Published April 27, 2021, 12:13 PM
The United States (US) is funding two separate agriculture projects in the Philippines with combined investment of P1.6 billion.
In a letter to Philippine Agriculture Secretary William Dar, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Thomas J. Vilsack said his agency is committed to making “historic investments” in the agriculture sector not just in the US but also in other countries like the Philippines.
This was in response to Dar’s letter congratulating Vilsack for his appointment as the USDA chief. In the letter, Dar also urged for “strengthening collaborative efforts between the Philippines and the US on agricultural trade, technical cooperation, and other partnership opportunities.”
Traded volumes of high-quality specialty coffee declined as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic while volumes of lower-quality specialty coffees increased, according to a recent analysis from the authors of the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide.
Peter W. Roberts and Chad Trewick penned the 19-page report documenting the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on specialty coffee purchasing behaviors in the 2019-20 harvest year. The report covered thousands of contracted transactions from the dawn of the pandemic through October 2020, providing comparisons to the prior year.
The data used for the report came from 58 “data donors” who submitted their coffee contract data for anonymized analysis in the two most recent years’ harvests as part of the ongoing SCTG project.