Poor Farmer

Coffee disconnect is brewing Demand for specialty brands has roasters leaving futures exchanges By Julie Wernaw The Wall Street Journal August 6, 2015 A worker separates coffee cherries in Brazil. Specialty-coffee buyers  are turning to unusual pricing plans, using alternative benchmarks,  even directly investing in producer farms.   PHOTO:   PATRICIA MONTEIRO/BLOOMBERG NEWS Consumer demand for better-tasting coffee is splitting the coffee market in two. A growing number of coffee roasters that deal in small farm-produced and best-flavored coffees are leaving the traditional, and more volatile, futures market, which they say has become so disconnected from their business models that it is no longer useful to manage risk. The rise in demand for specialty coffee, now one of every two cups in America, has upended the coffee market as producers are choosing to invest directly with farmers and take the investment risk alone rather th...

Two ministries oversee production and trade in coffee and tea, but this is unsatisfactory By Snetsehay Assefa Addis Fortune July 6, 2015 The Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) is collecting comments on a draft regulation to re-establish an authority for coffee and tea development years after a similar body was discarded as irrelevant. The new body, to be called Coffee & Tea Development & Trade Authority, will not be any different from the now defunct Coffee & Tea Authority, which was abandoned by the government seven years ago, said Fikru Amene, coffee development director at MoA. The Authority was abandoned with the introduction of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. The re-establishment of the Authority came at the request of the Prime Minister at the end of April, 2015. Subsequent to the request, the Ministry finalised the draft regulation based on an assessment of the sector, which was carried out with the collaboration of the Ministry of Trade (MoT) an...

Suspended coffee traders await further action by Ministry of Trade By Snetsehay Assefa Addis Fortune July 6, 2015 Coffee-roasting exporters have been put on hold until the contradictory proclamation is amended Three months after the Ministry of Trade (MoT) suspended four coffee-roasting and grinding companies from purchasing export standard coffee; it is yet to take any further measures. Aster Bunna, Jalanera Coffee Export & Farm Plc, Safu Trading and Tar Trading are the four companies that MoT found trading export standard coffee in its investigation in January, 2015, Getahun Bikara, director of Coffee Marketing at MoT disclosed. But the ban applies to all companies involved in a similar business. MoT has restricted the companies from purchasing export standard coffee based on, Proclamation No 602/2008, A Proclamation to Provide for Coffee Quality Control & Marketing, Getahun stated. Article 2:24, which defined "coffee roaster", is the article...

Aaron E. Carroll The New York Times, The Upshot May 11, 2015 When I was a kid, my parents refused to let me drink coffee because they believed it would “stunt my growth.” It turns out, of course, that  this is a myth . Studies have failed, again and again, to show that coffee or caffeine consumption are related to reduced bone mass or how tall people are. Coffee has  long had a reputation  as being unhealthy. But in almost every single respect that reputation is backward. The potential health benefits are surprisingly large. When I set out to look at the research on coffee and health, I thought I’d see it being associated with some good outcomes and some bad ones, mirroring the contradictory reports you can often find in the news media. This didn’t turn out to be the case. Just last year, a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies looking at long-term consumption of coffee and the  risk of cardiovascular disease was published . The resea...

The chain is a punching bag for those who distrust big business, but it has helped revolutionize the US coffee scene and paved the way for smaller businesses to flourish Nina Roberts The Guardian May 2, 2015 Three years ago, Elias Gurmu and his wife, Sarina Prabasi, spotted a shuttered shoe repair shop in their new Manhattan neighborhood. They had moved only a year earlier from Addis Ababa,  Ethiopia . And they thought the tiny vacant space was the right spot for an Ethiopian coffee shop. Their gentrifying pocket of Washington Heights, dubbed “Hudson Heights” by realtors, had no coffeehouses despite New York City’s more than 280 Starbucks and a slew of small boutique coffee chains like Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Blue Bottle Coffee. The closest specialty coffee shop, a  Starbucks , was a seven-minute walk south, a world away by New York City standards. Gurmu, a serial entrepreneur, and Prabasi, both 42 years old, took a gamble. They invested their s...

Forbes March 29, 2015 Your morning coffee could help give birth to a new generation of trees and plants.   Reduce. Reuse. Grow., a San Luis Obispo-based startup, has pioneered a new type of coffee cup — one encased with seeds.  After you trash the cup (in a specified bin), the company will ensure that those cups are planted in three nature parks in California. Given that Americans drink 400 million cups of coffee a day, amounting to 140 billion cups annually, this could create systemic change — that is, if the big coffee brands (ahem,  Starbucks  ), were to adopt the new technology.   Alex Henige, a Cal Poly student who was majoring in Landscape Architecture with a minor in Packaging and Industrial technologies, wanted to see a solution to our growing consumerism.  He picked coffee cups, a daily consumption that was amounting to a massive pile of waste. But what about recycled cups? Is that not good enough? The startup argues th...

Originating from the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, coffee was introduced to Turks in the early Ottoman period. Gradually,it gained an important place in Ottoman culture and became popular among patrons of coffee houses in Istanbul EKREM BUĞRA EKINCI Daily Sabah March 26, 2015 I n the past, foreign travelers observed that Turks drank Turkish coffee when they were ill, and if they did not get well, they wrote their will and waited for death to come. Indeed, Turks did not only drink Turkish coffee for pleasure but also as a remedy. In fact, Turkish coffee has become an internationally known drink over time. Coffee originates from the Kaffa region in Ethiopia. According to the legend, a shepherd observed that the goats were jumping up and down and wandering around the meadow more energetically than ever. Out of curiosity, he investigated the situation and discovered that the animals were behaving strangely because of the plant they were eating. He tried it himself, and th...