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The Coffee Complex, Part III
In my last two posts (Part I and Part II) I began discussing the impact of quality on coffee farmers. Since coffee is grown on such tight margins, and since the price really has little to do with the actual costs of production, most farmers and exporters go to great lengths to ensure that their ...
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The Coffee Complex, Part II
In my last post I asked whether the quality demands of the specialty coffee industry are, in fact, necessary. This demand for quality is the backbone of a $16 million dollar industry – specialty coffee’s estimated share of the roughly $80 billion per year coffee trade (statistics vary widely; these numbers are from the 2010 ...
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The Coffee Complex
The complexity and difficulty involved in turning a small red cherry into a liquid beverage has always surprised me. It seems simple enough: when ripe, the cherries are harvested, weighed, depulped, washed, dried, sorted, stored, exported, roasted, ground, and finally served as espresso or drip coffee. Yet each of these steps involves hundreds of smaller ...
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The Happiest Place on Earth
Once again, the New Economics Foundation has named Costa Rica the happiest country on the planet. The announcement has been met with skepticism and confusion, as well as what might be called pity for the rest of the world. “If Costa Rica is the happiest place on earth,” one man told me, “how bad must ...
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Welcome to Pura Vida
What happens to the family when the state is totally refigured around it? That is, can family and community values stay the same when larger social structures have been transformed? These are the questions that residents of Orosi, Costa Rica are starting to ask themselves, three years after the first provisions of DR-CAFTA, the Dominican ...