Coffee

by Gavin Fridell

  13 Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report; D’haeze et al., “Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts.”

  14 For an exception, see Mistiaen, “Better Future.”

  15 Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, p. 67.

  16 This is based on Vietnam’s GDP (current US$), which ranked 55th in 2011 according to World Bank data online (http://data.worldbank.org).

  CHAPTER 5

  1 Harvey, New Imperialism; McNally, Another World.

  2 The calculation on big business advertising is taken from Dawson, Consumer Trap. The estimated cost of ending world hunger varies within the range of $30 billion to $50 billion. In 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated world governments needed to invest an additional $44 billion to end world hunger. See Jeffrey Donovan, “Ending World Hunger Will Require $44 Billion a Year (Correct),” Bloomberg.com (November 11, 2008), http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axB4c8xDmBAk, accessed November 26, 2012.

  3 Anthony Winson, The Industrial Diet: The Degradation of Food and the Struggle for Healthy Eating (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013).

  4 Daviron and Ponte, Coffee Paradox.

  5 Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, p. 202.

  6 Steve Penfold, The Donut: A Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 171.

  7 Patricia Cormack, “‘True Stories’ of Canada: Tim Hortons and the Branding of National Identity,” Cultural Sociology 2: 3 (2008); Ari Alstedter, “Tim Hortons Cracks Top Five U.S. Coffee Shops in Zagat,” Bloomberg.com (September 28, 2012), http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012–09–28/tim-hortons-cracks-top-five-u-s-coffee-shops-in-zagat-su.html, accessed February 6, 2013.

  8 Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, pp. 138–42; Heather Fowler-Salamini, “Women Coffee Sorters Confront the Mill Owners and the Veracruz Revolutionary State, 1915–1918,” Journal of Women’s History 14: 1 (2002).

  9 The precarious situation of service sector coffee workers in Canada was conveyed to me in a telephone interview with Alex Dagg, director of Unite Here, Ontario Council, and Canadian director of Unite Here, Canada (November 7, 2006), Toronto, Canada. See also Andrew Jackson, “Good Jobs in Good Workplaces”: Reflections on Medium-Term Labour Market Challenges (Ottawa: Caledon Institute of Social Policy, 2003).

  10 Starbucks, Fiscal 2013 Annual Report (Starbucks, 2013).

  11 Mark Pendergrast, “The Starbucks Experience Going Global,” Tea and Coffee Trade Online 176: 2 (2002); Jackson, “Good Jobs.”

  12 For more on CAW 3000, see Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee, pp. 252–6. For tax avoidance by Starbucks, see Peter Campbell and Martin Robinson, “Starbucks Doesn’t Pay a Bean in UK Tax,” MailOnline (October 15, 2012), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2218192/Starbucks-tax-Coffee-chain-shortchanges-British-taxpayers-paying-just-8–6m-past-14-years.html, accessed February 18, 2013; Simon Neville and Jill Treanor, “Starbucks to Pay £20m in Tax Over Next Two Years After Customer Revolt,” Guardian (December 6, 2012), http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/06/starbucks-to-pay-10m-corporation-tax, accessed February 18, 2013. For the Starbucks CEO promoting austerity, see Leslie Patton, “Starbucks’ Schultz Urges Fellow CEOs to Halt Campaign Giving,” Bloomberg.com (August 15, 2011), http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011–08–15/starbucks-schultz-urges-fellow-ceos-to-boycott-campaign-giving.html, accessed February 18, 2013; Josh Eidelson, “Starbucks Tycoon Bullies the Baristas,” Nation (January 30, 2013), http://www.thenation.com/article/172547/starbucks-tycoon-bullies-baristas, accessed February 18, 2013.

  13 Marie-Christine Renard, “The Interstices of Globalization: The Example of Fair Coffee,” Sociologia Ruralis 39: 4 (1999), p. 485.

  14 Bacon, “Confronting the Coffee Crisis”; Jaffee, Brewing Justice. Much of the critical discussion on fair trade is drawn from Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee. See also Sarah Lyon and Mark Moberg (eds.), Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Bradford L. Barham,Mercedez Callenes, Seth Gitter, Jessa Lewis, and Jeremy Weber, “Fair Trade/Organic Coffee, Rural Livelihoods, and the ‘Agrarian Question’: Southern Mexican Coffee Families in Transition,” World Development 39: 1 (2011); Hudson et al., Fair Trade, Sustainability and Social Change.

  15 The price comparison here is based on the conventional export price for Brazilian Arabicas and the fair trade minimum price. Both prices are “free on board” (FOB), which includes the cost of transporting the beans to the export port. Fair trade farmers typically receive more of the FOB price than conventional farmers, although precisely how much varies depending on many local factors. Thanks to Bill Barrett of Planet Bean Coffee for pointing this out to the author in January 2014. Despite this difference, for many years conventional Brazilian Arabicas were well above the fair trade minimum price, making up for the difference and suggesting that today’s fair trade price would have been fairly standard or low for most coffee farmers from 1976 to 1989.

  16 Henry J. Frundt, Fair Bananas: Farmers, Workers, and Consumers Strive to Change an Industry (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009).

  17 For more on Planet Bean, see Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee, pp. 225–75. For more on JustUs! Coffee, see Stacey Byrne and Errol Sharpe, In Pursuit of Justice: JustUs! Coffee Roasters Co-op and the Fair Trade Movement (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, forthcoming).

  18 See Gavin Fridell, “The Co-Operative and the Corporation: Competing Visions of the Future of Fair Trade,” Journal of Business Ethics 86 (2009); Bambi Semroc, Elizabeth Baer, Joanne Sonenshine, and Marielle Canter Weikel, Assessment of the Starbucks Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices Program FY08–FY10 (n.p.: Starbucks and Conservation International, 2012).

  19 See Anton Foek, “Trademarking Coffee: Starbucks Cuts Ethiopia Deal,” CorpWatch (May 8, 2007); Oxfam Australia, “Oxfam Celebrates Win-Win Outcome for Ethiopian Coffee Farmers and Starbucks,” http://www.oxfam.org/en/node/174, accessed March 5, 2014. The total compensation of Howard Schultz in 2011 included bonus and exercised stock options; see Forbes.com, CEO Compensation Rankings (2011), http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-compensation-11_Howard-D-Schultz_S9CA.html, accessed February 19, 2013. The GDP per capita (current US$) in Ethiopia in 2011 was $357; see World Bank data online (http://data.worldbank.org). This estimate was made by dividing Schultz’s total pay in 2011 by the Ethiopian GDP per capita.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 Interview with Mauricio Galindo, head of operations, ICO (March 8, 2013), London, UK. For an important discussion on how Brazil’s original success in valorizing its coffee led to consensus among state officials over the benefits of price regulation, see Talbot, Grounds for Agreement.

  2 For general discussion on the cost-price squeeze, see Tony Weis, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2007), pp. 70–8. For specifics on the Colombian crisis, see Diana Delgado, “Colombia Hikes Coffee Subsidies, Calls for Farmers’ Strike to End,” Globe and Mail (March 2, 2013); Michael Sheridan, “After the Colombian Coffee Strike: What Is $444 Million Really Worth?” Daily Coffee News (March 20, 2013).

  3 The discussion on the “financialization of coffee” is taken from Jennifer Clapp’s wider discussion on the “financialization of food.” See Clapp, Food (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 125–57. For the data presented, see Marcelo Justo, “Los mercaderos detrás del aumento de precious de los alimentos,” BBC Mundo (October 16, 2012), http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/noticias/2012/10/121010_alimentos_mercaderes_especulacion_precios_marcelo_jmp.shtml, accessed March 5, 2014. For a longer historical view on speculation and coffee, see Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds.

  4 Gowan, Global Gamble.

  5 Rice, “Rich Brew from the Shade”; UNCTAD and IISD, Sustainability in the Coffee Sector; Dicum and Luttinger, Coffee Book. For a wider discussion on the Green Revolution and food, see Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Hungry for Change: Farmers, Food Justice and the Agrarian Question (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2013).

  6 For a summary of over 50 reports on
shade-grown versus full-sun, see Robert A. Rice, The Ecological Benefits of Shade-Grown Coffee: The Case for Going Bird Friendly (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center – National Zoological Park, 2010). See also Patricia Moguel and Victor M. Toledo, “Biodiversity Conservation in Traditional Coffee Systems of Mexico,” Conservation Biology 13: 1 (1999); José Sarukhán and Jorge Larson, “When the Commons Become Less Tragic: Land Tenure, Social Organization, and Fair Trade in Mexico,” in Joanna Burger, Elinor Ostrom, Richard B. Norgaard, David Policansky, and Bernard D. Goldstein (eds.), Protecting the Commons: A Framework for Resource Management in the Americas (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001). Information also attained from personal e-mail communication with Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace International (September 10, 2013).

  7 Pay, Market for Organic and Fair-Trade Coffee, pp. 9–10.

  8 For the impact of climate change on wild Arabicas see Jeff Green, “Coffee Beans Burn Towards Extinction,” Toronto Star (November 12, 2012). For its impact on Central America in general, see Michael Sheridan, “356. Coffee Rust: An Inconvenient Truth,” CRS Coffeelands Blog (May 6, 2013).

  9 Miho Shirotori and Ana Cristina Molina, South–South Trade: The Reality Check (Geneva: UNCTAD, 2009); UNDP, Human Development Report 2013: The Rise of the South – Human Progress in a Diverse World (New York: UNDP, 2013).

  10 For statistics on emerging coffee markets, see Coffee & Cocoa International, “Soluble Gains Market Share as Emerging Markets Evolve,” Coffee & Cocoa International 40: 5 (November 2013), pp. 36–7. For new coffee trends in Brazil and Latin America, see Mario K. Samper and Steven C. Topik (eds.), Crisis y Transformaciones del Mundo del Café: Dinámicas Locales y Estrategias Nacionales en un Periodo de Adversidad e Incertidumbre (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2012); Roberto Samora, “Update 2: Brazil Brews More Coffee as Beans Get Tastier – ABIC” (January 25, 2012), http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/25/idUKL2E8CO15520120125, accessed August 14, 2012. See also Carlos Henrique Jorge Brando, “How to Increase Internal Consumption of Coffee: Brazil’s Success Story” (n.p.: P&A Marketing International, 2008), http://www.slideshare.net/lemeph/how-to-increase-internal-coffee-consumption-presentation, accessed August 14, 2012.

  11 Daniel Allen, “China’s New Brew,” Asia Times (March 11, 2011), http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/MC11Cb02.html, accessed August 14, 2012.

  12 “Statement by the Chairperson of the InterAfrican Coffee Organisation (IACO) to the 110th Session of the International Coffee Council,” read out by M. Aly Touré, representative of Côte d’Ivoire, on behalf of the IACO at the 110th Session of the ICO, London (March 7, 2013), http://dev.ico.org/documents/cy2012–13/wsiteenglish/council-12-e.htm, document ICC-110–8, accessed May 16, 2013.

  13 Adolph A. Kumburu, director general, Tanzania Coffee Board, “Introducing: Tanzania Coffee Industry Development Strategy (2011–2021),” presented to the 110th Session of the ICO, London (March 7, 2013), http://www.ico.org/presents/1213/march-tanzania.pdf, accessed May 16, 2013.

  14 See Daviron and Ponte, Coffee Paradox. The discussion here on Ethiopian coffee is based on Oxfam Australia, “Oxfam Celebrates Win-Win Outcome for Ethiopian Coffee Farmers and Starbucks”; Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Ethiopia Trademarking and Licensing Initiative: Supporting a Better Deal for Coffee Farmers through Aid for Trade (London: ODI, 2009); ICO, Ethiopia: Country Datasheet (London: ICO, 2011); Coffee & Cocoa International, “ECX and Outgoing CEO Praised as Specialty Issues Begin to Be Addressed,” Coffee & Cocoa International (January 2013).

  15 See Light Years IP website, http://www.lightyearsip.net/projects/ethiopiancoffee, accessed May 22, 2013.

  16 The discussion of CLAC is based on Marco Coscione, CLAC and the Defense of the Small Producer, trans. Lizzy Solano Guzmán (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2014), English translation of La CLAC y la defensa del pequeño productor (Santo Domingo: CLAC and Editorial Funglode, 2012).

  17 For more on the coffee crisis, see ICO, Report on the Outbreak of Coffee Leaf Rust in Central America (London: ICO, May 13, 2013); Gavin Fridell, “Coffee Crisis in Central America,” Watershed Sentinel 23: 4 (September/October 2013). Ecologist John Vandermeer has argued that monocrop cultivation has led to the decline of white halo fungus, which tends to restrain the spread of coffee leaf rust, and may have played a significant role in the outbreak. See Emma Bryce, “Fighting Off the Coffee Curse,” New York Times (February 8, 2013).

  18 Anna Edgerton and Mario Sergio Lima, “Brazil to Buy Coffee above Market Price through Option Contracts,” Bloomberg.com (August 7, 2013).

  19 Ilan Kapoor, “Participatory Development, Complicity and Desire,” Third World Quarterly 26: 8 (2005), p. 1218.

  Selected readings

  Given its popularity and importance, numerous works have been written on coffee over the years, including excellent global assessments that are drawn on throughout this book: Robert H. Bates, Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); 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); John M. Talbot, Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (London: Zed Books, 2005). Out of necessity, this short annotated list of selected reading focuses on English-language materials, but many important works have been written in other languages, in particular Spanish. An excellent place to start is Mario K. Samper and Steven C. Topik (eds.), Crisis y Transformaciones del Mundo del Café: Dinámicas Locales y Estrategias Nacionales en un Periodo de Adversidad e Incertidumbre (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2012).

  There are countless journalistic works on coffee, among the best of which are Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2nd edn. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), which provides rich empirical and narrative details drawn on throughout this book; 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). The UNCTAD statistical database (http://unctadstat.unctad.org) provides core historical price data here; the ICO offers invaluable daily price data and analysis (http://www.ico.org); and WITS (https://wits.worldbank.org/WITS), combined with the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN-COMTRADE) (http://comtrade.un.org), provide invaluable data on imports and exports. An excellent “insiders” magazine is Coffee & Cocoa International (http://www.coffeeandcocoa.net).

  Chapter 1 draws on the sources just listed, along with other works dealing with global value chains, including 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); Jeffrey Neilson and Bill Pritchard, Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); and excellent reports on price volatility and corporate power in the coffee chain by Oxfam International, Mugged: Poverty in Your Coffee Cup (Boston and Washington, DC: Oxfam International, 2002); 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).

  The concept of “coffee statecraft” draws on the political economy works of Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso,
1999); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2005); Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007). The critique of free trade is based on Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008); 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); John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); as well as the idea of the “free trade fantasy” advanced by Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

  Chapter 2 draws on Topik, “Coffee,” and Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, as well as highly significant works on coffee and colonial and post-independence state building, including Liisa L. North, Bitter Grounds: Roots of Revolt in El Salvador, 2nd edn. (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1985); Jim Handy, Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); 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); 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). The discussion of Costa Rica draws on John A. Booth, “Costa Rica: The Roots of Democratic Stability,” in Larry Diamond, Jonathan Hartlyn, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988); Anthony Winson, Coffee and Democracy in Modern Costa Rica (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1989); Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marc Edelman, Peasants against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Williams, States and Social Evolution.