Honey processing. Daily Coffee News photo.
As might be expected, the topic on many people’s minds this year was coffee prices, which for much of the year sat at woefully unsustainable levels.
Like weather-related events, the massive leaf rust outbreak throughout Mesoamerica in the earlier part of this decade, or political instability, prices on the commodities market represented an imminent threat to many millions of smallholder coffee farmers throughout the year.
Given such a situation, it’s natural to want to propose solutions — be they related to structural changes to the market, changes to government regulation, or changes that might be made by individual actors on the roaster/importer/buyer side to build a more sustainable and just supply chain. Yet looking back at 2019, we see far fewer heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all solutions, and much more introspection.
Earlier in the year, Jan von Enden, the past general manager of Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung…
