Category Archives: Coffee

How Brazil and Vietnam are tightening their grip on the world’s coffee – Reuters

With increasing use of mechanization and other new technologies, the world’s top two coffee producers, Brazil and Vietnam, are achieving productivity growth that outstrips rivals in places such as Colombia, Central America and Africa.They are set to tighten their grip.

A plunge in global coffee prices in recent months, to their lowest levels in 13 years, has begun to trigger a massive shake-out in the market in which only the most efficient producers will thrive, according to coffee traders and analysts.Rival producers elsewhere in the world are increasingly likely to be driven to the margins, unable to make money from a crop they have grown for generations. Some are already turning to alternative crops while others are abandoning their farms completely.Such shifts are almost irreversible for perennial crops like coffee, as the decision to abandon or cut down trees can hit production for several years.

“Brazil and Vietnam have had consistent increases in productivity, other countries have not,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, citing advances in mechanization, selective crop breeding techniques and irrigation technology.

In Colombia and Central America, coffee is typically grown on hillsides where mechanization is more difficult, and hand-picking cherries has kept production costs relatively high. The African sector, meanwhile, is dominated by small-scale farmers often unable to raise the capital needed for new techniques.

Source: How Brazil and Vietnam are tightening their grip on the world’s coffee – Reuters

Yellow Bourbon Coffee (Photo: Roast Magazine)

US Army tool reveals how much coffee is needed to stay awake – Business Insider

US Army researchers have developed an online tool that suggests how much coffee you should really drink to stay awake. The algorithm is not only meant to help you become more aware of how much caffeine you’re drinking but can also help reduce your coffee consumption.

For the study, which was published in the trade magazine “Sleep”, participants underwent several sleep deprivation and shift work scenarios. Researchers observed how their lack of sleep affected alertness and performance and how much caffeine influenced this.

In some cases, study participants had to stay awake for up to 60 hours and their regular sleeping time was severely shortened. The research team then developed the Open Access tool 2B-Alert Web 2.0 based on these results.

Link here.

Coffee farmers meet in Brazil amid crisis, seek alternatives – Reuters

Brazil’s city of Campinas, in the southeast state of Sao Paulo, will host the 2nd World Coffee Producers Forum on July 10-11. The first edition was held in 2017 in Medellin, Colombia. Organizers of the global conference say the main objective this year is to look at ways to improve the economic sustainability of producers. “In Medellin, the target was to find a way to mobilize producers, to have a coordinated forum to discuss our issues,” said Vanusia Nogueira, one of the organizers. “Prices only fell from there on, so now we need to discuss alternatives to improve income for farmers,” she said. Coffee prices in New York reached a 12-year low in May at 86 cents per pound. They recovered slightly recently, mostly due to expectations for a harsh winter in Brazil, but are still at around 110 cents per pound, a level seen by many producers as unsustainable.

Source: Coffee farmers meet in Brazil amid crisis, seek alternatives – Reuters