Just java #2. (South America).
Peru -- Sales of Fair Trade coffee are continuing to rise, despite a slump in world coffee prices. Coffee producers allowed to use the "fair trade" label are currently selling their beans for at least $1.26 per pound--more than twice the September New York coffee price of $0.47. Of...

Corporations that need a cleanup. .
Last year corporations took it on the chin when it came to financial scandal. Here are a few other companies that need cleaning up--their practices aren't necessarily illegal, they're just wrong: British American Tobacco still promotes cigarettes to youth and opposes the World Health Organization's adoption of...

Going Dutch.
Byline: Joe Mosley The Register-Guard Paul Leighton remembers them as a pair of brothers from a rural dairy farming family, with a growing interest in coffee and a world of ambition. "They found me. I didn't find them," says Leighton, a Eugene coffee broker and...

Cameroon: too much oil was bad news for cocoa: the government of Cameroon has launched an initiative to revive the country's cocoa and coffee sectors. Tansa Musa reports from Yaounde.
Before Cameroon began exporting oil in 1977, cocoa and coffee were the mainstay of the economy, contributing about 80% of the country's gross domestic product. But after two decades of neglect and a poorly handled economic liberalisation policy, the two sectors now represent only 1.5% of GDP. ...

Just Coffee.
Coffee with Pleasure: Just Java and World Trade, Laure Waridel, with photos by Eric St-Pierre, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2002. Coffee is a drug that has held humanity unconsciously in its thrall since the rise of its popularity in Europe in the 1700s But the days of...

Where to start.
Organics and sustainable agriculture Planet-Friendly maintains a directory of organic and sustainable food and agriculture Web sites and other resources in Canada. www.planetfriendly.net/organic.html City Farmer is a global, on-line resource centre for urban agriculture, including hydroponics, rooftop and community gardens and urban forestry, www.cityfarmer.org ...

RP coffee exports rise 76% to $2 M.
After stagnating for the past few years, the countrys exports of coffee increased by 76 percent to 740 metric tons (MT) valued at $2.019-million in 2003 from 420 MT worth $1.144-million in 2002, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) announced yesterday. Of the years coffee exports,...

How sweet it isn't? Natural alternatives to sugar, minus the calories and carcinogens.
While visiting my local coffee shop, I watched a presumably aware, health-conscious patron (she ordered a fair trade coffee with low-fat soymilk) quickly dump three packets of that ubiquitous aspartame sweetener in her beverage before heading out the door. Maybe she knows that aspartame has been implicated as a...

NEWS IN BRIEF; P/$ rate closes at P55.81.
The peso closed lower at P55.81 to the US dollar yesterday at the Philippine Dealing System of the Bankers Association of the Philippines from P55.64 the previous day. The weighted average rate depreciated to P55.704 from P55.631. Total volume amounted to $246.4 million. 7-yr bond fetches 11.125%...

Into the valley of life and death: spectacular and unspoiled, Guatemala is a traveller's dream, yet faced with a tourism boom an essential balance must be struck. (Central America).
THE MEMORY OF WAR IS STILL AS FRESH AS wet blood, yet in the villages around Lake Atitlan, the scene is more carnivalesque than funerary. Each village is defined by its own hand embroidered, jewel-coloured uniform, worn by its inhabitants every day, with all the insouciance of film stars...