How This Happened Sometimes I wonder if there is a genetic component involved when choosing ones projects and purpose in life. In my case, I have always hated seeing usable items being tossed away. When I was three or four years old, I saw the bulky trash collection vehicle for the first time, smashing furniture … Food Rescue App Presentation
Updates from the “Fairdirect Coffee” project: today, we held a small event for members of Fairdirect e.V., to inaugurate our new roaster trailer. We have built it over the last two years so that we can present and sell coffee directly from farmers in Nepal to European customers. We’ll share more photos and videos when … Our mobile roastery is finished!
The “Paradox of Aid” states: “When the ‘conditions of development’ are present, aid is not required. When local conditions are hostile to development, aid is not useful, and it will do harm if it perpetuates those conditions.” (Angus Deaton, in “The Great Escape”). This is, roughly, the idea we try to follow with the Fairdirect … The Paradox of Aid
Important: The following does not constitute legal advice. It is merely content that has been found on the Internet and aggregated / referenced here. Use it at your full own risk. There is no warranty of any kind, and Fairdirect e.V. or its members cannot be held liable for errors in this consequences, and any … Bringing green coffee beans into Belgium
Just a quick update: We got note from Rajesh, our faithful manager of the coffee logistics in Nepal right now, that “our” 300 kg or coffee arrived in Kathmandu successfully, and were already handed over to our cargo and export agency Eagle Export. (With best recommendations, they have been very reliable and professional so far!) … The Fairdirect coffee from Hansapur is on its way
In March 2017, we developed an idea for an optical sorter machine for green beans of coffee and any other small items, built around a Raspberry Pi 3 and machine learning software. The machine and all knowledge about it should be open source, and the whole idea is to give small-scale coffee farmers low-cost tools to … Developing a small color sorter for green beans
10 plastic capsules 10 aluminium film lids 10 plastic sachets 1 cardboard box 0.052 kg of coffee 33.65 EUR/kg The funniest thing is this text on the package (originally in German): “UTZ certified. With our […] capsules, you support sustainable coffee farming. UTZ certified farmers are being educated to produce coffee with regard for people … Coffee capsules: Are we buying trash?
“Don’t exploit people. Just don’t.” There is a lot to be said about so-called international development cooperation: how it benefits foreign workers with high wages, how handouts of food and clothing etc. can disturb the local economy and lead to “addiction”, how in general it can lead to so-called learned helplessness. On the other hand, … Fair and direct coffee
Expensive schemes that don’t help much A frequent criticism of food labelling schemes (incl. the European organic food label and Fairtrade certification) is their cost. For small-scale farmers, the fixed one-time and yearly costs of certification can make the label economically nonsensical to them, even though their mode of production might (perhaps accidentally) conform to … P2P monitoring of food production