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Around 2001, I learned of an exciting collaborative at the University of California at Santa Cruz, consisting of faculty, graduate students, and other food- and social-justice-oriented researchers and activists who informally called themselves the “coffee mafia.” The collaborative had an ambitious agenda. How, they asked themselves, could an ecological approach be woven together with a social and economic justice agenda that addressed the crisis among coffee producers—small farmers in Nicaragua and other countries—who saw the rapid and painful decline of the price paid to the farmers during the years 1985–2005? And how could the decline in the price paid to farmers (which led to the loss of numerous small coffee farms and the migration of farmer-producers to the cities and across the borders in search of work) be reconciled with the fact that the retail price of coffee has remained about the same? Moreover, consumption has been essentially flat.
The researchers were also interested in coffee producers’ responses to this crisis. These included the use of ecological strategies (shade-grown, organic, and other agro-forestry and agroecology practices) as well as Fair Trade certification programs and the marketing of the Fair Trade label to consumers and retail outlets in the United States and in Europe. The researchers recognized that, although these approaches and strategies were still limited, they nevertheless represented important efforts designed to challenge and begin to undo what has become an “interrelated livelihood and ecological crisis,” as David Goodman puts it in his introductory chapter. Thus, in pulling together their material, the “coffee mafia” researchers focused on two important connected goals: to identify and analyze the multiple aspects of the crisis and to elaborate case studies that could evaluate promising strategies and the role of farmer organizations who have connected ecological and social-justice goals (including many of the agro-ecological practices that pre-dated the current crisis) and that place the coffee farmer at the center of those strategies for change.
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