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Revaluing Peasant Coffee
Production: Organic and Fair Trade Markets in
Mexico
The emergence of significant new markets for organic and "fairly traded"
products has been hailed as an important part of the effort to address
the chronic poverty suffered by many small-scale coffee producers in the
developing world. With 20-25 million producers around the world
suffering from a prolonged crash in coffee prices, the premiums in these
niche markets may offer a way out of crisis.
A new study of Mexican organic and Fair Trade coffee markets offers both
hope and caution for these new market-based responses to the coffee
crisis. In their new report, "Revaluing Peasant Coffee Production:
Organic and Fair Trade Markets in Mexico," researchers Muriel Calo and
Timothy A. Wise, find that:
Organic coffee premiums are too low to adequately cover the 2-3-year
conversion to organic production; Fair Trade markets, with their
guaranteed prices, can bring producers to profitability and are playing
a crucial role in cross-subsidizing the conversion to organic
production; Even for producers with access to niche markets, coffee
prices alone still fail to compensate producers for their labor and
their social and environmental contributions.
Only a minority of producers are likely to gain access to niche markets,
so government intervention in international coffee markets will be
crucial to solving the coffee crisis.
While the study suggests that niche markets
alone are unlikely to provide a comprehensive solution to the
coffee price crisis, they have an important role to play in promoting
more sustainable livelihoods and in beginning to revalue the
environmental, economic, and cultural contributions of small-scale
farmers in an increasingly global economy.
"Revaluing Peasant Coffee Production: Organic and Fair Trade Markets in
Mexico" is available online at:
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/RevaluingCoffee05.pdf
For more on GDAE's Globalization and Sustainable Development Program:
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/policy_research/globalization.html
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