STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 35 FNC c.e.o. Roberto Vélez Vallejo ity at Starbucks, said the chain has paid $18.5 million in additional premiums to growers, as well as investing in small holders and women producers. Annette Pensel of the NGO Global Coffee Platform (GCP) also stressed the importance of private sector input. GCP is training small groups of farmers in new techniques that lower their production costs, linking them to think tanks, and setting up cross-border networks of smallhold- ers to share experiences about what they've tried and how it worked. By employing more modern digital techniques, GCP also hopes to counter the youth drain and keep upcoming generations on family farms, an urgent response to the aging grower demographic. Grow the market – and the margins Along with specialty coffees, there is massive opportunity for revitalising the industry by increas- ing world consumption. In the US per capita consumption is on average only one cup a day. Only one-sixth of the world's population consume even one cup a day. "There is enormous potential here," said Jeffrey Sachs, who also noted the fortuitous release of two separate articles on the benefits of coffee consumption. One, a Gallup poll of life satisfaction among a varied mix of countries, showed that top coffee-drinking nations (The Netherlands wins hands down with 2.5 cups per capita a day) were highest on the scale, which controlled for other factors such as income, available health care, and good governance. The other, from The Annals of Internal Medicine, linked coffee-drinking to longer life. "There is a growing consensus that coffee contributes to mental and physical well-being," he noted. "Use this! Be a voice in the marketplace. Communicate to consumers on your packaging, at points of consumption," he said. Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) executive director Ric Rhinehart had more good news. Specialty consumption is growing among an unexpected demographic: 13-24-year-olds in the US. And there is room for expansion in "tea" countries like China, India, and Russia, for example, and in Eastern Europe. He seconded Sachs on targeting soda drinkers with the message that cof- fee is a higher quality and more healthful beverage. But by the end of the final panel, producers had heard it all one too many times. "It's about price," said Joseph Keiya of the Kenyan president's office. Marcelo Caixta Paterno, director of Sincal, the Brazilian Association of Coffee Growers took it further during a Q&A after Tuesday's sustainability panel, "We are not asking for charity," he declared. "We are demanding a fair price for our product." Sincal is working on a plan to counter the Brazilian Agriculture Ministry's control of coffee inventories. Incensed that "the government sold off all of Brazil's coffee reserves—I mean, who does that?" the Brazilian Coffee Growers Association has put forth a plan to buy up stocks from Brazilian producers and then to create a sort of international coffee bank to be run by grower's as- sociations internationally. "Prices should be up around $1.80 or even $2.00 a bag," he said; "we're not going to sell at current prices anymore." The idea was supported at a later panel by Bopanna Manavittara Belliapa of Equinox Planta- tion Management India: "Sixty producing countries can calculate country-specific prices and come up with an international base price." In another bid to place the grower's closer to power, Sincal president Armando Mattiello, is said to be about to announce a run for the Brazilian parliament, the first grower to do so ― al- though Brazilian MP and confer- ence attendee Eviar de Melo from the Espirito Santo region, is an ardent advocate for producers in Parliament. But one smallholder voiced producers' budding sense of re- volt: "The price we get is decided in New York and London. That has to change."

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