“When we think about resilience – we’re thinking about both the plant, the producers and the livelihoods going forward.” Mark Lundy of CIAT goes on to lay out what climate change looks like for Arabica coffee: as prices increase, coffee moves up in elevation, price increases, quality drops, and then yield drops, giving way to…
Building high performing and resilient sectors requires looking beyond the value chain and improving the governance of a sector. The last two decades have seen an increasing emphasis on company and supply chain driven approaches to promote sustainable production and trade of agricultural commodities such as cocoa, coffee, cotton and staple crops. Some of these…
Smallholder farmers around the globe are facing unstable productivity due to changing climate and weather patterns. The ways in which the private sector supports these farmers to build resilience to climate change and/or engage in efforts to mitigate climate change can have significant impact on the ability for farmers to make a living, the security…
While brands and manufacturers endeavor to understand sustainability performance on the ground, they may also be interested in how individual direct suppliers contribute to that performance through their policies and programs upstream. How does a brand assess what suppliers are doing in producing regions to improve conditions on the ground and support the brand’s overall…
Many sectors have developed platform or “backbone” organizations with a mandate to collect and manage precompetitive data. While there is a large amount of detailed data out there currently (farm size, income, adoption of practices, productivity), there has been a lot of hesitation in sharing this data for fear that it may be misunderstood or…
Nutrition is increasingly being identified as a key challenge within sourcing communities and an area where companies and their implementing are focusing more time and resources to investigate the nutritional situation on the ground and provide services to improve nutritional diversity and food security. This work has been described as a “no regret” intervention. However,…
Speakers: Roberto Vega, Syngenta; Christine Condo, Sustainable Harvest; Brian Gleeson, Catholic Relief Services Training and Service Delivery: Key to Successful Agriprenuers: A discussion of innovative and effective service delivery models that incentivize adoption of GAP and are effective in professionalizing smallholder agriculture. Sustainable agriculture depends on farmers adopting the best practices in managing their crops, soils and…
Speakers: Mark Lundy, CIAT; Laurence Jassogne, IITA; Britta Deutsch, HRNS Africa Building coffee growing communities that are resilient to climate change and can sell into stable, resilience value chains was the focus of this deep dive session. Mark Lundy (CIAT and Laurence Jassogne (IITA) from the CGIAR global program Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS)…
The CEO Water Mandate couldn’t have stated it more clearly: “Water poses one of the most vital sustainable development challenges of our time.” Increasing pressures on water reserves and the effects of climate change underline the need for the food and beverage industry, along with public sector donors and governments, to prioritize practical solutions to…
Indicators of Poverty and Hunger in Coffee Supply Chains When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters decided to measure the impact of their CSR programs, they asked the Sustainable Food Lab and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) for help. Together, they went into producer communities to identify useful indicators (in partnership with the growers themselves) that would enable…