"Step Aside, Gents. Witness The Rise of Women in Coffee" -NPR

NPR: 

...As the International Trade Centre has documented, women on family-owned coffee plants in African countries take on about 70 percent of maintenance and harvesting work. Yet they tend to have little or no control over their farms' finances, and they typically do not own land or have easy access to credit.

But change is coming. 

Increasingly in Central and South America, women are making progress. On Tuesday, we documented the story of Guatemalan farmer Miguelina Villatoro. In Colombia, 47 percent of the National Federation of Columbia Coffee Growers' members are female. In fact, one-fifth of that country's farms are owned and operated by women, according to the federation.
(read the full article here).

From the Ground Up sources a fantastic coffee from CODECH in Guatemala; Cafe Mujeres, which is not only comprised of female owners, but the profits are going towards building a women's health clinic in the community!  Taste some here. 

Coffee Quiz

Test your coffee knowledge on this fun little quiz. I got 8 out of 10, can you beat me??

Click here for the QUIZ

NPR: How Coffee Brings the World Together

Coffee is more than a drink. For many of us — OK, for me — it's woven into the fabric of every day.

It also connects us to far corners of the globe.

For instance, every Friday, a truck pulls up to the warehouse of Counter Culture Coffee, a small roaster and coffee distributor in Durham, N.C., and unloads a bunch of heavy burlap sacks.

On any random day, that truck could bring "10 bags from a farm in El Salvador; 20 bags from a cooperative in Burundi; two bags of a special coffee from Guatemala," says Kim Elena Ionescu, one of the coffee buyers for Counter Culture Coffee. She travels the world, visiting coffee farms and deciding which beans the company will buy.

The best coffee, she says, comes from high altitudes, but you cannot grow it in places that freeze, "so you need that mixture of high altitude and warm climate, which makes the tropics the place to grow it."

All across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, people grow coffee.

In many tropical countries, especially poor ones, it's a pillar of the economy; exports of green coffee beans, globally, are worth $15 billion a year.

Read the full story here.

NON-PROFIT STATUS

The IRS gave us the desired stamp of approval! From the Ground Up is officially a tax-exempt organization! 

This means that you can donate to the organization and get a year-end deduction.

Thank you for the patience and support during the last year while we waited for this!

Stay awake...and live longer? The health benefits of coffee.

"Drinking coffee can not only boost your energy but also your longevity. That’s the key finding of a new federal health study of nearly a half-million coffee drinkers that found those who regularly enjoy a cup of java live longer than those who don’t.

 

Cupping at AnaCafe in Guatemala

The National Institutes of Health study, published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicated that caffeinated and decaf coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections.

In an interview published this week in the Journal of Caffeine Research, Neal Freedman — with the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the NIH National Cancer Institute — said his study is among the most comprehensive to date of the health benefits of coffee and has significant implications for java junkies. Researchers tracked 500,000 U.S. men and women — ages 50 to 71, all members of the American Association of Retired Persons — for about 12 years.

Not only did the results show a clear association between coffee and longevity, Freedman said, but they also indicated people who drank the most coffee tended to have greatest health benefits."

Read the entire article here.