ABSTRACT
Life cycle analysis and the carbon footprint of coffee value chains Louis Bockel and Laure-Sophie Schiettecatte, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Italy
1 Introduction
2 Life cycle analysis
3 Valuing coffee quality and sustainability
4 Coffee value chain carbon footprint performance
5 Using carbon footprint performances to upgrade coffee value chains
6 Case study: green coffee in Haiti
7 Carbon footprint and green labelling
8 Conclusion
9 Where to look for further information
10 References
Seventy-five per cent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and most of them depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihood. Agriculture is a source of livelihood for about 2.5 billion rural people and provides jobs for 1.3 billion smallholders and landless workers (World Bank 2007). Rural households also have other diverse livelihoods in non-agricultural activities such as agro-processing, trading and so on. Together all these activities ensure food requirements for rural households and generate income. But if poverty has to be reduced, it is important for rural households to interact with agricultural markets (IFAD 2003). Promoting exports of agricultural products and linking of farmers to global markets will also potentially reduce poverty. Concomitantly, market imperfections along agricultural value chains and unfair conditions in global markets apparently prevent these beneficial impacts to be fully realised and might even exacerbate poverty by increasing farmers’ dependency income and the volatile market price of some agricultural products such as coffee.
