Poor Farmer

Related: ECX Board of Directors appoints interim CEO  Confusion surrounds puzzling resignation, flight of ECX boss ---- ECX Appoints Former Zemen Bank VP as CEO By Fasika Tadesse Addis Fortune December 15, 2014 Following a year-long selection, ECX again chooses a bank executive as its leader. Ermias Eshatu, the Newly appointed CEO of ECX Photo: Courtesy of Addis Fortune The Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) has appointed Ermias Eshatu, vice president of Zemen Bank, as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) after a year long selection process. The ECX, which is struggling to meet targets, is choosing a bank executive for its leader for a second time. The ECX was established in 2007 and commenced its trading operations in 2008. As a public-private enterprise partnership aiming to create a market infrastructure for framers to trade their agricultural products, mainly grains, and transforming the country's agriculture into a market-oriented p...

A bitter cup: climate change profile of global production of Arabica and Robusta coffee Christian Bunn* christian.bunn@hu-berlin.de Source: Climatic Change - An Interdisciplinary, International Journal Devoted to the Description, Causes and Implications of Climatic Change Via SpringerLink Published online:   December 13, 2014 Abstract Coffee has proven to be highly sensitive to climate change. Because coffee plantations have a lifespan of about thirty years, the likely effects of future climates are already a concern. Forward-looking research on adaptation is therefore in high demand across the entire supply chain. In this paper we seek to project current and future climate suitability for coffee production ( Coffea arabica  and  Coffea canephora ) on a global scale. We used machine learning algorithms to derive functions of climatic suitability from a database of geo-referenced production locations. Use of several parameter combinat...

FOX News December 11, 2014 A new 2.0 machine with specially marked K-Cups. (Keurig.com) In March, when coffee giant Keurig announced its 2.0 brewers would be designed exclusively for its expensive K-Cup single-use pods, people were understandably outraged. It meant that the new machines, designed with a scanner that reads and rejects any pods without an officially licensed digital ink stamp on the top foil, would no longer accept non-Keurig-branded coffee pods, usually at a fraction of the price. The company claimed that the move was to ensure consistent quality between brews but companies supplying the non-Keurig pods cried foul, according to Quartz. Earlier this year, Treehouse Foods , one of the third-party pod makers, filed a lawsuit against Green Mountain Coffee- Keurig's parent company --for attempting to monopolize the market and promised to reverse engineer the brewer and design compatible pods within "months." Now that Keurig 2.0 m...

By Michaela Whitbourn Investigations reporter The Sydney Morning Herald December 03, 2014 Can a coffee seller trademark the Italian words for "gold" and "five stars"? That was the question at the centre of a long-brewing legal battle between the vendor of Vittoria coffee and the importer of rival brand Molinari. On Wednesday, the High Court ruled that Cantarella, vendor of Al Pacino-spruiked Vittoria coffee, could trademark the words "oro" (gold) and "cinque stelle" (five stars) for its premium coffee. Cantarella had successfully trademarked the words in 2000 and 2001. But it lost the rights last year  when a three-judge bench of the Federal Court overturned its previously successful lawsuit against Modena, the Australian distributor of Molinari coffee, for infringing its trademarks by using the words on its products. The full Federal Court said the words were merely "descriptive" and could not be monop...

By Peter Murphy Reuters December 05, 2014 BOGOTA (Reuters) - A German entrepreneur has invented an in-home machine that quickly turns raw beans into a freshly brewed cup of coffee, racking up 5,000 pre-orders as consumers search for the perfect brew and retailers hunt for new ways tap the coffee market. Inventor Hans Stier says his Bonaverde machine's ability to roast beans at the optimum temperature and for just the right amount of time and almost as quickly as filter brewing machines, sets it above the crowd of current coffee makers. As coffee consumption is increasingly associated with sophistication in its mature arabica-focused markets, novelty in preparation has become big business as more cafes boast trained baristas and sales boom in markets such as the $8 billion single-serve segment, dominated by Nestle's Nespresso. "This is the freshest coffee you'll ever taste," said Stier, the CEO of Bonaverde, who quit work as a lawyer in 2011 ...

By Yuliya Neyman * Huffington Post Blog December 05, 2014 My first trip to a coffee-producing country was in 2008. I was traveling to Costa Rica, and right up there with surfing in Tamarindo and seeing the Volcan Arenal was what I considered a culinary must: sampling some fabled Costa Rican roast. Imagine my dismay when, upon settling into a cozy local restaurant, and requesting a coffee, I received... Nescafe. As I continued to travel to countries famous for their coffee - Peru, Tanzania, Rwanda - I realized that my experience in Costa Rica was no aberration. As many frustrated travelers come to find, the countries richest in coffee often produce almost exclusively for export, resigning themselves to drinking instant. Not so in Ethiopia. Coffee culture in Ethiopia - considered to be the drink's birthplace - dates back centuries, and continues to this day. In fact, according to the International Coffee Organization (ICO), domestic coffee consumption acco...