![]() Just like agriculture is a linchpin for rural development, income is a linchpin for agriculture’s sustainability.Įven among sustainability-minded buyers, the most popular approaches to addressing economic sustainability involve measuring prices against the ICE futures price, a.k.a the “C market price.” Buyers often embrace an “X is much better than the C” mindset, yet that may not reflect a clear goal, or an understanding of what economic sustainability actually means for coffee farmers. Thus, ensuring sustainable economic returns should be considered a pre-condition, or essential infrastructure, when considering all other initiatives. Economic unfeasibility is what we might consider a root-cause barrier to broader sustainability aims, which might be anything from workers’ rights to pollinator protection. The poverty cycle dictates that investing in longer-term, future-forward shifts, when current compensation is inadequate simply to make ends meet in the present, is impossible. This is likely true even if those investments would spur positive outcomes across social and environmental dimensions, or even if they would lead to improved economic outcomes in the long term. If the basic farm economics don’t net out - meaning the efforts required to produce and sell coffee eat up all reasonably available time and resources, yet still don’t result in a proper payoff - then further investment is a nonstarter. Digging Deeper into Economic Sustainability In short, living incomes are required to allow upstream actors to provide for their families, invest back in their businesses, and maintain a decent standard of living.Īs any entrepreneur knows, profitability is the means through which other impacts and initiatives can come to life, while a lack of profitability carries the opposite effect. Lake Atitlán and the Toliman volcano are visible on the walk to the Tinamit Cooperative’s coffee grove in Guatemala.Įxperience - and more importantly, farmers directly - tell us that essentially all of the dimensions of sustainability, including economic and social components, hinge upon agricultural products being a viable source for livelihoods. Photo by Phillip Davis for Heifer International. As the saying goes, “no farms, no food.” In coffee, the translation is “no coffee farms, no coffee.” Yet it’s a good starting point in unpacking coffee sustainability as a whole, since the very concepts of sustainable agriculture and sustainable value chains arguably rely on the premise of farmer livelihoods. an INGO) dedicated to sustainable living incomes in rural communities, particularly in the coffee sector. ![]() It’s a big, complicated topic, and a very personal one for me as a director at an international non-governmental organization (a.k.a. I’m excited to start with the subject of economic sustainability. Esteban, 28, sprays coffee plants using organic fertilizer in Lagunas Community, Honduras.Īs we embark on our shared learning journey Deconstructing Sustainability in Coffee, it’s time to take a closer look at what the term means, and how that might affect how we collectively think, talk and act moving forward. 2019 photo by Russell Powell for Heifer International. ![]()
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