Michael R. Neumann is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung. As co-founder of the foundation he is also Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Neumann Gruppe, the global leader in specialized green coffee services, with 43 operative companies in 25 countries. He is convinced that Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung will play a significant role in helping to create a "level playing field" for smallholder coffee farmers in origin countries and to move the tropical agricultural sector towards sustainable development by offering best practice examples from grassroots projects that can be scaled up to regional, national and even international levels.