when up to 60 percent of land used for coffee production becomes unsuitable for farming by 2050, as some scientists predict?[3] Changing weather patterns have made coffee producers nervous for years, and now they are starting to feel their effects. Not unlike many other crops and resources, coffee production has decreased due to changes in temperature, longer droughts, and increased invasion of pests.[4] In fact, the UN recently issued a report on global food insecurity, in which the authors estimate that one billion people will face water and food shortages by 2050.[5] Since the level of alarm is nowhere near where it arguably should be after such findings, perhaps a spotlight on climate change’s assault on coffee will make its effects more tangible.

This article examines how a market shift toward high-end (‘Third Wave') coffee creates tension between two producer models of economic engagement: cooperatives, with mechanisms that promote solidarity to minimize risks, and ‘open’ markets, with extraordinary rewards for those able to grow the highest quality coffees. Most Maya farmers value cooperative organization and yet a growing number are defecting, unable to forgo the premiums intermediaries offer for their best beans. This is a complicated moral and economic situation in which the Third Wave focus on single-origin coffees forces changes in relations of production that undermine the cooperative preferences of smallholding farmers.

International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), through its BRIDGE program (Building River Dialogue and Governance), is supporting work on transboundary river cooperation in the 3S (i.e. Srepok, Sesan and Sekong) river basins. Coffee is the dominant commercial land use and a major user of water in the Central Highlands of Vietnam (particularly Dak Lak Province), which forms the headwaters of the Srepok and Sesan (2S) Rivers. In 2019, a rapid assessment of opportunities was conducted to transition coffee monocultures into diversified coffee farming with significant benefits in terms of total crop value, drought resilience, existing coffee supply to global market and dry season water availability and downstream flows. The analysis showed that more efficient irrigation and the transition of drought prone areas out of coffee and into high value tree crops could increase the dry season flow of the 2S by 50% with potentially substantial downstream and transboundary benefits.
There is growing business interest in such transition to reduce the risk of farmers abandoning coffee
altogether under conditions in increasing weather variability, thereby threatening supply chains, and to
ensure compliance with increasingly strict international regulations on pesticide residues.
Building on the 2019 assessment, the objective of this assignment is to prepare a BRIDGE strategy to
directly engage businesses and national and provincial governments in a process to transition coffee production out of coffee monocultures into diverse, higher value, and water saving diversified farming.
BRIDGE’s role in this transition is intended to be catalytic.

Organic certification, as well as cup quality, are factors of interest for the export and marketing of coffee. The aim of this study was to determine and compare the production costs and profitability of certified organic and non-certified specialty coffees among organized coffee growers in the northern coffee region of Peru. Twenty-four small farmers were interviewed in Peru’s Jaén province. These farmers were divided into two analysis groups: (i) Specialty coffee with organic certification (CECO); and (ii) Specialty coffee without certification (CESC). The data was analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric analysis method. The production cost of the CECO group was found to be significantly higher than that for the CESC group (p = 0.00045 and k = 12.313). Moreover, the CESC group was found to be the most profitable across all the profitability indicators analyzed, and the least sensitive to the fall in the sale price of specialty coffee. The study concluded that the high production costs and consequent low profitability of the CECO group is closely associated with fertilization costs. However, environmental sustainability requires technologies, technological services or other private or public sector strategies that will provide support for its viability over the medium and long term

La certificación, en especial orgánica, así como la calidad en taza, son factores de interés para la exportación y comercialización del café. El objetivo fue determinar y comparar los costos de producción y la rentabilidad de los cafés especiales con certificación orgánica y sin certificación en productores cafetaleros organizados en el eje cafetalero del norte del Perú. Se entrevistó a 24 pequeños agricultores en la provincia de Jaén, Perú, que fueron distribuidos en dos grupos de análisis: (i) café especial con certificación orgánica (CECO) y (ii) café especial sin certificación (CESC). Los datos fueron analizados con análisis no paramétrico Kruskal-Wallis. Se encontró que el costo de producción del grupo CECO es significativamente mayor que el grupo CESC (p = 0,00045 y k = 12,313). Por tanto, el grupo CESC es el más rentable en todos los indicadores de rentabilidad analizados y el menos sensible a la baja de precio de venta del café especial. Se concluye que los altos costos de producción y, por tanto, la baja rentabilidad del grupo CECO están estrechamente vinculados a los costos de fertilización. Sin embargo, al ser sostenible con el ambiente y con la sociedad, requiere de tecnologías, servicios tecnológicos u otras estrategias privadas o estatales que den el soporte para su viabilidad en el mediano y largo plazo.

Over the years, Lavazza has honed its skills in assessing the environmental impacts of its products and the organisation’s activities, with the aim of mitigating and preventing such impacts in a process of continuous improvement. It is according to this perspective, and the firm belief that a full engagement of all corporate structures is essential, that environmental sustainability criteria are gradually being integrated in the approach of evaluating products and initiatives, through both ongoing education and raising-awareness activities and the effective use of the results of the LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) analyses conducted.

Over the years, the results of this engagement include positioning environmental sustainability among the top priorities for our stakeholders and the ever-growing number of initiatives and projects that focus on reducing the impacts of processes or products (e.g., the sustainable packaging roadmap and the integration of Life Cycle Thinking in the environmental management system). To report and disclose the way that the various stages of the supply and production chain contribute to environmental impact, in this Report Lavazza has used the Carbon Footprint 30 indicator. Categories of emissions analysed are reported in the following paragraphs.

Agricultural innovation is a primary driver of improved productivity and profitability, climate resilience and adaptation, and soil health and conservation among other critical factors. It contributes enormously to the economic viability of coffee farmers who adopt improved agricultural technologies and, as such, is a catalyst for the sustainability of the entire coffee sector. Coffee has lagged behind other crops in realizing the potential that agricultural innovation can deliver, but also has the potential to take advantage of dramatic changes in the cost and sophistication of new technologies to leapfrog over years of disinvestment rapidly. But there are many ways to focus agricultural R&D investments and research agendas, and there are many different types of organizations that engage in agricultural R&D sometimes in coordinated fashion, and sometimes competitively.

In order to better understand the awareness across the coffee sector of these efforts, and to better understand global and regional agricultural R&D priorities considering the perspectives of different value stream actors, as well as producing country national governments, World Coffee Research undertook a wide-ranging consultation of coffee sector participants in spring 2020. The consultation process consisted of 135 interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, as well as a survey distributed through our partners at coffee business associations (SCTA, SCA, BCA, NCA, and Deutscher Kaffeeverband) to roasting and supplier company representatives.

This document presented by the Sustainable Coffee Challenge in partnership with the Global Coffee Platform and Conservation International draws on the connection between a possible sustainable coffee sector and the nexus between four main pillars: a sustained supply, the conservation of nature, a strengthened market demand and the improvement of livelihoods. In addition, it assesses how the improvement of farmers’ profitability is at the backbone of creating sustainability throughout in connection with the twelve SDGs corresponding to the system. Finally, it presents an analysis reporting how the different pillars are interconnected, addressing the importance of triggering a chain of efforts to create system change towards a more sustainable industry. This framework might be particularly interesting for stakeholders directly engaged with sustainability analysis and looking for an overview of the system.

This informative leaflet presents a comparison of the price perceived by coffee farmers and the average price paid for a cup of coffee in a consuming country. It gives some context on the reasons behind such low prices have been paid to farmers around the world and it informs consumers on how make the right choice when purchasing coffee. Indeed, the leaflet presents some options for consumers to buy differently, reporting a few names of sustainable coffee companies, but also options connected with buying certified coffee or specialty coffee. It includes a small infographic regarding the countries whose producers are payed the least and a quick explanation on premium prices. This is a very recommended leaflet for all consumers looking for concrete and practical suggestions on how to buy their coffee if they want to participate to a more sustainable value chain.

This paper indicates that there is a huge price spread in coffee value chain due to the inability of the small coffee growers to ship their coffee directly to export destinations which is caused by a number of impediments like low bargaining power associated with fragmented production, lack of trade knowledge, lack of capital and information barriers. Thus, it is important to provide visionary long run sustainable solutions to micro level weakness and threats by considering strengths and opportunities of small coffee growers in the country to move up in the value chain. The results of the study also indicates that, there is huge potential for the coffee growers to enhance their gross income by moving up in the value chain. The study also highlighted the initiatives taken by the Coffee Board of India to support small coffee growers to move up in the value chain.

The narratives of migration as adaptation and in situ adaptation are well established in mainstream adaptation policy and are usually presented as independent and opposing trends of action. A common and fundamental element of such narratives is the depoliticized conception of both migration and adaptation. Using a trans-scalar approach, we address the migration–coffee–climate change nexus: first at a regional scale, at the conflictive border of Guatemala–Mexico, to show the contradiction between the current Central American migratory crisis and the narrative of migration as adaptation; second, at a local scale and from an ethnographic perspective, we focus on the process of in situ adaptation in shade-grown coffee plots of smallholder coffee farmers in the Tacaná Volcano cross-border region, between Chiapas and Guatemala. We argue that the dichotomy “in situ adaptation” versus “migration as adaptation” is not useful to capture the intertwined and political nature of both narratives, as illustrated in the case of the renovation of smallholders’ coffee plots in a context of climatic changes. We provide elements to contribute towards the repolitization of adaptation from an integral perspective.

Based on a study of the burgeoning high-end (‘Third Wave’) coffee market in the USA and on research conducted with Maya farmers in Guatemala, this article examines how economic gains are extracted by translating values across symbolic and material worlds. Drawing on anthropological understandings of value and the analytic tools of convention theory, I show how roasters, baristas and marketers have developed a new lexicon of quality for coffee, one tied to narratives of provenance and exclusivity that creates much of the value added in the Third Wave market. This disadvantages smallholding coffee farmers who are heavily invested in land and the material means of production but who lack the social and cultural capital needed to extract surplus symbolic value from their crops. In this unintentional way, the quest for artisanal quality in the coffee market perpetuates classic dependency patterns of global capital accumulation across these value worlds.

This report analysis deeply the challenges of the coffee sector and presents different business solutions that could be implemented to support a more sustainable scenario for all the actors involved. The report starts with a deep investigation on the current situation of the industry. It presents the challenges affecting producing countries, that are struggling with lower prices and higher costs of production and, also, the blooming momentum of consuming countries, whose activities are resulting in higher margins year after year. Then, it analysis the consequences of future changes in both demand and supply and it presents possible projections of future scenarios. This analysis is also aligned with the increasing consequences of climate change that, according to the study, will exacerbate the challenges of producing countries and create important concerns also for buyers, roasters and consumers. To counteract this scenario, the report suggest three solutions: the introduction of a National Coffee Sustainability Plan introducing dedicated policies on an international level, a Global Coffee Fund ready to grant economic support in case of specific needs, and the use of new tools to potentially increase producers’ profits, such as the introduction of new technologies or of a minimum farmgate price. This report is of interested to everyone willing to learn about the future of the coffee sector through a comprehensive analysis.