Coffee producers from Central America and Indonesia dominated the Taiwan International Coffee Show at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center yesterday, sending a strong message that small-scale farmers and their families rely on sustainable supply chains.
“For every five US dollars some big brands make, the farmer only gets one cent. As you can imagine, it’s an unfair game,” Zircle Coffee founder and CEO Elias Rivera told the Central News Agency.
His company promotes sustainable supply chains in his home country of Honduras, working with small farmers and buying coffee beans at a 10 to 20 percent premium compared with market prices, Rivera said.
Photo: Reuters
Zircle Coffee buys at higher prices because he has seen big coffee brands and intermediaries take advantage of smaller farmers, who are vulnerable due to limited access to information on the market value of their product, Rivera said.
“We are trying to form long-term relationships with the farmers. They are the most important people, but actually they are the ones who get the least,” he said.
Rivera was not the only industry representative among the 230 exhibitors across 820 booths who promoted a farmer-centric approach at the 19th edition of the annual show, which opened on Friday and ends today.
Guatemalan coffee importer Alvaro Lopez from JAK International Trade Co said that one of the bigger farms he works with supports four schools, two hospitals and an apartment complex where its workers can live rent-free.
Programs that give farmers’ children access to free basic education and scholarships for higher education are meaningful because it means that kids would not spend their childhood working on farms, he said.
“Sometimes kids prefer to help their parents’ farm so they will earn more profits, but we prefer the kids to go to school and learn skills. If the kids later want to become farmers, that is great, but at least they have tools to improve their lives,” Lopez said.
JAK also buys from family farms that would otherwise have no access to the international market, he said.
“It is very important to have that relationship with the person who is actually in the farm instead of the businessman who is in the office and might not even know how the coffee is actually processed,” Lopez said.
Taiwanese Aimee Chan (詹雅雯), a manager at EOE Indonesia, said that the firm works with local farmers who produce kopi luwak — an Indonesian specialty coffee from beans partly digested by Asian palm civets — to help the producers empower themselves.
The company also promotes collecting beans from droppings of wild civets instead of caging the animals, Chan said.
“I love animals ... and when we opened EOE Indonesia, the one thing we wanted to do was preserve the environment, and caging the luwak is not part of that,” EOE founder Peter Masyuni said during a visit to Taiwan last year, referring to the civets by their Indonesian name.
The Taiwan International Coffee Show is one of the Asia-Pacific region’s largest coffee fair, attracting up to 200,000 visitors every year.
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
‘SACRED MOUNTAIN’: The chipmaker can form joint ventures abroad, except in China, but like other firms, it needs government approval for large investments Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) needs government permission for any overseas joint ventures (JVs), but there are no restrictions on making the most advanced chips overseas other than for China, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. US media have said that TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to companies such as Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp, has been in talks for a stake in Intel Corp. Neither company has confirmed the talks, but US President Donald Trump has accused Taiwan of taking away the US’ semiconductor business and said he wants the industry back
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
RSS