News

A new Spanish-language manual promotes research-backed farm practices and disease management in a simplified format geared toward small family farmers. The manual, titled Guía para trabajo con familias productoras, was produced by researchers at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), with funding from World Coffee Research (WCR) and other partners.

World Coffee Research (WCR) and Eximware Inc. today announced a strategic partnership to advance WCR’s global mission to enhance supplies of quality coffee while improving the livelihoods of the families who produce it. An initial area of focus will be to introduce WCR’s “Check-off” funding mechanism into Eximware’s Partner XM commodity management- coffee trading and risk management- software platform. This will allow Eximware clients to seamlessly direct “pennies per pound” contributions toward WCR’s mission through streamlined collection and reporting.

When World Coffee Research formed in 2012, one of the first initiatives the organization launched was the International Multilocation Variety Trial (IMLVT), the world’s largest coffee variety performance trial and seed exchange. The IMLVT brought 31 top varieties of Arabica coffee to 23 countries around the world for rigorous testing and evaluation to see how different varieties perform in different environments. Earlier this year—about two years after the trial officially launched in 2016—14 of the 23 participating countries collected the trial’s first data.

This week, World Coffee Research launched a major update to its Arabica Coffee Varieties catalog, expanding it to include varieties from six new countries: Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The catalog previously only covered varieties commonly found in and around Central America.