Description
Overview
The purpose of the rough draft is to ensure you are progressing sufficiently towards your final research paper. At this stage you should focus on solidifying main paper topics, gathering supporting evidence, and organizing all the information in a logical flow. To do this use you will rely heavily on your Short Writing Assignment 3, the Research Framework. Your draft does not need to be submitted with final-paper quality sentence structure or grammar. Plagiarism and paraphrasing standards do apply to rough drafts in addition to final versions, so cite properly. Please be aware that the word count for the final paper is 1,750 -2000 words.
Teaching assistants will provide as much constructive feedback as possible on rough drafts, so the more developed your rough draft is the more opportunity you will have to incorporate that feedback into your final paper.
Your Draft should include:
- Title
- Introduction
- A thesis: Since there are two major sections of this paper, your paper will have a compound (two sentence) thesis. The first sentence will respond to the question: ‘What is the most severe threat to production in your chosen country of origin, and why?’ The second sentence will respond to the question: ‘What is one solution that is being implemented to alleviate this threat to production, is the solution sufficient to overcome the threat, and why or why not?’
- Identification, discussion, and analysis of the 1 threat to coffee production
- Identification and analysis of 1 solution currently being done to address these threats
- In-text citations throughout
- Bibliography with 7+ sources including a minimum of 2 journal articles, 1 citation from in-course lectures, and 1 citation from course readings and/or supplemental readings
- At least 1,750-2000 words, not including titles or sources
Final Paper Description:
Throughout the quarter you will be building writing skills and developing content for a research paper. The theme for the research paper is “Coffee Origins + Threats to Production”. In your paper, you will choose a coffee growing country from the list below. You will then respond to the questions:
1) What is the most severe threat to production in your chosen country of origin, and why?
2) What is one solution that is being implemented to alleviate this threat to production, is the solution sufficient to overcome the threat, and why or why not?
You will respond to these questions in two main parts: 1. Threat to production 2. Assessment of solutions. On the next page are details about each section, along with some questions to consider and course Module resources for writing your paper.
As with all of your writing assignments in this course, this is a thesis-driven paper. Since there are two major sections of this paper, your paper will have a compound (two sentence) thesis. The first sentence will respond to question 1 above, and the second sentence will address question 2 above. Focus on developing a strong, clear compound thesis statement that complies with the requirements for a good thesis that were discussed in Live Discussion Section: The Coffee Plant and Biophysical Landscape.
You will have several opportunities to draft and revise your thesis during your writing process including in your Research Framework Worksheet and rough draft/peer review process. If you would like more guidance in developing a strong thesis statement, please come to a TA’s office hours. They will be happy to work with you.
Part 1: Threat to production
In this section of your paper, you will describe the most critical threat to coffee production in your chosen country of origin and explain how it became such a significant threat. A threat is a characteristic or a set of circumstances likely to significantly reduce or even eliminate coffee production or the livelihoods of the people who produce it in a given place.
Examples of threats include:
Rising temperatures that are shifting the climate suitable from traditional coffee production regions within a country
Changes in quantity and timing of rainfall patterns that increase the occurrence of pests and diseases and threaten yields and sustainable production.
The current “C” price does not cover the cost of production, contributing to poverty and food insecurity at the producer level.
Government policies that underfunding agricultural extension programs have left farmers ill-equipped to respond to outbreaks of coffee leaf rust disease.
Please note if you have selected climate change as a threat, you must identify a specific impact of changing temperatures, rainfall patterns, etc. on coffee production systems. See the first two examples below.
Some questions to consider when identifying and writing about a threat to production include:
What are the current agroecological and climatic pressures surrounding coffee production in your country of origin?
What threatens coffee farmer livelihoods in your country of origin?
What makes this threat the most significant barrier to sustainable and long-term viability of the coffee sector in your country of origin?
After identifying and describing your chosen threat to production, you should provide information about how this threat came to be such an issue in your chosen country of origin. Consider the historical, biophysical, economic and/or sociocultural context of coffee production in your chosen country and how each of those factors may have contributed to the severity of this threat. Draw on your answers to the questions from the Research Framework Worksheet to develop this section of your paper. Some specific questions you should consider as you are describing the causes of this threat include:
- What are the historical methods of coffee production and what is the current state of coffee production in your country of origin?
- How would you describe the biophysical landscape of your country of origin?
- What are varieties of coffee under production in your country of origin?
- How was coffee introduced to your country of origin? How was/wasn’t coffee production promoted and supported by the government?
- How does this background explain or contribute to your chosen threat?
- How do the coffee systems in your selected country impact the price coffee farmers are able to receive for their product?
- See Modules 1, 2, 6, 8, and 9 – The History and Global Spread of Coffee (historical); The Coffee Plant and Biophysical Landscape (biophysical); Coffee Economics and Marketing(economic) and Coffee and International Development; Parts I and II (sociocultural).
Part 2: Assessment of Solutions
In the second part of the paper, you will identify, describe and analyze one specific solution that is being implemented to address the threat you identified in the first part of your paper- either by reducing the threat itself or mitigating the impacts of the threat on coffee production. By solution we mean an action being taken by a cooperative/research institution/government/company/international agency to help solve a problem in the coffee sector that is being implemented on coffee farms and/or with coffee farmers. Choose a solution that is actively (or very soon to be) implemented in your chosen country of origin.
Some examples of solutions are:
A development agency providing microloans and inputs to farmers in Ethiopia to increase productivity
The Indonesian government providing shade trees and technical training to mitigate the effects of climate change.
The government of Brazil has invested in a digital extension program for farmers to adopt environmentally-friendly and sustainable cultivation practices
Vietnam is implementing a new series of regulations that monitor water use and fertilizer leaching to promote sound water and input management use to address fertilizer pollution in Vietnamese growing systems
Questions to consider when identifying and writing about the solution to production include: