Skilled farmworkers are necessary to harvest specialty coffees in most parts of the world, but they are too often undervalued and invisible to the industry.

By now, many readers will have heard about the coffee price crisis and the SCA’s response team, dubbed the Price Crisis Response Initiative. If you are among them, you likely understand that the price crisis is a complex issue and that there’s no easy, quick solution.

Forces of disruption in agricultural supply chains – intensifying production demands, accelerating climate change, an urbanizing labor force – have led to marginal incomes at the production level for both farmers and farmworkers, but the latter remain largely hidden in coffee price discourse.

Las fuerzas de disrupción existentes en las cadenas de suministro agrícolas – las demandas de producción cada vez más exigentes, el acuciante cambio climático, una mano de obra que emigra a zonas urbanas – han hecho que el nivel de ingresos tanto para agricultores como para trabajadores de sus tierras sea marginal a nivel de producción, si bien los segundos se omiten en el discurso sobre los precios del café.