Alliance

IWCA and Cup of Excellence Team Up to Elevate Women in Coffee

IWCA and Cup of Excellence Team Up to Elevate Women in Coffee

Coffee lovers, wine enthusiasts, tea devotees—here’s a move set to redefine the industry. The International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA) has struck new partnerships with Cup of Excellence (CoE) and the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE), aiming to amplify women’s roles in coffee’s most prestigious platforms. These memoranda of understanding (MOUs) are more than paperwork—they’re a blueprint for equity, designed to open doors for women producers, jurors, and buyers in a male-dominated field. CoE’s green coffee competitions and auctions have long been a gold standard, lifting microlots to record prices and global acclaim. Yet women remain underrepresented in these high-stakes arenas.…
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Fixing Mapping Errors in Smallholder Coffee Farms: A New Dataset for Transparency and Compliance

Fixing Mapping Errors in Smallholder Coffee Farms: A New Dataset for Transparency and Compliance

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is about to kick into high gear, but a critical flaw threatens to cut hundreds of thousands of smallholder coffee farmers out of the European market. A new open-access dataset called Sample Earth aims to rectify this issue by helping mapmakers accurately classify smallholder farms instead of mislabeling them as forests. Launched last week by the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Sample Earth is a reference dataset designed to improve map accuracy in deforestation due diligence. The groups behind this initiative say that inaccurate mapping could lead to…
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