8 See My Virtual Coffeehouse, “For the Good Earth,” http://myvirtualcoffeehouse.com/for-the-good-earth, accessed November 3, 2013. My Virtual Coffeehouse is a website run by the National Coffee Association (NCA) in the United States.
9 For works that deal with the historical evolution of coffee see Anthony Winson, Coffee and Democracy in Modern Costa Rica (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1989); David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Robert G. Williams, States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (eds.), The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For works devoted to power, politics, and class, see John M. Talbot, Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Christopher Bacon, “Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Can Fair Trade, Organic, and Specialty Coffees Reduce Small-Scale Farmer Vulnerability in Northern Nicaragua?” World Development 33: 3 (2005); Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (London: Zed Books, 2005); Roldan Muradian and Wim Pelupessy, “Governing the Coffee Chain: The Role of Voluntary Regulatory Systems,” World Development 33: 12 (2005); Jytte Agergaard Larsen, Niels Fold, and Katherine Gough, “Global–Local Interactions: Socioeconomic and Spatial Dynamics in Vietnam’s Coffee Frontier,” Geographical Journal 175: 2 (2009); Jeffrey Neilson and Bill Pritchard, Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Insightful journalistic works include Anthony Wild, Coffee: A Dark History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop, rev. edn. (New York: New Press, 2006); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2nd edn. (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Most of these works have little to say about the geopolitics of coffee statecraft or tend to replicate the distinction between state and market being critiqued here.
10 The quote is from Robert H. Bates, “Institutions and Development: Talk for the First International Coffee Organization World Coffee Conference” (London: ICO, 2001), p. 13. See Bates, Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Bates is a lead institutionalist thinker. For a critique of this approach, see Vivek Chibber, “Building a Developmental State: The Korean Case Reconsidered,” Politics and Society 27: 3 (1999).
11 Talbot, Grounds for Agreement. For more on the global value chain approach, see Daviron and Ponte, Coffee Paradox; Niels Fold and Bill Pritchard, Cross-Continental Food Chains (London: Routledge, 2005); Henry Bernstein and Liam Campling, “Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism I: Trading Down,” Journal of Agrarian Change 6: 2 (2006); “Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism II: ‘Profits with Principles’?” Journal of Agrarian Change 6: 3 (2006); Jennifer Bair (ed.), Frontiers in Commodity Chain Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); John M. Talbot, “The Comparative Advantages of Tropical Commodity Chain Analysis,” in Bair, Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research.
12 See Bernstein and Campling, “Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism I,” and “Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism II”; Talbot, “Comparative Advantages.” In addition, as noted by Talbot, “Comparative Advantages,” the focus of global value chain literature on developing specific typologies for different chains has suffered from the weakness that it is difficult, if not impossible, to define an entire chain on the basis of a single typology: different firms may dominate along different nodes of a chain, and this can change significantly over time. Concepts such as “lead firms” and “drivenness” are, thus, highly instructive, although in this work I employ them in a manner looser than is typically the case in much global value chain work.
13 See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2005); Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007). These approaches are devoted to understanding imperial powers, but can be instructively applied to all capitalist states. Harvey’s work on the two logics of capitalism is based on a reformulation of Arrighi’s earlier conception. Peter Gowan’s unique use of Marxist political economy in dialogue with neo-realist international relations theory is central to the notion of “economic statecraft,” as is Ellen Meiksins Wood’s insight into the manner in which capitalist states work to preserve the artificial separation between the economic and political realms. The historical work of Steven Topik, which emphasized Southern agency in the coffee world, has also indirectly influenced the notion of coffee statecraft. See Clarence-Smith and Topik, Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
14 Wood, Empire of Capital.
15 David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 162–7; Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte, Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); Duncan Green, “Conspiracy of Silence: Old and New Directions on Commodities,” paper presented at the Strategic Dialogue on Commodities, Trade, Poverty and Sustainable Development Conference, Faculty of Law, Barcelona (June 13–15, 2005).
16 Talbot, Grounds for Agreement.
17 Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds.
18 Statistics on Nestlé are taken from Fortune Magazine, “Global 500” for 2012, at CNN Money online, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2012/snapshots/6126.html, accessed November 26, 2012. Statistics on Vietnam are based on 2011 figures, taken from the World Bank data online, http://data.worldbank.org/country/vietnam, accessed November 26, 2012.
19 For more on specialty coffee see Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds. For corporate advertising see Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Starbucks’ total net revenues for fiscal year 2013 were $14.9 billion, of which 74 percent ($11 billion) came from stores in the Americas. See Starbucks, Fiscal 2013 Annual Report (Starbucks, 2013). In 2012, the retail value of the entire US market was estimated at around $30–2 billion, with the specialty coffee industry accounting for a 37 percent volume and a 50 percent value share. See Specialty Coffee Association of America, “Specialty Coffee Facts & Figures” (March 2012), http://www.scaa.org/PDF/resources/facts-and-figures.pdf, accessed August 29, 2012.
20 Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine, From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory (London: Routledge, 2009).
21 Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2005); Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jagdish Bhagwati, Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Paul R. Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
22 The notion of free trade as a political, economic, and ideologically charged “package” is derived from Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008), p. 8.
23 Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 50, 55–8.
24 Louis Lefeber and Thomas Vietorisz, “The Meaning of Social Efficiency,” Review of Political Economy 19: 2 (2007).
25 See Starbucks, 2012 Global Responsibility Repor
t: Year in Review (Starbucks, 2012), p. 4.
CHAPTER 2
1 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999). See also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); Robert Brenner, “The Social Basis of Economic Development,” in J. Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); David McNally, Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2006).
2 Sachs, End of Poverty, pp. 31, 50.
3 For more on coffee’s early expansion, see Steven C. Topik, “Coffee,” in Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells (eds.), The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil During the Export Boom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Steven Topik, “The Integration of the World Coffee Market,” in William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (eds.), The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
4 The history of the world system in this chapter relies on Polanyi, Great Transformation; Brenner, “Social Basis of Economic Development”; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Wood, Origin of Capitalism and Empire of Capital. Much of the general historical narrative of global coffee, as well as statistics on prices, consumption, labor movement, and production during the colonial period, is drawn from the rich empirical work of Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds. An earlier chapter on the history of coffee appeared in Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee, pp. 101–34.
5 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 19–74; Wolf, Europe and the People without History, pp. 195–201.
6 Brenner, “Social Basis of Economic Development”; Wood, Origin of Capitalism.
7 Topik, “The Integration of the World Coffee Market,” p. 37.
8 Mario K. Samper, “Café, Trabajo y Sociedad en Centroamérica (1870–1930): Una Historia Común y Divergente,” in Víctor Hugo Acuña Ortega (ed.), Las Repúplicas Agroexportadoras. Tomo IV: Historía General de Centroamérica (Costa Rica: FLACSO – Programa Costa Rica, 1994). Rural smallholders who provide some of their subsistence needs through home production but must ultimately sell their labor power to survive are often referred to as “semi-proletarian.” See Carmen Diana Deere and Alain de Janvry, “A Conceptual Framework for the Empirical Analysis of Peasants,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 61 (1979).
9 Topik, “Coffee,” pp. 61–7.
10 See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and International Institute for Trade and Development (IISD), Sustainability in the Coffee Sector: Exploring Opportunities for International Cooperation (Geneva: UNCTAD; Winnipeg: IISD, 2003), pp. 5–6.
11 UNCTAD and IISD, Sustainability in the Coffee Sector, p. 6 n. 16.
12 This brief account of Costa Rican history relies in particular on the work of Winson, Coffee and Democracy in Modern Costa Rica; Williams, States and Social Evolution; Paige, Coffee and Power.
13 Cathy Payne, “Heavy Coffee Consumption Linked to Higher Death Risk,” USA Today (August 16, 2013), http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/15/coffee-consumption-death-risk/2655855, accessed November 19, 2013.
14 Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, pp. 229–62.
15 Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, p. 280.
16 This understanding of international politics and power, along with the quote of “skewed,” comes from Robert Cox, “Labour and Hegemony,” International Organization 31: 3 (1977), p. 387. The reference to a “tug of war” is drawn from Wolf, Europe and the People without History, p. 148.
CHAPTER 3
1 “Social regulation” is drawn from the idea of “social efficiency” advanced by Lefeber and Vietorisz, “Meaning of Social Efficiency,” as well as the ideas in Kevin Watkins, Growth with Equity Is Good for the Poor (Oxford: Oxfam GB, 2000); Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006); Ananya Mukherjee Reed, Human Development and Social Power: Perspectives from South Asia (London: Routledge, 2008). The concept is more fully developed in Gavin Fridell, Alternative Trade: Legacies for the Future (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2013).
2 The general narrative and statistics on coffee prices, consumption, and exports in the decades leading up to the signing of the ICA draw in particular on Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds.
3 Talbot, Grounds for Agreement.
4 Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, pp. 48–9.
5 Talbot, Grounds for Agreement; Gibbon and Ponte, Trading Down; Ellen Pay, The Market for Organic and Fair-Trade Coffee: Study Prepared in the Framework of Fao Project GCP/RAF/404/GER, “Increasing Incomes and Food Security of Small Farmers in West and Central Africa through Exports of Organic and Fair-Trade Tropical Products” (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Trade and Markets Division, 2009); Inter-African Coffee Organization, Improving African Coffee Processing and Market Access (Abidjan: IACO, 2010).
6 Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, pp. 273–7.
7 Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, p. 59.
8 Oxfam International, Mugged.
9 Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, p. 111.
10 Oxfam International, Mugged; Inter-African Coffee Organization, Improving African Coffee Processing and Market Access.
11 According to Oxfam International, Mugged, p. 2, the same year that the ICO announced $45.2 million in funding for its projects, each of the world’s four largest coffee companies (Kraft Foods Group, Nestlé, Sara Lee, and Procter & Gamble) had coffee brands worth $1 billion or more in annual sales.
12 ICO agreements are available at the ICO website (http://www.ico.org).
13 Anna Edgerton and Mario Sergio Lima, “Brazil to Buy Coffee above Market Price through Option Contracts,” Bloomberg.com (August 7, 2013). Wexler, Lewis, and Josephs, “Brazil Drought Jolts Commodities’ Prices.”
14 Lefeber and Vietorisz, “Meaning of Social Efficiency,” pp. 141, 158, 161.
15 Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee.
16 In one particular case in the mid-1990s, the use of “endosulfan” as an insecticide in Colombia was linked to more than 200 poisonings. See UNCTAD and IISD, Sustainability in the Coffee Sector; Robert A. Rice, “A Rich Brew from the Shade,” Americas 50: 2 (1998); Dicum and Luttinger, Coffee Book.
CHAPTER 4
1 Daniele Giovannucci, Bryan Lewin, Rob Swinkels, and Panos Varangis, Vietnam Coffee Sector Report (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004), p. ix.
2 Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, p. 7.
3 The history of the Vietnamese coffee industry is drawn from Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, as well as D. D’haeze, J. Deckers, D. Raes, T. A. Phong, and H. V. Loi, “Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts of Institutional Reforms on the Agricultural Sector of Vietnam Land Suitability Assessment for Robusta Coffee in the Dak Gan Region,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 105 (2005); Dang Thanh Ha and Gerald Shively, “Coffee Boom, Coffee Bust and Smallholder Response in Vietnam’s Central Highlands,” Review of Development Economics 12: 2 (2008); Larsen et al., “Global–Local Interactions.” See also Gavin Fridell, “Coffee Statecraft: Rethinking the Global Coffee Crisis, 1998–2002,” New Political Economy (2013), accessed January 20, 2014.
4 Wood, Empire of Capital.
5 Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, p. xi.
6 After 20 years of intense negotiations, Russia became a member of the WTO in 2012, an event much desired by coffee sectors in Brazil and Africa that have sought greater access to the Russian coffee market, the seventh largest in the world and the largest for instant coffee. See Adam Robert Green, “Russia–Africa Trade: Set for a WTO Boost?” This is Africa (November 22, 2012). States have also used regional free trade agreements to settle disputes over various barriers blocking the smooth transport of beans. See the case of the dispute between Tanzania and
Rwanda, in Edward Ojulu, “Rwanda Squeezes Tanzania to Remove Barriers to Trade,” Bridges Africa 1: 4 (October 25, 2012). For more on Vietnam’s reluctance to take part in “sustainable” coffee certification, see Veronique Mistiaen, “A Better Future Is Percolating for Vietnam’s Coffee,” Guardian (March 26, 2012), http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/mar/26/better-future-vietnam-coffee-growth, accessed August 7, 2012.
7 Gowan, The Global Gamble.
8 Peter Baker, “What the Papers Say,” Coffee and Cocoa International 40: 5 (November 2013), p. 44.
9 Neilson and Pritchard, Value Chain Struggles, pp. 107–29.
10 Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report.
11 In 2011, China was only the 12th-largest export market for Vietnamese coffee (in overall quantity), with the United States first, followed by European countries. However, as Vietnam provided 75 percent of China’s coffee imports, it is poised to benefit from the anticipated rapid growth of the Chinese coffee market. Data from World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS), United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade), accessed November 18, 2013. See also Mistiaen, “Better Future.”
12 Reuters, “Crippling Debts, Bankruptcies Brew Vietnam Coffee Crisis,” Voice of America (August 14, 2013), http://www.voanews.com/content/reu-debt-bankruptcies-vietnam-coffee-crisis/1730013.html, accessed January 8, 2014.
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