Photo by Rodrigo Flores
[N]ine months have passed since the SCA launched its Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative due to the worryingly low prices paid to farmers in the commodity market, which dipped below $1.00 per pound last August and have continued to hover at unsustainable prices. Led by a team of staff and volunteers from the SCA’s Sustainability Center, the initiative has focused on research of other industries tackling similar problems and mapping the systems within coffee that led to the crisis in order to find actionable intervention points that will create systemic change.
SCA Chief Sustainability Officer, Kim Elena Ionescu, and Director of Strategy & Steering for Advocacy, Ellie Hudson, recently led a webinar presentation that walked through the organization’s research and approach to solving this complicated issue. Part of the research included several convenings across the globe of stakeholders throughout the supply chain in order to identify possible reasons for today’s price crisis. As a result of this research, the initiative developed several documents containing their findings and are asking the industry at large for their feedback through peer review. These documents can be obtained by emailing pricecrisis@sca.coffee. Ionescu and Hudson asked that feedback and comments be submitted by August 31 in order to be considered during the initiative’s next steps of system mapping and action identification and execution phases.
