Media CenterCRS Marks First-Ever International Coffee Day with Global Coffee Program Launch

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Jim Stipe  (United States)
Catholic Relief Services
(410) 951-7256  
[email protected]

Michael Sheridan (Ecuador) 
Catholic Relief Services
593-997186295
[email protected]

BALTIMORE, MD, October 1, 2015 – On this first-ever International Coffee Day—a celebration of the diversity, quality and passion that surround this important crop—Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is pleased to announce a $4.5 million global program that will engage industry, government and researchers to make the coffee trade more equitable and inclusive.

CRS envisions a coffee sector in which smallholder coffee growers are profitable, farmworkers are empowered, and coffee production protects the environment by mitigating the impacts of climate change and delivering more clean water to communities. This vision depends on public policies and private-sector practices that make the coffee trade more inclusive and equitable.

In service of this vision, the CRS Coffeelands Program will invest in expanded programming, strategic research, and industry collaboration and policy advocacy to positively impact a half-million people over the next three years.

“This is the first time in its more than 70-year history that CRS has invested to specialize in a specific supply chain,” said Michael Sheridan, CRS Coffeelands program director. “It is a testament to the importance of coffee to the livelihoods of millions of vulnerable farmers and farmworkers, to the stability of volatile regions in developing countries and fragile ecosystems in the tropics.”  

Globally, more than 10 million small farm families and countless landless laborers depend on coffee production for their livelihoods. Though they work in a multi-billion dollar industry, a significant percentage experience food insecurity at some point during the harvest cycle every year.

For more than a decade, CRS has worked with upwards of 50,000 farm families spanning 14 countries. We have developed a holistic approach to sustainable coffee production that integrates soil and water resource management with market-driven programming to boost household income, increase coffee quality, enhance organizational capacity and build farmers’ commercial relationships within the specialty market. 

Earlier this year, collaboration with private-sector allies helped farm families from Colombia to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) bring fully traceable, single-origin lots to the U.S. market for the first time. In the case of the DRC, the sale marked the first time Starbucks has ever sourced coffee from the country.

In Colombia, CRS created an advisory council made up of U.S. coffee companies that have advised the staff, partners and participants in the CRS Borderlands Coffee Project in Nariño, a renowned coffee-growing region characterized by internal conflict. Members of the advisory council have also helped farm families sell high-quality coffee to the U.S. specialty market at premium prices for the first time ever. The government of Nariño has embraced the approach, recently awarding more than $8 million to support a local consortium led by CRS that will expand the model’s reach from 1,600 coffee-growing families to more than 10,000.

CRS hasn’t just responded effectively to the needs of leading U.S. coffee roasters in its programming, but is also beginning to collaborate with industry on business model innovation to make their practices more inclusive.

CRS also continues to advocate for more inclusive business practices through its Coffeelands Blog, a respected and influential publication in the coffee industry, and its leadership role on the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) Sustainability Council.

To scale up such programs and bring more equitable models to the marketplace, the CRS Coffeelands Program will rely on a combination of research, policy advocacy and industry engagement all along the supply chain, from farmers to the final consumers. 

CRS will work with longstanding partners, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and World Coffee Research, and other local and international researchers, to examine issues of market access, climate change and impact assessment, bringing results-based evidence to bear on the decisions being made at the farm level, in the public sector and in the marketplace.

An example of such collaboration is last year’s Colombia Sensory Trial, which brought together researchers from CIAT, World Coffee Research and Kansas State University’s Sensory Analysis Center to analyze the sensory properties of two of Colombia’s leading coffee varieties, the traditional variety Caturra and the improved variety Castillo. It has contributed to changes in the way the industry looks at the trade-off between traditional and improved coffee varieties.

The CRS Coffeelands Program will continue to use such innovative research to engage industry and government and to drive dialogue that matters in the coffee sector, highlighting challenges and opportunities in coffee-growing countries. 

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Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. The agency alleviates suffering and provides assistance to people in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, HIV, health, agriculture, education, microfinance and peacebuilding. For more information, please visit crs.org or crsespanol.org and follow CRS on social media: Facebook, @CatholicRelief, @CRSnews, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.