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Friday, March 29, 2024

Taya Brown is a graduate student working with coffee hybrids in the Guatemalan Highlands. Her work has been partially advised and supported by ConDev.

Taya BrownTaya Brown

GRADUATE STUDENT

Taya Brown has spent the last few years studying obstacles to adoption of newly bred and introduced coffee hybrids in several smallholder coffee farming communities in the Guatemalan Highlands. The phenomena of study was provided by a development project titled, Sustainable Incomes through Coffee Farming Improvement, which was funded by The Starbucks Foundation and implemented by World Coffee Research (WCR) and Anacafé, the National Association of Coffee in Guatemala, between 2015 and 2018. The project's objective was to support socioeconomic gains for smallholder coffee farmers who experienced dramatic reductions in profit as a result of the 2012-2013 coffee leaf rust epidemic through delivery of 130,000 Centroamericano coffee hybrids to affected smallholder farmers. Taya's role has been to identify any obstacles to adoption of these hybrids, stemming from either farmer perceptions of hybrid characteristics, or the project that introduced them.

As there is a history of conflict which re-located the communities in this project from other regions of Guatemala onto coffee lands in the Highlands where they currently reside, and aspects of conflict are still present and affect the daily lives of these smallholder communities, Taya's work has been partially advised and supported by ConDev. Initial studies have led the way for further studies and she has continued to build collaborations to address some of the obstacles these farmers face, and to investigate questions that have arisen along the way.

For more information, contact Taya at: tayabrown@tamu.edu

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