It was more than a decade ago when I first started talking and writing publicly about the urgent need for World Coffee Development, an industry-backed agency that does for community and economic development in coffee communities what WCR does for breeding. What prompted it then? A crisis of governance: when coffee leaf rust ravaged Central America during the 2012/13 crop cycle, there was no obvious organization positioned to coordinate a sectoral response to the social and economic impacts in coffee communities. What is bringing me back to the topic today? The same thing: the giant sucking sound in Washington caused by a $40B disinvestment in overseas development assistance has served as a painful reminder that we still don't have (and desperately need) a single organization that can coordinate the vital, market-aligned investments that are needed in the places where coffee is grown.
Forget the tired slogan "trade not aid." It is not aid or trade. The formula for lasting impact is aid plus trade. The benefits delivered by trade are often the returns on investments made by aid – investments that would not have been made by the trade because they would have been seen having too much risk, not enough reward, or both. As we move into a new era in overseas development assistance, let's celebrate the impact of developmental approaches to trade, but let's not forget the catalytic impacts of well-placed aid.
I can't think of a better way to describe the clear-eyed persistence of everyone working to make coffee better amid a perfect storm of threats than what jazz great Wynton Marsalis calls "the blues ethos" and defines as "an optimism that is not naive."
More reflections on the current moment in the market, including efforts to score it, name it, graph it, and put it in some historical perspective.
Over the past 20 years, I have had the good fortune to work on both the buying and selling sides of the coffee trade. On both sides, I have experienced market rallies, and on both sides my experience has taught me that high prices can be the enemy of quality, in part because buyers and sellers alike cope with market shocks in ways that can undermine their trading relationships. For relationships anchored in mutual commitment to quality, this coping strategy can be perilous, and make rebuilding on the other side of market rallies harder.
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