Archive for July, 2007

Sustainable Harvest – A Relationship Coffee

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers, a Portland, Oregon-based green coffee importer that provides sustainable, higher income markets for coffee farmers around the world. Sustainable Harvest was the early pioneer in the sustainable specialty coffee niche of fair trade and organics. It serves quality-oriented specialty roasters in North America and Japan. Sustainable Harvest is known in the industry for its triple bottom-line approach, with a focus on social, environmental and economic impact on the coffee growing communities it serves. The company sources and imports the highest quality certified organic, fair trade, and shade grown coffee from small farmer cooperatives in Latin America and Africa.”

Please Note: The Sustainable Harvest website can usually be best viewed in Firefox.

Don’t miss the videos linked to the site!

Coffee Traceability with Utz Kapeh Certification

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Utz Kapeh Certification

“UTZ CERTIFIED is about… professional coffee growing, traceability & trust … Coffee farms and cooperatives use UTZ certification to prove that they grow their coffee professionally and with care for their local communities and the environment. UTZ CERTIFIED empowers growers with knowledge concerning good agricultural practices and the global coffee market. Certification also provides growers with a stronger position in the market due to the growing buyer demand for certified coffee.”

The “story” behind the coffee, and thus its traceability, can also be navigated through their site.    

Coffee Traceability for Haiti

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Bridging the Global Digital Divide. Coffee – Technology – Haiti.

Alcatel-Lucent joins with Cafés Malongo, the University of Nice and ComCEL to offer broadband Internet access to the isolated rural areas of Cap Rouge in Haiti.
This pilot project called “Traçabilité du Café” (Coffee Traceability) will give Haiti’s coffee cooperatives Internet access from their plantations by applying WiMAX and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies. By having such access to the latest information technologies, they will be able to monitor the traceability of their fair trade labeled production and sell their coffee on optimum terms by reducing the number of intermediaries.”

Mapping Global Inequalities conference

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

UC Atlas Conference – Mapping Global Inequalities: Beyond Income Inequalities

For several years there has been debate in the academic and popular media about the implications of globalization for poverty and inequality. The debate has, however, become stalled partly because it is too narrowly conceived, being focused almost exclusively on income inequality and on the national scale. The conference will expand this debate by both mapping global inequality at various scales and by deploying multidisciplinary perspectives to take the debate beyond income inequality.

The Fair Tracing Demo

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

Over the summer, the Fair Tracing Project has two more members: Adel Haider and Vishal Shah, two students at UCL. They are working together on a Fair Tracing Demo. Please have a look at the current status of their work: here or here (find the links on the sidebar as well).

Please note that this is still an early prototype. However, you can help them by leaving feedback which would be very much appreciated.

Green food heats up

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

New Zealand and Australia’s farmers are fighting back against the concept of food miles:

As counter-intuitive as it is, a study by New Zealand’s Lincoln University last year found that New Zealand dairy products sold in Britain, even allowing for shipping, used only half the energy and emissions per tonne than did their British equivalents. For lamb, it was only a quarter. Like size, distance isn’t everything.