100. New Sustainability Reports - Specialty and Total Market

100th post - woo hoo!                                                             15. January 2021

Over 80 data donors to the Transaction Guide

As a fitting 100th post on this blog, we are excited to share about the 2020 Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide , which was released two days ago, 13 January, 2021. You can click here to download the report. Artisan Coffee Imports is proud to be a data contributor this year. 

Download the Transaction Guide: www.transactionguide.coffee.  

Another useful coffee industry report, covering both specialty and commodity, is being released today: the 2020 Coffee Barometer. Download this report here: https://coffeebarometer.org/

"The coffee supply chain is closely tied to the top ten multinational roasters that represent over 35 percent of global trade in green coffee and engages millions of smallholders and workers." ~ 2020 Coffee Barometer

The two reports are synergistic, because the Coffee Barometer strongly urges more pre-competitive collaboration between importers and roasters on behalf of farmers. The "Transaction Guide" is a good example of what that kind of collaboration looks like. Indeed, on page 38, the Barometer discusses the value of Transaction Guide and its transparent price sharing as an alternative to pricing based on the C market. 

For the most part, the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, as it's name implies, focuses on the low-volume, but high dollars-per-pound part of the coffee world -- the high-quality specialty coffee market. Meanwhile the Barometer will teach you more about the largest roasters and importer multinationals and the high-volume, low-quality, low price-per-pound commercial grade coffee trade.

It was interesting to join a promotional webinar for the Coffee Barometer today. It was hosted by a media group in Amsterdam named CIRCL. Below are some highlights and a summary of a few of the comments from their high-powered panel of guests.

Moderator: Bahram Sadeghi, journalist

Speakers:

Sjoerd Panhuysen, Director of Research at Ethos Agriculture and editor of the Coffee Barometer. 

Kaitlin Cordes, Researcher at Columbia Center on Sustainability in New York City. She discussed the recommendations of the Jeffery Sachs report to the World Producers' Forum.

Vanusia Nogueira, Director, the Brazil Specialty Coffee Association (BSCA).

Mario Cerutti, Chief Sustainability Officer, Lavazza

Juan Antonio Rivas, Senior Vice President, Olam International.

I found Cordes' summary of the three recommendations of the Jeffrey Sachs report useful. They are:

1. Support each producing country to create a National Coffee Sustainability Plans, 

2. Create an international Coffee Fund of about 10 billion USD to support producer prices when they fall below a certain level.

3. Increase Domestic Consumption of coffee.

Key comments:

Less than $.005 additional price paid by consumers, for every cup of coffee sold, would make the 10 billion coffee fund possible. The criticism of this is that it is charity instead of fundamental structural change. The counter to that criticism is to think of it as the "user" side of the industry as shouldering some of the risk that currently is borne by farmers alone -- especially price and climate change risk.

A minimum farm size is needed in most countries. Diversification of income is a only a hedge and productivity improvement is only one step among many. 

According to Mario Cerutti, the "coffee crisis" is more than a crisis. It's not going away after a short time. He also commented that paying 10% of coffee exports per year into a coffee fund is not realistic. He says it will put roasters like Lavazza out of business.

99. Babies and Research on Better Informed Husbands

 Jan. 13, 2021         Excerpt from a World Bank Blog               

At Artisan Coffee Imports, we are regular readers of the World Bank Blog, "Development Impact." We especially appreciate posts by Markus Goldstein, and this week's post was no exception. He starts with the intriguing title, "Is an informed husband a better husband?"

The paper Goldstein reviews deserves attention because it shows that we must take issues like intra-household gender dynamics seriously if we want to tackle issues like fertility. In this study, a relatively simple intervention is observed as making meaningful progress in not only reducing the chance of pregnancy, but also shifting preferences, improving communication, and making folks happier in their marriage. 

I give you the setting of the paper here -- you will need to click and read the above link to learn the details of the intervention and results.

The setting is Lusaka, Zambia. National fertility rates are on the high side, with 5.3 children per woman aged 15-49. In this context, as in many others, men would prefer, on average, to have more children than women (in Ashraf and co’s sample, men would like 4.43, women 4.19). Maternal mortality is high: 1 in 59 Zambian women die giving birth. And men are less aware of the factors that contribute to maternal mortality than women. For example, 84.6 percent of women identify advanced maternal age as a risk factor, but only 74.3 percent of men do.

So, this adds up to a situation where men are less informed about a risk they want their wife to take. And she can’t effectively communicate this risk to him. 

(Quoted from Markus Goldstein, Development Impact Blog)

As Ashraf and co-authors argue, we still have some ways to go to understand these things better, but for now the results of this study help us get a handle on how asymmetric information and differing preferences at an intra-household level is impacting decisions about child-bearing.

98. New Year 2021: Inspiration from Nobel Prize Laureates

 Jan. 5, 2021    

Happy New Year! Yesterday the American Economic Association hosted a wonderful, international webinar allowing fans of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics laureates to get to know the people and their work a little better.

Click here to view the recording on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvnojrkrRDU

The beauty of Zoom recordings allows you to feel as if you are in the room with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, the Nobel Laureates, and people who have worked with them closely. All of the individuals speak candidly and  share the highlights of why their work has been so impactful in the world of development economics.

For any reader who has not been in the coffee industry very long, please note that at Artisan Coffee Imports we consider ourselves as participants in field of development economics, albeit at a very applied and microscopic level.