GLOBAL COFFEEPLATFORM

Representing over 150 coffee stakeholders from across the entire coffee sector, the Global Coffee Platform has appointed a new Chair of the Board, Mr. Carlos Brando.

In addition to facilitating the GCP Board’s strategic governance of the multi-stakeholder organization, Mr. Brando is set to further strengthen the relationships between GCP and international donor bodies, ensuring that more and more of the $350M spent annually on coffee sustainability is aligned with a shared sector agenda, better coordinated and therefore more effective. By doing so, Mr. Brando aims at increasing the scale at which GCP enables its members to collectively act on local priorities, increasing the availability of sustainably produced coffee and channeling the added value directly to producers.

Mr. Brando’s emphasis on local action will also help further strengthen GCP’s capacity to support the public-private National Coffee Platforms in various producing countries to continue to define their own priorities and lines of action as well as harmonize National Sustainability Curricula with the global reference code, GCP Baseline.

The GCP acknowledges and sincerely thanks the outgoing Chair, Mr. Ted van der Put for his formative contributions since the organization’s inception.

The GCP Board currently consists of 14 members representing some of the most important actors in the coffee sector – producer organizations such as the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (FNC) and Brazil’s Coffee National Council (CNC) represented by Cooxupé, trade and industry companies such as Olam International, Volcafe, Nestlé, and Jacob Douwe Egberts, and civil society organizations such as Conservation International and Rainforest Alliance.

Carlos Brando is a civil engineer and was a Fellow in Urban and Regional Studies at MIT whose PhD Program he attended. He is the Director of P&A Marketing which has led him to consult for the International Coffee Organization (ICO), the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), the World Bank and many other companies and institutions. Carlos has coordinated coffee projects in over 50 countries on 5 continents including all main coffee growing areas of Brazil. Additionally, Carlos sat on the boards of UTZ and Ipanema Coffees, is a current member of the Coffee Quality Institute’s Board of Trustees, Vice-Chairman of the Santos Coffee Museum Board, that he helped to found, and the São Paulo Museum of Immigration. In 2017, Carlos received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the African Fine Coffees Association (AFCA), while in 2016 a Campinas Agronomy Institute (IAC) Award as Agribusiness Personality of the Year.