VOCAL joins Swiss Coffee Trade Association Forum in Basel

In the first week of October 2025, VOCAL joined the Swiss Coffee Trade Association (SCTA) Forum in Basel. The event carried encouraging language about empathy, unity, and long-term collaboration – but it also revealed a noticeable gap between the way the industry talks about sustainability and the realities producers face.

 

Traders spoke about managing risk across the supply chain, building trust, and avoiding greenwashing as younger, data-driven consumers demand proof of impact. Yet several assumptions surfaced: that high prices translate to high incomes for all producers, that liquidity is readily available, and that farmers should shoulder more of the costs of transforming production systems. Meanwhile, discussions gave more airtime to blacklisting “defaulters” than to addressing structural causes such as cash-flow pressures and delayed payments.

 

Commodity exchanges were presented as the sector’s anchor of trust, despite being inaccessible to most farmers and disconnected from core issues such as cost of production, living income gaps, and ecosystem health. And while brands increasingly center producers in their storytelling, little evidence was shared that the value generated from those narratives reaches the communities behind them.

 

At its core, Earth is the true supplier of coffee, and producers are its stewards. If the sector wants to manage risk effectively, it must invest in producer resilience through finance, infrastructure, traceability, and genuine value- and risk-sharing. The opportunity now is to move from hopeful words to meaningful action – sharing responsibility and value consistently, transparently, and for the long term