In the mail

Alex Singleton, the director-general of the Globalisation Institute, kindly wrote to me – in response to this – saying that I might be interested in a post of his about "fair trade" coffee:

Earlier this week I suggested that the way forward for developing country coffee producers was to for them not just to grow the coffee but also to process and package the coffee and stick their own trademark on it.
"This is exactly what Café Britt has been saying for the past 20 years!" says Adrian Loening, Director of 100% Arabica, a company that sells Café Britt’s products in the UK.
Café Britt is a brand of coffee from Costa Rica and Peru. The coffee is processed and packaged in the producing countries. That's important because it enables developing countries get more of the value of the coffee and climb up the economic ladder - and apparently because the green coffee has not been shipped around the world, the quality is better, too.

I claim no expertise because, despite the fact that I am Italian, on the rare occasions that I do drink coffee I favour the instant kind - with lots of milk and sugar! Even so, I am very pleased to learn that rational ideas are being put into practice.
In other news, Meryl Yourish lets me know that she has kindly blogrolled this blog. Thank you, Meryl! Incidentally, the only other place (I know of) where I have been blogrolled (quite a long time ago) is Different River, so let me take this opportunity to thank him as well.