Want to take an academic look at fair trade coffee? Pick up “Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America” — a collection of academic essays, published by The MIT Press, that looks at coffee issues from a variety of disciplines — agroecology, environmental studies, latin american and latino studies, and more.
If short news articles and clips about fair trade just aren’t cutting it for you, this book’s where you can get a lot of great raw data and serious evaluative studies. Considering the fact that a lot of the impetus behind the fair trade movement relies on anecdotal or single-case stories, the more in-depth, numbers-based studies in this book lend a welcome, somewhat less biased perspective on the problem.
The examples and stories in the essays in this book are less sugarcoated. Because while there are communities where fair trade has shown a clear difference — sent kids to schools, health, community development, empowerment, etc. — that get featured in Fair Trade USA’s brochures, there are also communities that have participated in fair trade programs where concrete changes are tough to see.
One study in the book takes Venezuela as an example. There, fair trade helps mitigate crises and softens economic blows, but the coffee industry’s still full of problems. Farmers are selling 70% via conventional market due to the difficulty of finding buyers — and are struggling for those and other reasons. This study shows that while fair trade can help, a community or country embracing fair trade isn’t necessarily a magic bullet solution that suddenly and significantly improves people’s lives.
In fact, some of the studies more honestly deal with some of the current conflicts between the fair trade model and the organic models — mainly by pointing out that eco-friendly practices aren’t always financially viable, especially in countries where environmental laws are few. One essay studying Veracruz, Mexico notes that the ecofriendliest farms there have the lowest harvest output — not a financially sustainable model, even with the price premiums from organic or fair trade labels.
There is encouraging stuff in these essays too, of course, about increased yield after converting to organic farming — and especially about “intensified” organic farming that can boost yields.
But more than anything, the essays in this book show how complicated everything is. There are, for example, very many different ways of coffee growing — beyond just organic vs. conventional, sustainable vs. technified. And there are many other issues to consider in most coffee growing countries — from the histories of colonialization to transitional farming possibilities to all sorts of other technical and political stuff we usually aren’t faced with in the supermarket when buying a bag of coffee.
The studies do make you wish things were simpler. If only we had solid data — i.e. something like how fair trade certification allowed for an x% incrase in the standard of living of producers — consumer choices would be easier to make. But nothing like that’s available. In fact, what many of the essays emphasize is the necessity of dealing with things on the micro level — looking closely at the diversity of issues, and citing the need for local and regional focus.
Compared to all of that, the current quibbles about fair trade certification seem — small.
Confronting the Coffee Crisis is a heavy read, but there’s lots of interesting stuff to interest the coffee lover — from an essay on the difficult paradoxical work of organic standards inspectors in Oaxaca to a more poetic essay about landscapes. And of course, the book provides a general overview of history of coffee crisis that answers background questions.
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