This book provides a collection of intimate photographs accompanied by short vignettes, bringing the lives of 25 Colombian women coffee farmers into sharp focus. Author and photographer Lucia Bawot shatters conventional one-dimensional portrayals of female coffee producers to highlight the full spectrum of their life experiences.

In this podcast from the Innovation Forum, representatives from the Rainforest Alliance, agriculture commodities trader Ecom and finance provider Norandino discuss a LandScale pilot project that is working on deforestation, resilient ecosystems and farm incomes in a coffee and cocoa growing region in Lamas Province, northern Peru. 

This paper, co-authored by FCRN member Simon Bager, assesses the sustainability practices of a sample of hundreds of companies in the global coffee sector, including producers, traders, roasters, processors and cafés. It reports that around one third of the companies have no sustainability commitments, another third have one to four commitments and the remaining third have five or more sustainability commitments.

FCRN member Ujué Fresán has co-authored this paper, which calculates the environmental impacts associated with the packaging of several breakfast foods (including orange juice, cereals and peanut butter). For each food product, significant differences in carbon footprint were found, depending on packaging size, packaging materials and brand. Packaging consistently accounted for a lower carbon footprint than production of the food item itself.

This article evaluates the impact of voluntary crop sustainability standards on biodiversity protection. The authors reviewed the 12 major crop standards (such as Organic cropland (IFOAM), Fairtrade and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), and found that only two of these prohibited all deforestation (Rainforest Alliance/Sustainable Agriculture Network and Proterra). 

This report by a partnership comprising the International Trade Centre, the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture and the International Institute for Sustainable Development summarises the recent market trends and growth in voluntary sustainability standards (VSS), for nine commodities.

Coffee is the most widely traded agricultural commodity of the tropics, and studies have shown that as a crop it is very sensitive to rising temperatures arising from, climate change. Two new studies now look at the implications of warmer temperatures on Arabica coffee production.