Search

Copyright of Revista Entramado is the property of Universidad Libre Seccional Cali and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The emergence of Rwanda's specialty coffee sector during the early twenty-first century has brought high-end Rwandan coffee to the shelves of coffee retailers across the United States, Europe, and Japan. While a variety of factors have influenced the rapid development of Rwanda's specialty coffee industry, one of the most significant has been the training of domestic coffee tasters. Known as cuppers, these taste professionals act as a unique link in this global foodway and help enable perception of locally based flavors through marketplace mechanisms. The Rwandan cupper is not simply another middleman in a very long commodity chain. Rather, she or he plays a new role in transforming a generic cash-crop commodity into locality-based luxury item. This new role highlights the language and standards used to differentiate coffees in producing countries for international niche markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which assesses the health risks from occupational exposure to coffee dust. The study was performed in areas such as a coffee haulage company, a coffee silo and a decaffeinating company. Recorded data include case histories, lung function values, and airborne coffee dust. Efforts to reduce dust exposure are recommended as relevant exposure to coffee dust is found to occur during the transshipment of green coffee.

In recent years, the use of collaborative and partnership approaches in health and agricultural research has flourished. Such approaches are frequently adopted to ensure more successful research uptake and to contribute to community empowerment through participatory research practices. At the same time that interest in research partnerships has been growing, publications on methods, models, and guidelines for building these partnerships have proliferated. However, partnership development is not necessarily as straightforward or linear a process as such literature makes it appear, particularly when the research involves divisive or contentious issues. This paper explores prevailing views on research partnerships, and also questions the applicability of partnership models using an emerging research program around gender equity and health in Fair Trade coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua as an example. Moreover, the paper introduces some of the complicated issues facing the authors as they attempt to develop and expand partnerships in this research area. The paper culminates with a series of strategies that the authors plan to use that offer alternative ways of thinking about building research partnerships concerning controversial or complex issues in the field of community health and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a profile of Sunalini Menon, chief executive of Coffee Lab Pvt. Ltd. in India. She is described as Asia's only woman coffee taster. Her background in a male-dominated profession is discussed, including her early work on India's Coffee Board. Her company's work is also discussed, including its formulation of special coffee blends.

Oriental persimmon,Diospyros kakiL., in Upper Kula on the island of Maui (Hawaii) is attacked by the Mediterranean fruit fly,Ceratitis capitata(Wiedemann). Recent suppression trials using mass trapping with a synthetic food-based bait, initiated in alternate host crops before the start of persimmon season, had shown promise as a means of reducingC. capitatapopulation levels. However, this did not adequately suppressC. capitatapopulation where there were adjacent plantings of coffee,Coffea arabicaL., a favoured alternate host, which bears fruits before and during the persimmon season. To improveC. capitatapopulation suppression, we applied a spinosad-based bait spray to coffee plants, starting before persimmon fruits became susceptible to oviposition by the Mediterranean fruit fly. The bait spray suppressed theC. capitatapopulation and led to reduced infestation of both coffee cherries and persimmon fruits. Percentage parasitization ofC. capitatain coffee cherries by established biological control agents, primarilyFopius arisanus(Sonan), was not significantly different in unsprayed vs. sprayed plots even after 11 weekly sprays. These results suggest that mass trapping, combined with spinosad-based bait sprays, are control components that are compatible with biological control and can be combined in an integrated pest management system forC. capitata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the impact of the organic-coffee certification enacted under the transnational certification norms on the logic and practice of economic management and governance in an Oaxacan peasant producers' union in Mexico. Effect on village and regional leaders; Impact upon household and village economic governance; Changes in the statewide producer unions.

Reprints the article 'Peasant Laborers: Paying the Highest Coffee Prices,' from the June 7, 1977 issue of the 'Washington Post' which focus on the plight of coffee workers.

The article focuses on the risk of coffee processing facility workers for the lung disease called obliterative bronchiolitis, according to a research conducted by the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

Presents an abstract of the article `Sensitization to Green Coffee Beans and Work-Related Allergic Symptoms in Coffee Workers,' by F. Larese, A. Fiorito, F. Casasola et al, which appeared in the publication `American Journal of Industrial Medicine.'

This essay engages the ways femininity has evolved through transnational economic relationships in the specialty coffee industry. What I call "fair trade femininities" are reproduced through specific business practices and media representations prompted by transnational feminisms and ethical consumer movements in the Americas. Here, I analyze Café Femenino, a successful brand of women's organic, Fair Trade coffee first harvested in Peru in 2004. The organization's women-only business model provides a unique window into the transnational production of American femininities, marking the brand as something that disrupts the category of "woman" by enacting and depending upon multiple femininities from women who are usually portrayed by American media in monolithic terms. Café Femenino's English-language website--targeting North American ethical consumer movements--describes its Latin American women coffee farmers as uniformly experiencing poverty, violence, motherhood, and abandonment by husbands. The women farmers appear both worthy of support and interchangeable. Such representations of women from the global south have been common in specialty marketing since WWII, and represent an imperial imaginary of formerly colonized femininity. Transnational feminists have rebuked global north feminists for engaging in "rescue" tactics of development aimed at women from the global south, arguing the activism does more for global north feminists' conceptions of themselves as women than it does for transforming conditions of global inequality. However, the economic framework of Café Femenino provides unusual circumstances that intervene in a different area of gender justice: that of recognizing the constructedness of gender. Café Femenino's gender-segregated business arrangements engender multiple femininities, establishing powerful roles for women at every stage of the coffee's transnational production. Every bag of green coffee beans is gendered, tied with a pink ribbon to mark its femininity. North American roasters and retailers additionally give a portion of proceeds to a women's shelter or halfway house in their local community. This practice, what coffee owner Joanne Sargant calls her "favorite, the paying it forward aspect," was a stipulation designed by the Café Femenino farmers. Unlike traditional Fair Trade coffee contracts, which send money from ethical consumers to "worthy" farmers in developing countries, the women of Café Femenino earn income from their coffee sales and cause marginalized North American women to benefit from their coffee. The pay-it-forward element to Café Femenino flips the gendered rescue narrative, making it difficult to cast indigenous Peruvian women farmers in their "normative" gender roles as in need of rescue. The normative genders of the farmers expand along the specialty coffee chain, while ethical consumers have their gendered roles as "rescuers of women from the global south" re-written. Café Femenino's economic arrangement provides the framework from which I engage a feminist analysis of gender representations circulated via news, documentaries, and advertising about Café Femenino. This reading practice reveals the repetition of gender formation in various Café Femenino media. The category "women" fractures into multiple "fair trade femininities" in this political economy precisely because the kinds of women involved in Café Femenino appear to be the same in every kind of media representing them. I read Café Femenino's normative representations of femininity in layers, in which the very repetition of characters--the farmers, importer, roasters, consumers, and pay-it-forward recipients-- reveals the processes by which we recognize these types of women as normalized. Yet the repeated stories contain evidence that the many women of Café Femenino contradict typical western binary gender norms and defy expected north-south flows of aid. I argue that Café Femenino's gender-segregated business model can be understood as functioning through and as transgender phenomena because it draws attention to the ways gender is far more complex than the dominant Eurocentric sex/gender binary. Thus, Café Femenino has the unexpected effect of disrupting binary gender and global north-south power relations through its transnational production of fair trade femininities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article cites the case of a 39-year-old woman presented with chronic hand dermatitis, who had been working in a coffee bar for 12 years. Allergic contact dermatitis and protein contact dermatitis are frequent among food handlers. But contact dermatitis from coffee powder of from the drink is very rare. Many chemical changes occur during coffee roasting and preparation of the drink. The heterogeneous chemical composition of coffee makes identification of the constituents actually responsible for contact allergy very difficult.