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Colonial brews: café and power in the Américas
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Content
COLONIAL BREWS:
CAFÈ AND POWER IN THE AMÈRICAS
By
Orlando R. Serrano
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES & ETHNICITY)
May 2014
ii
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables iii
Abstract vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: The Reproduction of Reach and Colonial Power 1
Chapter 1 – Developing Disaster: 1950-1970s, 33
Setting the Conditions for Coffee Chaos
Chapter 2 – Caffeinated Consent: 100
Certified Coffee as Crisis Management
Chapter 3 – Production at Twilight: 153
The Life of a Coffee Farm in Nicaragua
Bibliography 193
iii
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
Figure 1: Medida 1
Figure 2: Map of Nicaragua 5
Figure 3: Between Matagalpa and Jinotega 6
Figure 4: Map of Guatemala 92
Figure 5: Number of Massacres by Department 96
Figure 6: Percentage of Victims by Ethnic Group 97
Figure 7: Forces Responsible for 97
Human Rights Violations and Acts of Violence
Figure 8: Fair Trade USA Label 100
Figure 9: USDA Organic Seal 100
Figure 10: Breakdown of Global Coffee Imports 107
By Country and Percent, 1990
Figure 11: Breakdown of Global Coffee Exports 108
By Country or Region and Percent, 1990
Figure 12: Exportable Coffee Production 109
By Leading Seven Countries from 1990-1999
Figure 13: Composite Indicator Price of Coffee 110
From 1980-2000 in Hundreds of Cents
Figure 14: Coffee Prices Per Pound for Retail 114
and Returning to Growers With the Value of
U.S. Dollar Against Swiss Franc
Figure 15: Retail Price in U.S. Cents Per Pound 115
of Coffee Broken Down
Figure 16: Retail Price in Percentages Per Pound 115
of Coffee Broken Down
iv
Figure 17: Estimated Retail Sales for Fairtrade 117
Labeled Market in Europe, 1995-2001
Figure 18: Sales of FLO Certified Coffee in Metric Tons 118
Figure 19: Growth Rate in Sales of FLO Certified Coffee 119
Figure 20: TJ's Nicaraguan Right 123
Figure 21: TJ's Nicaraguan Left 123
Figure 22: Map of Nicaragua, 1859 124
Figure 23: Sandy Springs 125
Figure 24: Comparison of Prices Per 139
Pound of Coffee from 1999-2011
Figure 25: Entrance to La Hammonia and Selva Negra 153
Figure 26: Map of Nicaragua 154
Figure 27: Bust of Carlos Fonseca 162
at His Home in Matagalpa
Figure 28: Mural in Matagalpa 170
Figure 29: Net Profit in Cordobas 176
for La Hammonia, 1990-1994
Figure 30: Net Profit in Cordobas 179
for La Hammonia, 1996-2009
Figure 31: La Hammonia 181
Tables
Table 1: Changes in Farm Acreage for Adopters 65
and Nonadopters of New Coffee Varieties,
Támesis, Colombia, 1963-1970
Table 2: Foreign Export Quotas 76
for the Coffee Year 1959-60
v
Table 3: Retailers and Their Corresponding 144
Certified Private Brand Products
Table 4: Coffee Crisis Cycle, 1989-2011 146
vi
Abstract
Colonial Brews: Café and Power in the Américas examines coffee trade in the Américas
generally, and between the U.S. and Nicaragua specifically, to see how unequal and colonial
power is produced and maintained in a region. It is a geo-historical study that combines archival
research, policy analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork methods with critical spatial and critical
ethnic studies theories. Primary sources include nineteenth century U.S. canal project papers,
coffee trade journals and agreements, GATT and WTO agreements, and fair trade materials. I
also analyze the accounting archives of La Hammonia coffee plantation in Nicaragua in addition
to conducting interviews and completing participant observation on-site. Colonial Brews
combines these sources to answer key research questions. How do the production, retail, and
consumption of coffee broadly and between the U.S. and Nicaragua specifically reveal the
persistence of colonial power? What shapes do the control over the economic, political, civic,
and epistemic take in a particular global commodity chain? Who are the actors involved in
delineating the contours of—whether in a dominant or marginal role—production, retail, and
consumption in a coffee commodity chain between the U.S. and Nicaragua? How are different
crises—of surplus, of price drops, of infrastructure, of war—resolved? How do the resolutions
inhibit or engender alternative forms of interdependence? Over the course of the dissertation it
becomes evident that tracing the history of a coffee commodity chain between the U.S. and
Nicaragua reveals colonial power at work that is structured by what Walter Mignolo calls the
logic of coloniality (2005). In each instance, the resolutions to crises work to reproduce colonial
power and extend the reach of coloniality. In the end, the colonial interdependence made
between people and places across space in this context can only be undone through anti-colonial
vii
practices that form a diverse assault across the spectrum of political, economic, and social life in
the service of refashioning global connection. This is all the more urgent at a moment in which
political, economic, and social acts are binding people and places together with increasing
intimacy. We must join in the work of many who are trying to make another kind of
interdependence that is more equitable and life-sustaining. To make it based on mutuality.
Colonial Brews contributes to scholarship on processes of globalization and
transnationalism in Critical Geography, (Transnational) American Studies, Transnational
Sociology and Latino Studies. It builds on the work of geographers, sociologists, and
anthropologists who use political economy and commodity chains to study the production of
power at a regional or global scale by approaching them from the anti-colonial perspective of
critical ethnic studies. In so doing it presents an analysis that is not couched solely in class terms,
but one that sees class, ethnicity, race, and gender differences as mutually constituted and made
simultaneously through the logic of coloniality. It challenges the modern conception of history as
linear and the effects this has on economic and social policy by positing a nested notion of
history that enables new beginnings and not simply points of departure. Lastly, the mixed
methods research design combines the social sciences and humanities by bringing critical ethnic
studies and critical spatial theories to bear on the practices of ethnography, policy analysis, and
archival research.
viii
Acknowledgements
There are many people who I need to thank for this project. I have been in school since I
was four years old, it has been a long road, and it is finally coming to an end. Along the way I
have been blessed with many mentors and friends. As an undergraduate, Point Loma provided
me a community that encouraged me to pursue my questions. Karl Martin, Jamie Gates, Jerry
McCant, Ron Benefiel, and Michael Lodahl pushed me to look deeper for answers and not to
wince at them, unsettling though they may be. It was in a lunch seminar with Dr. Benefiel that I
first read Liberation Theology and began to think about the radical trajectories possible in the
Christian tradition I grew up in. I am deeply appreciative for their support. It was also during this
time that I made some dear friends. Thomas Baird, Marcos Canales, Roxanne Rodriguez,
Tommy Baird, and Marshela Salgado, and Esteban Trujillo offered kinship and laughs on many
evenings. I am deeply grateful for each of their lives and the warmth and care they have provided
me over the years.
At California State University, Fullerton, I was able to find a home in the American
Studies Department. It was not luck, but careful guidance from Karl Martin that led me there.
Carrie Lane’s “Search for Community” class introduced me to the importance of speaking with
people, of hearing stories, of bodily and kinesthetic knowledge. Jennie Thigpen’s “Print Culture”
helped to take seriously the way knowledge is presented as well as who has access to it. Thank
you both for your time and help. From the first time we met, Pamela Steinle has been a close
advisor, mentor, and friend. Pam, thank you your continued support, challenge, and belief. I
appreciate the coffee meetings and breakfasts together. I look forward to our next time together.
John Ibson was the best M.A. exam committee chair. John, thank you trusting me with your
class, for inviting me into your home, for comforting me when I broke down in tears during the
ix
exam, and for helping me trust myself. Beyond these wonderful mentors I was able to learn with
and from an amazing group of peers: Joe Barrett, we’ll always have D.C.; Brenda Beza, thank
you for your infectious laughter; and Sean Slusser, L.A. for life (I will look past your Angel
fandom). I also need to thank the folks at the Center for Careers in Teaching: Dana Kiethly,
Kristen Luzzi, Barbara Saur, and Lillybeth Sasis, you made the CCT a wonderful place to work.
I am humbled to have studied alongside and be guided by so many wonderful people in
the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the USC. There are several students who I
never actually took a course with, but learned from. Laura Barraclough, Wendy Cheng, Michelle
Commander, Aracely Esparza, Jesus Hernandez, Daniel HoSang, Hillary Jenks, and Imani Kai
Johnson, and Nisha Kunte were and are an amazing group of elders who continue to teach me
how to be generous with my thoughts and actions. Andrew “Budge” Burridge, Genevieve
Carpio, Laura Fugikawa, Laura “L-Boogie” Harjo, Emily Hobson, April Ruth Hoffman, Todd
Honma, Crisshona Grant Nieva, Tanachi Mark Padoongpatt, Jake Peters, Margarita Smith, and
Terrion Williamson it was a pleasure to be in class with such classy and giften scholars. Thank
you for all I learned from you. If it were not for the amazing support staff, I would have been lost
more than I already was. Ms. Sandra Hopwood, thank you so much for always checking in on me
and bringing a smile to my face. When you left, it was a sad day for so many us. Kitty Lai,
Jujuana Preston, and Sonia Rodriguez, you did incomparable work with such patience after I
moved to Virginia. Thank you for everything.
Moving away from family and friends was made more bearable with the friendships I
have made in Virginia. Lister Barnett, Ike Bullock, Jonathan Fox, McShaun Hanks, April
Johnson, Peter Johnson, Anthony Kay, Lorne Smith, Martin Smith, and Mondell Washington,
and many of the other folks at the Fredericksburg UPS building, you made loading boxes at three
x
in the morning as pleasant and fun as humanly possible. Ana, Dan, Boss Amanda, NASCAR
Amanda, Ray, Aaron, Abigail, Amy, and the regulars at Hyperion Espresso, you helped me
understand why people enjoy small places. Thank you for the time as part of your community.
Rob McCarty, you recruited me to Chavez Prep and I am grateful for being exposed to teaching
in an environment that is helping me grow as an educator thanks to Team Nine: Bianca Body,
ELA partner in puns; Emily Swain, homeroom co-teacher extraordinaire (thanks for putting up
with my OCD); Myisha Trice, Coverage Queen and ENS champ; and Allison Waithe-Benton,
lesson planning genius. Thank you all for the patience and advice for a first-year teacher.
This project would not have been possible without the community at La Hammonia in
Matagalpa. Doña Mausi, Don Eddy, Chico Kühl, Don Goyo, Yanira, Don Pablo, and Don
Enrique, gracias por dejarme trabajar con ustedes y aprender de ustedes. The patience of
everyone at La Hammonia while this güero (the workers nickname for me on the farm) did his
best to not fall while pruning, fertilizing, and digging alongside the perpetually wet hillsides is
much appreciated. I am looking forward to my next trip back, this time during picking season—
coiled up snakes in the bushes or not I am on my way.
I need to especially thank a group of fictive kin. Thang Dao and Haven Perez, our
conversations and time together over food with the Keyword Collective always bring warmth.
Alvaro Marquez, Tasneem Siddiqui, and Gretel Vera Rosas thank you for you generosity over
the years. You have comforted me, cared for me, and pulled me through. Perla Guerrero, Sharon
Luk, and Anthony Rodriguez you have cried with me, laughed with me, and helped me survive.
Thank you for your friendship, understanding, and open hearts. You are so dear to me. Without
all of you, I may not have made it. That is truth. I have immense gratitude for your being in my
life, for the privilege of calling you all friends.
xi
I put my committee through hell, and they stayed with me. They were everything a
neurotic and insecure graduate student could ask for. Although she was not on the final
committee, I must express my gratitude to Dorinne Kondo. Thank you for teaching me about
speaking with people, the craft and practice of ethnography, and how to be willing to revise—
always. Veronica Terriquez, thank you for coming on board relatively late in the game. Your
feedback and encouragement leading up to, during, and after the defense will not be forgotten. I
wish I had the opportunity to take a course with you. Macarena Gómez-Barris, thank you for
your guidance as began looking into Latino Studies, for your generous but critical notes, and
wonderful laughter. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, I do not know how you knew, but you did. You
knew I would end up in ASE early on yet you let me figure it out on my own. I have learned so
much from you about how about how to be a scholar and how to be a human. Freedom is indeed
a place, one we must continue making. Laura Pulido, there really are no words. But that will not
stop me from trying. You always have your students best at heart, even when it may be difficult
to hear—and I am forever thankful. You have pushed me, encouraged me, made me cry, made
me try, challenged me, and trusted me. Thank you. Your patience with a reformed Literature (no
offense to Lit folks, I am currently an English and Language Arts teacher after all) major over
the years has been humbling. I have told so many people, anyone who would listen really, that I
was blessed with a chair who is honest, supportive, critical, patient, and humble. These are just
the beginnings, sketches, of how appreciative I am for you generosity. Thank you.
My family has loved me, fed me, and pushed and pulled me through the good and bad of
this work. Papi and Mami, I love you so much, thank you for believing in me. From the very
beginning I felt your belief. I cannot express to you how much I admire your sacrifice, your
curiosity, and your grace. You may not understand my work—I know you do not agree with it—
xii
but you always ask. Araxie, my first friend. You are such a strong woman with a gentle heart.
Thank you for always defending me first and asking questions later. You have always tried to
protect me, us. Lyric, you are such a beautiful young man, fierce like your mother. Nehemias,
my brother. my brother. I love you. In many ways this dissertation is informed by conversations
we started and never finished. I am so glad to have had the chance to get to know you all over
again these past few years. Your smile lights up a room, your sense of humor never misses a
beat. Isaiah, the love and wonder in your eyes gives me hope. Morena, you understand me in
ways I find hard to believe given that we barely lived in the same house at the same time. I am
grateful for you and so awed by the person you have become. I am learning so much from you. I
look up to you. Thank you all for laughing and crying with me. Abuelito and Abuelita, gracias
por su amor. Los quiero tanto. Tia Sandra y Claudia, gracias por todo. Gracias por su cariño
conmigo durantes mis veranos en Nicaragua—y por enseñarme como cocinar.
Simeon and Ana Luz, my heart and my light, thank you for all of your love and for
bringing so much laughter into my life. You were both born during this work. Simeon, I often
told people that all they needed to do to understand how long I worked on this was look at you.
Ana, you made my writing and research breaks in the final stages special. Thank you both for
giving of me to this work for so long. Lastly, Sarah, thank you for everything. You have no idea
how much this project is yours as much as it is mine. It would not exist without you. You
believed I could do it. While I was away, you took care of the littles. You are in here. In all of it.
I do not have the right words for you either. The ones I have are thank you. So, Thank you. I
hope they are enough of a beginning to express my gratitude for you in my life.
This is dedicated to Simeon and Ana Luz. It is also for Isaiah and Lyric.
You are our stars home…
1
Introduction: The Reproduction and Reach of Colonial Power
“Human beings do create social structures,
and do endow events with meaning;
but these structures and meanings
have historical origins that
shape, limit, and help
to explain such creativity.”
- Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power
1
Figure 1. Medida (Photo by author)
It is about one in the afternoon. The backpacks wait for their owners, the lone cuadrillo
(workcrew) of women on the farm, who should be there any minute now. The workday that
began at five in the morning is almost over. Each of the fertilizer bags weighs forty pounds and
takes about an hour to empty at the feet of the plants growing along the slopes of Copa Viva
coffee farm. Once the eight women return from their break they will have close to forty minutes
1
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, NY: Penguin
Books, 1985), xxx.
2
of work left. During non-harvest months, the medidas (weigh stations) that dot the farm serve as
break areas—while working, while walking the grounds on the way home or to the commissary,
or on the path out to the carretera (highway). From November to March the scene is completely
different. No room for backpacks then. For five months the medidas are the farm’s hubs, where
the workers bring canastas (baskets) full of freshly picked coffee cherries to be quickly sorted
and weighed and thus get paid. Each worker will pick an average of twenty pounds a day and
touch the same plant at least twice, every plant is picked seven times during harvest after all.
Then as suddenly as it comes the picking season ends. Temporary workers hired to help move on
to other jobs, permanent workers shift their attention to the vital off-season duties of pruning,
fertilizing, composting, planting, and other assorted projects on the farm. The cherries are simply
beginning their journey however. They are depulped on-site using a wet mill to remove the
mucilage covering the bean. After that, they are dried, packed, and shipped still green to roasters
in the U.S. and Europe. In a few months time, the process will begin all over again.
* * * * *
Every year, millions of burlap bags of green unroasted coffee enter the ports of
consuming countries. According to the International Coffee Organization (ICO), during the 2010
calendar year 105.2 million bags were imported by member countries.
2
Over the same period of
time, the contents in 72.3 million of those burlap bags disappeared into homes, coffee shops,
restaurants, and other sites of consumption in the same importing countries.
3
During the same
2
Importing Members Total Imports From All Orgins, Calendar Years From 2000-2010, International
Coffee Organization, accessed July 12, 2011, http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp. The ICO also maintains import
statistics for non-member countries. The most recent calendar year with a complete report is 2007, with a total of
26.5 million bags imported (Importing Non-Members Imports of All Forms of Coffee From All Origins, ICO,
accessed July 12, 2011, http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp).
3
Domestic consumption in producing countries at the close of the 2010 coffee year registered at 40.5
million (Domestic Consumption of Exporting Countries Crop Years Commencing 2000 to 2010, ICO, accessed July
12, 2011 http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp). The coffee year begins in October and ends in September. Its start
3
year, ICO member countries that produce coffee harvested 132.5 million bags, 96.7 of which
were for export. In other words, non-producing member countries bought 100% and consumed
68.6% of all the coffee exported by member countries.
4
These empty bags are material remnants
of political, social, and economic relationships between places articulated across space by beans.
“Colonial Brews: Café and Power in the Américas” is a geo-historical analysis of how
overlapping processes of imperialism and colonialism working through colonial power affect
how coffee is consumed, traded, and produced in the world’s largest importing nation and one of
the countries most dependent on café in the Américas; and by extension, how this reflects and
affects the interdependence between these places, the U.S. and Nicaragua.
As the second most valuable exported commodity behind only oil, coffee directly
sustains 25 million producers and over 125 million workers indirectly every day.
5
As the world’s
leading importer, the U.S. alone accounted for 24% of 2010’s traded bags.
6
It is an industry
estimated at $90 billion annually with 108 million people sipping from it daily.
7
The Specialty
Coffee Association of America estimates that if everyone involved from “coffee machine
mechanics to styrofoam cup makers” are accounted for, the amount of people dependent on the
industry for their livelihood in the U.S. is near 1.5 million.
8
In a further testament to its
importance for roasters and retailers, U.S. based multinationals Phillip Morris, Sara Lee, and
coincides with the beginning of the harvest season. Thus the 2010 coffee year spans October 2009 to September
2010.
4
Exporting Countries Total Exports to All Destinations, Calendar Years 2000-2010, ICO, accessed July 12,
2011 http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp and Importing Members Total Imports From All Origins. Importing
countries brought in a total of 105.2 million bags, 96.7 from ICO member producers. The difference equals 8.1% of
the total imports. To figure out how much of the coffee consumed in 2010 came from the 96.7 exported I subtracted
8.1% from 72.3 million to get 66.4 million; or 68.6% of 96.7 million.
5
Nina Luttinger and Gregory Dicum, The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Cup to the Last
Drop, Revised and Revisited (New York, NY: The New Press, 2006); Oxfam, “Mugged: Poverty in Your Cup,”
accessed July 12, 2011, http://www.oxfamamerica.org; Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of
Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, Second Edition (New York, NY: 2010); and Antony Wild, Coffee: A
Dark History (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005).
6
ICO, Importing Members Total Imports From All Origins.
7
Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds and TransFair USA, “Fair Trade: Fast Facts,” pamphlet.
8
Wild, Coffee, 2.
4
Proctor and Gamble combined with Switzerland based Nestlé and the German company Tchibo
control 50% of the global market.
9
Much like the other fuel much of the industrialized world is
addicted to, coffee is only found in particular places. It grows only in the coffee belt—swaths of
earth between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer that circumnavigate the globe. The collection
of producing countries counts Ethiopia, Kenya, Java, Vietnam, Perú, Costa Rica, and Brasil
among it. Fazendas, plantations, farms, estates, and cafetales can be found in locations as
disparate as these, but the land used for coffee cultivation is concentrated in a particular region.
More land is dedicated to café throughout the Central and Southern Américas than anywhere
else. In 2006, a total of roughly 25 million acres were used to grow coffee. Over three-fifths,
63%, were in the Américas. To be more specific, 4.7 million acres in América Central were
harvested during picking season and 9.7 in Sud América.
10
Coffee is an important export for
each of the countries in América Central, albeit to varying degrees.
In Nicaragua, it is the highest valued export product and a crucial part of the national
economy comprising 30% of all export income.
11
Of all rural workers, one out of every three
works in coffee.
12
There are two major production zones in Nicaragua. Along the Sierras de
Managua in the departamento of Carazo, cafetales stretch over the landscapes of Jinotepe and
Diriamba. This is where coffee was first planted in Nicaragua. At one point, Carazo was
responsible for 44% of the country’s harvest.
13
Today, the departamento’s industry is struggling
mightily for two reasons. First, in the 1970s, many of Carazo’s trees were hit hard with roya
9
Oxfam, “Mugged.”
10
Luttinger and Dicum, The Coffee Book.
11
The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, accessed July 12, 2011,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/nu.html;
12
Doreen Massey, Nicaragua (Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1987).
13
The work of Julie Charlip concentrates on Carazo’s coffee industry. See “‘So the Land Takes on Value’:
Coffee and Land in Carazo, Nicaragua,” Latin American Perspectives 26, no. 1 (1999): 92-105, and Cultivating
Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo Nicaragua, 1880-1930 (Athens, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2003). My
Abuelito and Abuelita’s families are from Rivas in Granada. He used to tell me stories, “De Jinotepe hasta
Diriamba, puro café. Café, café, café por todos lados. Hasta molestaba.”
5
(hemileia vastatrix), or coffee rust. A fungal infection, roya causes leaves to fall prematurely,
attract harmful insects, and make it difficult for the plants to be nourished effectively—by
chemical or organic means. Making matters worse, it spreads easily but is eliminated with
difficulty. Carazo’s coffee has had a difficult time rebounding from this epidemic and the plants
that did survive have struggled to live through droughts that compound the effects of the area’s
already low rainfall totals.
14
2001 and 2010 brought bookend droughts to Nicaragua.
15
Harvest
used to begin in October and go into January, sometimes February. Now, it barely lasts two
months.
16
One hundred-fifty kilometers to the north, lies another coffee zone in a far different
state.
Figure 2. Map of Nicaragua
14
Claudia Adrien, “Black Gold Turns Red: Politics and Uncertainty Turn Nicaragua’s Once Rich Coffee
Industry Into Bitter Brew,” accessed July 21, 2011. http://www.internationaljournalism.com/BlackGold.htm
15
Mary Jordan, “Coffee Glut and Drought Hit Nicaragua: Sandinisatas Gain in Campaign as Hunger
Sweeps Rural Areas.” Washington Post, September 3, 2001, sec. A.
16
Ardien, “Black Gold Turns Red.”
6
Nicaragua’s central mountainous region begins in Matagalpa and ends in Nueva Segovia.
This is where most of the country’s coffee exports originate from today. Driving the Carretera
Panamericana reveals why coffee grows so well here: lush vegetation, trees for shade, sloped
hillsides, and cooler temperatures. Combining these physical characteristics with much higher
annual rainfall totals than Carazo makes for excellent growing conditions. In the 1850’s, German
migrants settled in Matagalpa and Jinotega. Los cheles—as locals call the blond-haired fair-
skinned people—began to permeate the still small-scale coffee sector the old-fashioned way:
settling on some land, buying some other land, and marrying into local families. La Hammonia,
the coffee farm I worked with and on for this dissertation, is owned and operated by a
granddaughter of the original owner, a German migrant.
Figure 3. Between Matagalpa and Jinotega (Photo by author)
7
On Reproduction
Power is by definition unequal. That is, power does not exist without producing
difference. By conceptualizing power as the ability to get someone to do commit an act they
would not do on their own, a difference between intent and act is produced and leveraged. Power
and difference are in many ways two sides of the same coin: power cannot be without difference,
nor can difference be without power. In this way, power is a relationship. It is made through
interactions spontaneous and rehearsed, mundane and spectacular. In and of itself the unequal
power made through relationships is neutral. It is not necessarily productive or destructive, life
sustaining or fatal. It is the end that defines the means.
17
Writ large in the U.S. social context, power is calcified in various kinds of institutions
from prisons, to private property, to schools among others.
18
These institutions are then
relegitimated, reorganized, and remobilized by the state, locally and nationally. The state
functions as “an institution of subinstitutions,” an apparatus that holds still particular
combinations of difference production.
19
The kind of stasis made and maintained by the
articulation of differences determines what relationships dominate and structure a society.
20
17
It must also be noted that all processes of unequal power have multiple personality syndrome. The very same
processes are experienced by group ‘x’ as ‘y’ while simultaneously experienced as ‘a’ by group ‘z’.
18
See, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage Books,
1995 [1977]); Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader,
Second Edition edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978); Louis Althusser,
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2001 [1970]).
19
See, Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (London: Blackwell, 1982) and
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2007), 28.
20
The scholarship that contributes to this understanding of power includes Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal
Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1
(2002): 15-24 and Golden Gulag; Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935,
edited by David Forgacs (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000 [1988]); Stuart Hall, “Race,
Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris:
UNESCO, 1980), “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry
10, no. 2 (1986): 5-27, and “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural
Studies,” Rethinking MARXISM 5, no. 1 (1992): 10-18; and Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice:
Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996) and Black, Brown,
Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
8
Again, the ends define the means—the kinds of differences reproduced and used in particular
ways define the state.
Although there is much work on the kind of state the U.S. is, two particular theorizations
that describe its beginnings are vital to this project. First, established and expanded on already
cared for land, it is a settler state. The territorial expansion of what is now the U.S. across the
Northern American continent occurred first by occupation and then through genocide.
21
It is
maintained both by geographic solutions to a perceived social problem from the settler’s
perspective—the inability of two entities to mutually inhabit one space at the same time—and a
regulatory arm of the state.
22
Reservations and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are how the
U.S. continues to settle on Native American land on a daily basis. They are two key institutions
that function to fix a settler/displaced relationship rooted in domination. They ensure that
conquest continues, that the U.S. repeatedly “win” the “Indian wars that have never ended in the
21
The Pinky Show, a collaborative on-line popular education program put together by two artists recently
exhibited an installation at Picturing Politics 2008: Artists Speak to Power at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington,
VA. Presented as a triptych, the introductory frame and three subsequent panels read: “I’M ON UR LAND MAPPIN
UR DEMIZ;” “YOU ARE EMPIRE BUILDING ON NATIVE LAND;” YOU ARE DEATH CONSTRUCTING
ON NATIVE LAND;” and “YOU ARE FINAL RESTING ON NATIVE LAND.” Each of these phrases is
watermarked over an image: a John Smith era map of Virginia, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, nuclear bomb test
“Priscilla” on the homeland of the Shoshone, and Arlington National Cemetery. Pinky and Bunny are drawing
attention to the fact that the U.S. is a settler state (available online at http://www.pinkyshow.org/art/on-native-land).
The Nevada Test Site (NTS) that was the site for “Priscilla” is also cited by Smith (2005) and alluded to by Leslie
Marmon Silko in Ceremony (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1986). It is a prime example of the violent
displacement and domination of Native peoples and lands by the U.S. See also, Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for
Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988 [1969]) and Andrea Smith,
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2005)
22
Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 14. I say perceived social problem because there are in fact examples of
multiple societies coexisting in the same place while each govern themselves. Two notable cases being the Zapatista
and Afro-Colombiano communities that govern themselves and engage the Mexican and Colombian state as
autonomous territories. See Subcomandante Marcos and Ben Clarke, Voices of Fire: Communiques and Interviews
From the Zapatista National Liberation Army (San Francisco, CA: Freedom Voices Editorial Collective, 2000);
Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movement, Life,
Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
9
Americas” over whose lands these are.
23
However, the settler state alone does not address how
land and the people who live on it are organized.
Second, from its inception, the U.S. has been a capitalist state. Money becoming capital
begetting money, never standing still, always in motion. Although it came into existence prior to
free trade, the industrial revolution, and Karl Marx himself, it is imperative to recognize the early
U.S. republic as capitalist. After all, the raw matter—the proto or primitive capital—used by
traders and merchants to challenge established feudal orders in Europe came from the Américas
and Caribbean; from occupied land worked by slave labor.
24
A non-capitalist relationship in the
most literal sense, slavery did not involve ‘free labor’ selling itself piecemeal in order to eat.
25
It
did produce a racialized workforce alienated to death by their labor who toiled in what were the
blueprints for the factory floor: fields of tobacco and sugar and coffee.
26
Even though the slavery
system is not capitalist, the logic of it and purpose of it are.
27
In other words, plantocrats in the
U.S. south and the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies used both theft and
previously stagnant money to create a commodity that would generate more money: the slave.
28
As the key component of the first dominant mode of production in the Américas, slaves were
23
Smith, Conquest and Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster,
1991).
24
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition edited by Robert C. Tucker,
(New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 329; Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Edmund S. Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003 [1975]); and Eric
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: Uinversity of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]).
25
J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
26
Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; and Williams, Capitalism
and Slavery. Also see Carey McWilliams’ Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, (2000 [1939]) for writing on agricultural workers in California in the
first half of the twentieth century.
27
Bobby Wilson, America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 45.
28
Woods, Development Arrested, 1998; Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Faces and Masks (New York,
NY: Norton & Company, 1998 [1987]) and Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a
Continent (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1997 [1973]); Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom;
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003); and Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
10
also the machinery that facilitated the transition to the capitalist mode of production that defines
the U.S.—and most of the western hemisphere. In a perverse act of forced multiple personality
disorder, slaves in the U.S. South were both commodities and instruments of production. The
capital created through the harvesting of tobacco leaves, burning of sugar cane, and picking of
coffee cherries greased the wheels of invention that conjured the factory into existence. The U.S.
as a political economic and social unit has been capitalist since its beginnings. Capitalism—as an
economic system, as a way of organizing the world, and as a way to structure relationships
between people and places—and the U.S. came of age together. Even more specifically,
dependent on racialized slave labor, the U.S. and racial capitalism—a way of structuring
relationships through class and race—came of age together. Still, the practices that ensured the
continuation of this “society structured in dominance” had to be cemented and protected.
29
Adopted in 1787, the U.S. Constitution organized all aspects of political, economic, and
social life from New Hampshire to Georgia in an unprecedented way twice. First, it was written
and voted on by wealthy land-owning white men gathered in Philadelphia, or a version of Marx
and Engels’ “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
30
Second,
the power move made by the thirty-nine delegates not only created a new bourgeois [read:
capitalist] state to serve the interests of a particular class of persons, but their invention produced
and operated at a new scale.
31
Until this point, each of the colonies operated independently of
each other, e pluribus. The ratification of the Constitution made them unum under a supra-state
apparatus that regulated inter-state interactions. In other words, it demarcated a different kind of
area through which power could be embedded. It demonstrated the capacity of paper to reify and
extend the power of particular interests over a broad geography. It also forces us to recognize the
29
Hall, “Societies Structured in Dominance.”
30
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 475.
31
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (New York, NY: Vintage Books).
11
power in paper: treaties, contracts, agreements, policies, and trade quotas. In the end, The U.S.
Constitution did the work of legitimating a settler state while at the same time establishing a new
model for how to concentrate power on parchment able to exercise enormous reach.
32
A method
to reify power used many times since, for various purposes.
* * * * *
“Adolescent capitalism,
stampeding and gluttonous,
transfigures what it touches.”
(Galeano 1998 [1987], 179)
“The circulation of money as capital is,
on the contrary,
an end in itself,
for the expansion of value takes place
only
within this constantly renewed movement.
The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.”
33
During the eighteenth century, the articulation of settling with capitalism resulted in U.S.
imperialism and colonialism. Having gained independence from Britain, attempting to spur along
its nascent economy with the mercantilist Embargo Act of 1807, and defending its expansionist
aspirations in the War of 1812, the U.S. went about the business of emulating its forebear. That
is, it began to acquire land and increase its territorial borders by methodically invading, settling,
occupying, killing and colonizing its way across Northern America. It did this based on the
ethnocentric and racist premise that the peoples caring for the land were not exploiting it to
32
In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write that the U.S. Constitution marked both a “formal
constitution,” that is the actual written document, and a “material constitution,” formation of social forces, that serve
as models for how to organize life under a new logic of Empire (2000, xiii). My understanding of the radical
political, economic, and social creation marked by the U.S. Constitution is influenced by their interpretation of it and
how it changes issues globally. However, I do want to note the imperialist as well as imperial function of the
document because it was used to legitimize U.S. sovereignty beyond its boundary to continually push it further and
further west and out. The U.S. establishes an imperialist power first that is then maintained by imperial power, to use
their term. I also need to point out that Dana Frank’s Buy American: The untold story of economic nationalism
(1999) makes a similar point, that the U.S. was the EU before the EU became the EU (29). Lastly, Sharon Luk’s
“The life of paper: A poetics” (2011) profoundly impacted my reading of how paper can be life-sustaining and fatal,
able to destroy and create in the most material ways possible.
33
Marx, Capital, 333.
12
maximum capacity and thus did not deserve to be responsible for said land.
34
Before
independence, English settlers took Algonquin, Yamasee, Appalachee, Creek, and Cherokee
lands through genocidal wars and predatory financing. (Woods 1998, 41, 44). “Between 1801
and 1805, President Jefferson’s administration negotiated three treaties with the Choctaw in
which 7.6 million acres of land were ceded in exchange for less than $100,000 in debt” (Woods
1998, 44). In 1830, the combination of the Indian Removal Act and Treaty of Dancing Rabbit
Creek—another exercise of power in paper—“led to the rapid deportation of 18,000 Choctaw,
Chickasaw, Cherokees, and Creeks to Oklahoma in forced marches plagued by cholera, malaria,
blizzards, starvation, violence, and more than 7,000 deaths” (Woods 1998, 45). In the 1930s, it
ran into the borders of another recently independent former colony. War broke out in 1946
largely over Mexico’s refusal to recognize Texas’ joining the U.S. as a state in 1845. Operating
as an independent republic since 1836, the government of Texas entered the union as a slave
state. In 1848, ink on paper ended the war and once again proving its utility and importance.
“The treaty with Mexico [was] signed in the Villa of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico cedes to the
United States, pistol at chest, half its territory” (Galeano 1998 [1987], 161). That was the first
time the U.S. used force against another nation-state to expand its reach and redistribute power in
the Américas, to become an imperialist power different than but not dissimilar to European
models.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the articulation of settling and capitalism enabled
the U.S. to reproduce its power. Changes in instruments of production and the continued
infrastructural development created the conditions for expansion. One reason the U.S. pushed its
34
Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of
American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). This logic was also steeped in
the myth of Anglo-Saxon European exceptionalism and role as Protagonist of History. See, James Blaut, The
Colonizer’s Model of the World (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 1993).
13
territorial boundaries was the capital accumulation occurring along the eastern seaboard and
beyond. Technification and mechanization of several parts of the production processes across
nascent to blossoming industries in different states signaled the oncoming industrial revolution.
In the U.S. South, field-factories of tobacco and cotton grew in size and yield due in large part to
twisted “innovations” in the slave—as instrument of production—making process. From the type
of ship best suited to trade, carry, and torture women, men and children through the Middle
Passage; to “improvements” in systems of classification and holding at auction houses; to the use
of rape as technology for surplus labor extraction; to the use of murder as a method to control
overhead. The commodity chain that made slaves got more efficient and productive.
35
The cotton
gin was only able to make the impact it did because of all this violent and racialized industrial
engineering. Plantation owners, being good capitalists, used the surplus being made to plant
more and more cotton further and further west. Cotton expansion into Alabama and Texas was
the material expression of the formula MTM´, Money put into expanding Territorial holdings
will create more Money. That is, after all, the logic of racial capitalism: the accumulation of
money as end in itself.
36
In the north, new factories and infrastructure facilitated the growth of different industries
that expanded the finance, trade, and transportation of commodities. Frances Cabot Lowell
secured financing from a group of investors named the Boston Associates to build a new kind of
cotton factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. Built based on plans stolen and committed to memory
after a visit to cotton mills in Britain, the Boston Manufacturing Company organized in 1813
introduced new weaving technologies, cotton to cloth processing, and hydro-power to New
35
Rediker, The Slave Ship; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside and Antebellum Slave Market
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
36
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, New and
Update Edition (London: Verso, 2010 [1994]), 34; Marx, Capital.
14
England’s textile industry. More factories, including the Merrimack Manufacturing (1822) and
Naumkeag Steam Cotton (1839) Companies, sprang up and used spinning jennies, spinning
mules, and power looms as well.
37
Eventually, this meant southern cotton could stay stateside
and head a few hundred miles north instead of going overseas to Lancashire, Leeds,
Birmingham, and Manchester (Stiles 2010; Yafa 2005).
38
The new goods had to be financed and moved from place to place. In ports from
Savannah, to Norfolk, to Boston bankers and merchants moved, financed, and traded products
made in the U.S. Especially in New York. “Funds from the Northeast and England financed the
transfer of slaves, purchase of land, and working capital during the period of clearing the land” in
the newer territories.
39
Making the geography work in their favor, financiers and traders operated
from Manhattan island’s shore reaching into the North American continent over rivers, through
canals, on turnpikes, and out to the European continent across the Atlantic.
40
Thus transportation
infrastructure was a vital issue for people wanting to move their commodities to buyers and to
connect places at the limits of the amorphous nation-state. As the territories allied with the U.S.
kept moving away from the east coast, the influence and wealth of transportation magnates—
37
Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor History: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working
Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Stephen Yafa, Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber
(New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2005).
38
Another important industry to get going in the first half of the nineteenth century was firearms. In 1836,
Samuel Colt of Hartford, Connecticut registered the patent for the five chamber revolving pistol, “which kills five
times in twenty seconds” (Galeano 1998 [1987], 148). The first order came from Texas. I am not sure what it is
about New England and guns. In addition to the colt coming out of Hartford, Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson of
Norwich developed the Smith and Wesson 1, first sold in 1857 and manufactured by Volcanic Repeating Arms. On
the cusp of the introduction of their firearm, the two split ways, with Smith staying at Volcanic and moving with the
company to New Haven. Oliver Winchester, the largest shareholder, changed the firm’s name to New Haven Arms
Company in 1857. Nine years later, the first Winchester repeating rifles were sold. Eventually, the Winchester rifle
gained the reputation as the main instrument that “won the west”.
39
T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York, NY: Vintage Books,
2010), 105.
40
It is important to see the bankers, merchants, and transportation magnates as the actors in New York’s
history as opposed to the land—ie. the geography of the sound and rivers led to an economic and transportation
boom—because of what the latter means in a larger context. That is, by arguing that the geography produced a
certain kind of society and people one brushes up against environmental determinism. Furthermore, in the case of
New York, that position makes it European diffusion west.
15
owners of the lines and means of transit—increased. Loans, commissions, and insurance charges
may have lined the pockets of bankers and traders, but passage fees and operation rights filled
the accounts of the owners of water, road, and rail lines. This class of capitalist found its
apotheosis in a native New Yorker, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Slowly at first, then with a fury, the
Commodore (as he nicknamed himself) accumulated domestic and ocean steamboat lines as well
as railroad tracks.
41
Vanderbilt was a product of his time who could only become the “First
Tycoon” because of the conditions set by war with Mexico and the burgeoning industrial
revolution. Seeing an opportunity when the transcontinental railroad proved to be too slow in
coming for sellers of goods and gold seekers trying to get to California, Vanderbilt went to
América Central. He sought to export the formula MTM´.
42
Waging war against the Mexican state served as a right of passage into imperialist
power.
43
After 1948, the relationships between the U.S. and the rest of the countries in the
Américas took on a different tenor. The distribution of power clearly lay in its favor. Using
different modes of violence, the U.S. regenerated itself not just socially and culturally in its war
with Mexico, but politically, economically, and territorially.
44
Leveraging differences in capital
and accumulation, ethnicity, race, and technology it amplified its reach all the way to the Pacific.
Having generated imperialist power, it began transitioning into a colonial power complete with
territorial holdings and occupations throughout the Américas. This process began as a private
endeavor by filibusters, but soon became a state project during the war in Spanish America.
41
Stiles, The First Tycoon.
42
On territorial expansion see, Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum
America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Stiles, The First Tycoon; and Thomas W.
Walker, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle, Fourth Edition (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2003).
43
I am not overlooking U.S. annexation efforts for Hawaii that for all intents and purposes began with U.S.
protesting British interference in Hawai’i in 1842. The reason I do not address it here is that U.S. relationships with
Hawai’i are part of another related but distinct history of colonial expansion.
44
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).
16
Drawing from—if not drawing on—lessons learned in its takeover of lands spread over Tejas,
Nuevo Mexico, and Alta California the U.S. began to create a new relationship with the rest of
the western hemisphere that incorporated settler, capitalist, and imperialist practices.
From the nineteenth century to today, the U.S. has established and maintained a position
of dominance in the Américas through colonial power structured by a logic of coloniality.
Related to and using colonialism—a historical period and structure for relationships between
people and places—“‘coloniality’ is the logical structure of colonial domination underlying the
Spanish, Dutch, British, and US control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the
control and management of almost the entire planet.”
45
It is an “embedded logic that enforces
control, domination, and exploitation disguised in the language of salvation, progress,
modernization, and being good for everyone.”
46
It is the epistemic and ontological frame from
which modernity and its enablers operate. Coloniality homogenizes even as it depends on the
proliferation and articulation of difference for use in the reproduction and reach of colonial
power. In other words, it is how imperialists in the Américas subsume potential and/or actual
alternative political, economic, and social relationships to reorganize and stratify them on their
terms and insert them into political, economic, and social relationships structured in domination.
It is how the terms for interdependence between people and places across space are forged. In the
Américas, it is the mental and material alchemy that turns peasants into wage-workers, people
into citizens, mountains into railways, and clay into canals. According to Walter Mignolo, it
works by controlling four domains of experience. These are not discreet but intersect and
overlap: the economic; the political; the civic; and the epistemic and the subjective/personal.
47
Already operating in North America as the colonies became states and the states became a
45
Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 7.
46
Ibid., 6.
47
Ibid., 11.
17
nation-state, the logic of coloniality drove U.S. actions in the Central and Southern Américas
after that day in the Villa de Guadalupe Hidalgo.
48
Although coloniality works through settling, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism it
is important not to conceptualize it as a next step in a procession of logics that run parallel to
historical periods.
49
In fact, it is vital not to think of these practices temporally—or at least only
temporally—but spatially, on and in the political, economic, and social terrains they make. They
occupy the world in particular ways, ways that as Marx noted, make us in particular ways. How
we mix our work with the earth—how we organize it, how we distribute its resources, how we
construct societies on it—bears on our possibilities of being. Each of these build on each other
and bleed together, they depend on but are not determined by one another. They are nested: tied
to each other yet distinct, neither hierarchical nor horizontal but overlapping. They are parts of a
typology for the possibilities of interdependence in a world structured through and dominated by
coloniality.
50
“Colonial Brews” works with coloniality as a theoretical heuristic to analyze how
colonial interdependence is established and maintained through colonial power in the Américas
broadly, and between the U.S. and Nicaragua specifically. Understanding it as the logic behind
the material realities of colonial interdependence between these two places provides a frame
broad enough for thinking about relationships in a region as scattered as the Américas. I
conceptualize region in light of Doreen Massey’s argument that places, regardless of scale, are
48
Not by accident or coincidence, this moment of U.S. dominance dovetails with Giovanni Arrighi’s long
twentieth-century, his fourth major cycle of capital accumulation (2010 [1994]). Coloniality does not necessarily
lead to accumulation—Spain, Portugal, and France never led one of Arrighi’s cycles—but accumulation does enable
the machinations of coloniality to be carried out.
49
As Mignolo argues, it existed since Spain’s conquest nearly four hundred years before the U.S. took
Mexico and started landing on the shores on América central.
50
The conceptualization of these ideas as nested is inspired by Neil Smith’s typology for scale—difference
kinds of places—in capitalist space in “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of
Geographical Scale” Social Text 33 (1992): 54-81.
18
“defined in terms of the sets of social relations or processes in question.”
51
Following her lead, I
imagine the Américas as a discontinuous region, an “articulated [moment] in networks of social
relations and understanding” spread over a large space.
52
Together, Mignolo’s concept of
coloniality and Massey’s discontinuous region provide a framework for how the kind of colonial
power made and maintained in colonial interdependence is reproduced. Although coloniality is
the concept most apt for this dissertation, it is not the only concept which foregrounds large-scale
units of analysis.
World-systems analysis begins from the premise that scholarship in the social sciences
must not only work through all disciplinary distinctions but at the largest scale possible.
Academics representing a world-systems approach such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni
Arrighi offer large-scale analyses that focus on dynamic connections between people and places
over time in an all encompassing capitalist world-system.
53
One of the hallmarks of this
approach is its division of the world into three kinds of places depending on which of the
processes and capacities of capitalism occur there: core (completion, retail, and consumption),
semi-periphery (mediation), and periphery (raw material production). For the most part, core
countries are industrialized and accumulate capital, those in the semi-periphery have
characteristics of both and are industrializing, and peripheral countries are the least industrialized
and dependent on exports. These contributions are vital to my research, but in the end do not
hold a more central role because of the amount of emphasis placed on economic factors
structuring interdependence. In addition, they re-center sixteenth century Central Europe as point
51
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994),
139.
52
Ibid, 154. Massey continues to work on this and addresses the idea of discontinuous regions as part of a
group in Rethinking the Region: Spaces of Neo-Liberalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998). Part one is especially
helpful.
53
Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), 23. See also, Arrighi, The Longt Twentieth Century.
19
zero for our contemporary world: Italy, the Netherlands, and Britain. My point in eschewing
toward coloniality as a concept is not to underemphasize the roles of accumulation or Central
Europe, but to make the ethnocentric and racist logic that animated all the imperialists and
colonialists from the fifteenth century onward—including Portugal, Spain, France, and the
U.S.—an integral part of any conversation on colonial power. On the one hand, world-systems
moves analysis beyond the nation-state to weave histories of disparate places linked together
through large cycles of accumulation.
54
On the other hand, the multiple axes along which power
54
Much Marxian writing is done with the capitalist nation-state as the central unit of analysis albeit in a
manner that takes its imbrication at a global scale into account. My work here is influenced by academics such as
David Harvey’s Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London,
Verso: 2006) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [2005]) as well as Neil
Smith’s Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 2008 [1984]) who offer rich, complex theorizations of ideas such as “accumulation by dispossession”
(Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism); the “uneven development” inherent in capitalism (Smith, Uneven
Development); and “socializing risk and privatizing profits” (Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism). How class
difference is made, leveraged, exploited, and materialized is evident in all their work. However, in their analyses of
how particular ideological, financial, and material practices create extreme class difference the roles of other
differences are not addressed or function as additives. For instance, in Spaces of Global Capitalism, Harvey
misreads the Zapatista movement as an example of a response to capitalist driven accumulation by dispossession. He
describes it as a movement “that did not seek to take over state power or accomplish a political revolution. It sought
instead a more inclusionary politics in a more open and fluid search for alternatives that would look to the specific
needs of the different social groups and allow them to improve their lot” (63). Although it is true the Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) did not seek to occupy state power, it is inaccurate to suggest that it
sought a different kind of inclusion in the Mexican nation-state. The EZLN did not refuse state power, it dismissed
it—there is a substantial difference. Harvey adds, “[The EZLN] sought thereby to accomplish something akin to a
passive revolution within the territorial logic of state power” (63). Once again, he misreads the intent and
significance of what happened in 1993 and 1994 when the EZLN released the Primera and Segunda Declaración de
la Selva Lacandona, and declared war on the Mexican nation-state. Their actions were deeply rooted in territorial
claims antagonistic to the territorial logic of modern capitalist state power. As Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo,
Walter Mignolo, and Arturo Escobar—among others—argue, the EZLN practiced, and are continuing to try and
practice, non-modern and decolonial life (Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination; Mignolo, The Idea of
Latin America; Escobar, Territories of Difference). The members of the EZLN are enacting an alternate
“cosmovision,” world-vision, (Escobar, Territories of Difference) that asserts itself as coeval with the modern,
colonial nation-state system Mexico represents. They declared the ability for multiple nations to inhabit the
territorial boundary of the Mexican nation-state, what Escobar calls “pluriversality,” what Doreen Massey calls
heterogeneous space-time (for Space [London: SAGE Publications, 2005). By rejecting the Mexican state’s claims
of sovereignty over their land, the EZLN dismissed the colonial logic embedded in the modern capitalist nation-state
system. Because Harvey argues that global “unevenness must be understood as something actively produced and
sustained by processes of capital accumulation” only and that the only way to respond to it is in class terms (Harvey,
Spaces of Global Capitalism, 65), he finds the variety of struggles against neo-liberalism in the 1980s and beyond
“simply stunning.” So much so that “[i]t is hard to even imagine connections between them (63). If one approaches
these struggles through the lens of class only it is difficult to imagine. However, if one sees class difference as one
of the differences produced and articulated with ethnicity/race/sex through coloniality then the connections are more
readily apparent. Again, Harvey’s—and Smith’s—work are important for their deep deconstructions of capitalism
and class stratification, and are distinct from world-systems analysis in terms of unit of analysis, but they both
20
is made and maintained—race, ethnicity, gender, sex—are relegated to the periphery without
irony.
Similar to world-systems theory, writers who focus on global commodity chains (GCC)
as a unit of analysis study changes in relationships created between multiple people and places
by specific goods. Terrence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein define a GCC as “a network of
labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity.”
55
By tracking the
“organization of inputs (eg. raw materials or semi-finished products), labor power (and its
provisioning), transportation, distribution (via markets or transfers), and consumption”
56
scholars
lay plain “world economic spatial inequalities in terms of differential access to markets and
resources.”
57
In keeping with world-systems typology, most GCC studies divide the different
parts of the chain by their location in the capitalist world-system: raw materials originate in the
periphery (least industrialized countries), move through the semi-periphery (industrializing
countries), and are sold and consumed in the core (industrialized countries).
Several authors use the GCC framework to analyze the interdependence between sites of
production and consumption. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power is a classic example of how
the GCC framework can be used to illuminate the production of power through sugar planting,
trading, retail, and consumption. Most importantly for my work here, he argues that the subtle
shifts from honey to sugar as sweetener, in sugar consumption rates, and proliferation of use
throughout the world as Britain colonized the West Indies and continued its imperialist march
operate from a modern epistemic foundation. In other words, the units, forms, and results of their analyses may be
different, but both take modernity for granted, meaning that proletariat revolt is the only revolt that can alter power
relationships. This is what marks the limits of Marxian scholarship that centers on class and tacks on differences.
55
Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Commodity Chains in the World Economy Prior to 1800”
Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 10, no.1 (1986), 157-170.
56
John M. Talbot, Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004), 8.
57
Flavia Echánove, “Globalisation and Restructuring in Rural Mexico: The Case of the Fruit Growers,”
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geographie 96, no. 1 (2005): 15-30.
21
reveal much about the extent of British reach and dominance in a particular historical moment.
Recently, more work has been done that looks at how GCCs are governed and shaped, whether
they are producer-driven or buyer-driven, as well as how they can be used against themselves by
activists.
58
Increasingly, GCC analyses are becoming more complex to attend to the myriad
“forces beyond the nakedly military and economic ones maintained” in these interdependencies,
and not reduce them all simply to capitalists in the core accumulating by dispossessing.
59
Anna
Tsing’s Friction is an example of this different kind of GCC analysis.
Tsing works from a forest in Kalawan, Indonesia to painstakingly trace the multiple
narratives and relationships—what she calls “connections”—between people and places logging
has created. In other words, transnational activism, colonial dispossession, anti-imperial
solidarity, and repartitioned topographies are made as well as tables and chairs.
60
For Tsing, the
structure of the timber GCC originating in Kalawan constructs the institutional and material
infrastructure for contested global connection forged through struggles over the future of a
forest.
61
The kind of infrastructure constructed is crucial because once created it serves as the
grooved path for the circulation of people, ideas, goods, and forms of relationships.
62
Over the
course of her monograph Tsing demonstrates that what seems to be only capitalist global
connection is actually much more. In the interlude titled “This earth, this island Borneo,” her
writing performs the epistemological and ontological effects of the logging industry on the local
58
Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, Globalization of Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Américas: The
Sweatshop Movement and the Struggle for Social Justice (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); Chomsky, Linked
Labor History; Dana Frank, Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Boston, MA:
South End Press, 2008); and Talbot, Grounds for Agreement.
59
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, xvi.
60
Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005).
61
Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 327-360.
62
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Big Things (Forthcoming).
22
community.
63
All along the margins she enacts the local knowledge being displaced by colonial
knowledge. Where outsiders see bananas, the local people see isang, manurun, talans, tahur,
sarapang, lilin, and twenty-two more varieties of what foreigners see as occurring once—
coloniality homogenizing difference in order to make it legible.
64
Friction begins to make the
case that in order to shape global connection and relationships therein it is important to work on
multiple fronts, at various differences, not just along class lines. That quite to the contrary of
what David Harvey argues, a diverse assault across the spectrum of political, economic, and
social life is necessary to refashion global connection and interdependence.
65
GCCs create and
leverage more than just class difference. Functioning through coloniality, they are
simultaneously about race/ethnicity/gender. They do not work through class and ethnicity, and
race, and gender but through class/race/ethnicity/gender—all at once.
In his essay, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” Stuart Hall
works through economic and sociological literature on racially structured social formations to
argue that labor is not simply colored by race, but works through race. That “[r]ace is thus also
the modality in which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which class relations are experienced,
the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’.”
66
The point Hall is making is not that
two discreet differences—class and race—are coupled in societies structured in dominance for
purposes of stratification, but that the differences are produced and exploited at the same time.
He surveyed post-colonial, both former colonies and formerly colonizing societies, to argue that
the differences are manufactured and used simultaneously from the outset. For different purposes
63
Tsing, Friction, 155-170.
64
Ibid., 166.
65
Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 63.
66
Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Social Dominance,” 341.
23
and by different actors these repartitioned geographies are naturalized.
67
It serves the interests of
those benefitting from the power created through dominance for these partitions to remain
common sense. With regard to coloniality, it serves the interests of those benefitting from
colonial power for the multiple dimensions of existence coloniality works through to seem
unconnected. If class and race and ethnicity and gender are conceptualized as distinct categories
of existence then it will continue to be difficult to realize the connections between seemingly
disparate struggles, mobilizations, and insurrections. However, once we realize that these occur
all at once and deconstruct how this happens we can develop a theory, a guide to action, for
making different kinds of societies and a world structured otherwise. More specifically for this
project, only then can we unmake colonial power and interdependence and begin constructing
connections characterized by mutuality in the Américas (Gilmore 2002).
68
On Reach
Building on the work of previous scholars, I introduce and argue for reach as a critical
material category. In Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, Macarena
Gómez-Barris develops the concept of afterlife to describe the realities of people living through
political violence. Theorizing how state-led and alternative forms of memory are constructed in
post-Pinochet Chile, Gómez-Barris defines “afterlife of political violence as the continuing and
persistent symbolic and material effects of the original event of violence on people’s daily lives,
their social and psychic identities, and their ongoing wrestling with the past in the present.”
69
The idea here being that even after the repression, torture, and disappearances that occurred at
67
Smith, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics.”
68
Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference.”
69
Macarema Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkely, CA:
University of California Press, 2008), 6.
24
the behest of Augusto Pinochet ended, the memories and effects of these events pulses in the
lives of Chileans within and without the country as evidenced through truth and reconciliation
committees, memorials, and various forms of cultural production. Afterlife as past with presence
in the present provides a concept for the continued persistence of events, moments, and
relationships thought to have been pushed to the annals of history. This idea of presence in
absence, perceived or actual, is related to the idea of haunting developed by Avery Gordon.
In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Gordon develops a
theory of haunting to describe the traces of violence left in the wake of efforts to cover up
modernity’s failures and contradictions.
70
Attempts to reconcile state terror unleashed in
Argentina during the Dirty War of the late 1970s and racial capitalist terror in U.S. by selling
people as property through chattel slavery leave imprints. These imprints are hauntings that
function to remind us that “invisible things are not necessarily not-there” and are signaled by
ghosts.
71
Ghosts are events, moments, and/or people that bring a strangeness to the place of
haunting to unsettle our knowledge; are symptoms of what is missing, giving notice not only of
themselves but of what is missing; and they are alive, we are in relationship with them.
72
Gordon
concludes that it is our duty to reckon with these ghosts when we encounter them and “offer
[them] a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice.”
73
Thinking these two concepts
together, the afterlife of political violence is the where and how ghosts are sustained to do the
vital work of haunting, calling us to recognize that what “appears to be absent can indeed be a
seething presence.”
74
70
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7, 12.
71
Ibid., 17.
72
Ibid., 64-65.
73
Ibid., 65.
74
Ibid., 17. In fact, Gómez-Barris builds on Gordon’s work, noting that it creates a multivalent frame that
allows her to stage some of the themes in Where Memory Dwells (19).
25
Working across the Américas, both Gómez-Barris and Gordon challenge us to recognize,
seek to understand, and move to rectify previous state sanctioned physical violence and psychic
terror. They challenge us to see the traces of structures of domination and modernity’s machinery
for producing premature death everyday. Their contributions lead me to echo one of Gordon’s
sentiments, “we are not ‘post’ modern yet.”
75
Which means, that following Mignolo’s
theorization of modernity’s inability to exist without coloniality, neither are we “post” colonial.
This does not mean all is as it once was. It does mean that because of wars for independence,
drafting of constitutions, and elections around the world many act as though we are done with
the past. Unfortunately, the past is not done with us.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker begin The Many Headed Hydra with a meditation
on the hidden time and distance crossed when a wave crashes on the shores of Lands End in
England.
76
They compare moments in Atlantic history that seem to spontaneously appear to these
breaking waves. In the same way the waves are actually the product of wind patterns reaching at
least as far as Newfoundland and developed over seconds, minutes, and days our current moment
in which capitalism is a dominant form structuring our world reaches back at least to the violence
and opposition of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Stated differently, the “long fetch” of the waves is
what gives them their shape and strength. It is what makes the waves appear at all. In order for
this to happen, they have to start somewhere. Maybe Newfoundland. Perhaps Florida or the West
Indies. The point they make in The Many-Headed Hydra is not one about origins, but about
beginnings. That is, relationships between people and places were different after 1609. They
reference the importance of the “fetch” in wind, currents, and grooves in the ocean floor made by
wind and currents—the infrastructure—not only in making waves, but in ensuring their
75
Ibid., 12.
76
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the
Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000).
26
reproduction, cycles that ensure their reappearance. Thinking through the long fetch, and
afterlife, and haunting I offer reach as a critical material category defined as the infrastructure for
and capacity to make, reproduce, and maintain power across space and over time.
Reach builds on Gómez-Barris, Gordon, and Linebaugh and Rediker’s theorizations of
how the past impinges on and marks the present, but is also connected to Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
Stuart Hall, Laura Pulido, and Clyde Woods’ explanations for how particular articulations of
difference are held still and structured in dominance.
77
To be clear, there are more scholars
whose work also analyzes how relationships and structures of domination are maintained. I draw
heavily on these writers and other in the same intellectual tradition because of their persistence
on pointing out that this happens by creating and exploiting multiple differences at the same time
that are then repartitioned for the political purposes of what Rosa Linda Fregoso calls scientific
disaggregation.
78
That is, making the production class, race, ethnicity, and gender difference
seem unrelated. In other words, they are anti-colonial writers, broadly conceived.
My purpose in using reach critically is simply this, to contextualize a beginning that is
actually a sixth rehearsal: U.S. dominance in the Américas maintained through colonial power. It
is a sixth rehearsal, at least, because others occupied that position before the U.S. Like
Linebaugh and Rediker, I believe we find contemporary relationships and structures more
familiar if we look past the present and search for the wind, currents, and grooves that have been
created over time to make the present possible—the infrastructure for repetition. The waves are
different—Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Britain—but the infrastructure is the
same—colonial power—and they come from the same place, coloniality. Historically
77
Specifically the work done in “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference,” “Race, Articulation, and
Societies Structured in Dominance,” Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left, and Development Arrested.
78
Rosa Linda Fregoso, meXicana encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 5-6.
27
contextualized, what is the production of U.S. colonial power is also the reproduction of colonial
power broadly. It is true that changes are afoot with regard to how power may be materializing in
a more centralized imperial form according to Hardt and Negri.
79
It is also true that control of the
economic, political, civic, and epistemic domains of human experience is still the end even if the
means have changed. We are still caught in a colonial matrix of power. The practices may take
multiple shapes in history, but their purpose is the same. It is important to think about U.S.
dominance in the Américas through the reach of coloniality and colonial power because it is only
through collective anti-colonial thought and action that pushes along multiple axes of difference
all at once that we can productively destroy colonial interdependence in order to create
relationships grounded in mutuality.
Research Questions and Methods
The research questions guiding my work are:
• How do the production, retail, and consumption of coffee broadly and between the U.S. and
Nicaragua specifically reveal the persistence of colonial power? What shapes do the control
over the economic, political, civic, and epistemic take in a particular GCC?
• Who are the actors involved in delineating the contours of—whether in a dominant or
marginal role—production, retail, and consumption in a coffee commodity chain between the
U.S. and Nicaragua?
• How are different crises—of surplus, of price drops, of infrastructure, of war—resolved?
How do the resolutions inhibit or engender alternative forms of interdependence? What are
the possibilities for and limitations to constituting power and interdependence differently?
79
Michael Hardt and Antonion Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.)
28
Coffee as Power Window
Coffee’s paradoxical ability to be both ubiquitous and specific make it apt for a study on
how colonial power is made and maintained in a region over time. It is ubiquitous in that it is
everywhere; it is specific in that it is everywhere in particular ways. Most of the coffee
consumed on a daily basis is done so in post-industrializing countries. However, it is produced in
countries still heavily dependent on raw exports.
80
In spite of this complete dependence on
countries in the coffee belt, post-industrialized countries absorb most of the benefits while
producing countries reap the costs.
Coffee is so quotidian, yet this is what makes it an important window into how the
workings of colonial power permeate the everyday. With so many people and places around the
world dependant on it—for work, as work, to get through work—coffee consumption, trade and
production are mundane manifestations of interdependence between people and places.
However, the political, economic, and social conditions that enable these connections illuminate
the colonial nature of this interdependence. Murky as a tasa of Café Bustelo may be, it is indeed
a power window. Coffee consumption, trade, and production can help us see how colonial power
is reproduced. For all the attention Starbucks receives as the face of all that is unjust about the
coffee industry, it only buys about 2% of coffee traded each year. It is in grocery stores and
homes with Philip Morris, Sara Lee, and Proctor and Gamble products that colonial power is at
work. It is at home that we find that “power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and
routine.”
81
In 2001, the most recent coffee crisis produced a new zenith for roasters and nadir for
growers. The price was driven down to a dubious record low of $.41/lb and subsequently forcing
80
Some of these countries, Nicaragua included, are also increasing their reliance on textiles and apparel
made in zonas francas, free trade zones.
81
Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 3.
29
growers to abandon their farms or begin planting more lucrative addiction forming plants such as
coca and qat.
82
Sara Lee for instance, reported a 17% profit from its coffee division.
83
This
margin is attributed to higher retail prices and lower wholesale prices for green coffee imported
from producing countries. The average retail price for a pound of ground coffee at the close of
the 2000 coffee year was $3.99. Of that, 79.4%, or $3.17, came from value added in consuming
countries.
84
Examples of adding value are roasting, packing, and branding. Transportation costs
accounted for 8.3%, or $.33. Value added in producing countries—usually in the form of an
export tax—factored in for 1.9%, $.07. This means that of the $3.99 paid on average for a pound
of coffee, 10.4% went to growers, $.42. As a frame of reference, in 1980 the average price per
pound in consuming countries was $4.17. That price broke down in following manner: 51.7%
($2.16) from value added in consuming countries; 12.8% ($.54) for transportation; 16.8% ($.70)
from value added in producing countries; and 18.5% ($.77) went to growers.
85
Another way to
understand this is that in 1980 a producer needed to sell 9.19 pounds of coffee to purchase a
Swiss army knife, 16.32 pounds in 2000.
86
“Colonial Brews” is a geo-historical study within a political economic framework in
conversation with the work of scholars across disciplines. It combines archival research, policy
analysis, and ethnographic methods with critical spatial and ethnic studies theories. Primary
sources include nineteenth century U.S. canal project papers, coffee trade journals and
82
Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival (Berkeley, CA:
University of California, 2007), 43.
83
Néstor Osorio, “The Global Coffee Crisis: A Threat to Sustainable Development,” accessed July 19,
2011, http://www.ico.org/crisis.asp?section=About_Coffee; Oxfam, “Mugged Poverty in Your Cup,” accessed July
12, 2011, http://www.oxfamamerica.org; and Antony Wild, Coffee: A Dark History (New York, NY: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2005). Wild notes the decision some growers have made to torch their coffee plants in favor of coca in
Colombia and qat in Ethiopia, other addictive drugs, is caused by low coffee prices. For a filmic rendering of these
issues, see Black Gold: A Film About Coffee and Trade, directed by Marc and Nick Francis (Speak It Productions,
2006).
84
Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 169.
85
Ibid., 166.
86
Oxfam, “Mugged,” 15. In 2001, it would have taken 23.06 pounds.
30
agreements, GATT and WTO agreements, and fair trade materials. I analyze the accounting
archives of Copa Viva coffee plantation in Nicaragua in addition to interviews and participant
observation conducted on-site. The persistence of colonial power a historical moment in which
people and places being bound ever tighter across space by trade should move us to enact other
ways to depend on each other, to be in relationship with one another. And many are in fact doing
just that. “Colonial Brews” aims to contribute to the efforts of people trying to make another
kind of interdependence that is more equitable and life-sustaining. To make it based on
mutuality.
Organization and Chapter Outline
Chapter one, “Developing Disaster: 1962-1972, Setting Conditions for Future Coffee
Chaos,” is an analysis of the immediate physical and long term economic effects of triangulating
chemical inputs with international trade regulation and the beginning of trade liberalization.
Combining policy analysis, archival research, and ethnographic methods within a political
economic framework this chapter focuses on an important historical conjuncture in U.S. political
economics and its effects on Latin American coffee growers generally, and a Nicaraguan farm
specifically. The decade from 1962 to 1972 began with the U.S. signing onto the International
Coffee Agreement (ICA) and ended with its participation in the Tokyo round of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The ICA was an agreement between coffee consuming
and producing countries that set a quota system in order to stabilize the international coffee
market. During the same time, development loans and technologies led to both an increase in
agricultural producers and higher yielding crops across the Américas, including Nicaragua. The
quota system’s limits combined with new agricultural technologies opened the door for smaller
growers to expand rapidly as a development strategy and fill the void created by export ceilings.
31
Not lost in the middle of this is the paradigm shift in how coffee was grown at the expense of
local practices. Whether intentional or not, a result of the ICA and development policy in the
Américas was a region full of coffee growers sustained by a quota system and operating at their
maximum yield levels. In this context, the 1972 Tokyo GATT marked the beginning of the end
of regulation and started setting the conditions for a future crisis by slowly eroding the walls that
kept coffee from flooding the world.
“Caffeinated Consent: Fair Trade as Crisis Management,” is a multi-scaled examination
of certified coffee practice. Presented as a way to alleviate the material inequalities that
characterize global capitalism in the era of free trade it actually does harmful political work. As
Julie Guthman among others point out, labelling is so troubling because it puts a purchase price
on “politics,” as if “doing good” is something that can be bought.
87
In other words, it
manufactures consent to capitalism by making it appear redeemable. Building on Guthman’s
work, I argue that it also replicates colonial power and perpetuates what Blaut calls the myth of
European diffusionism—that the northern and western European peoples and their descendants
are the movers and makers and saviors of history.
88
Working through of the language and
imagery on fair trade literature and product packaging and the relationships between retailers and
producers from this perspective reveals that the collectives and co-ops that produce the coffee
may be the new kinder, gentler missions.
Chapter three, “Production at Twilight: The Life of a Farm” is devoted to Copa Viva
coffee plantation. Located north of Matagalpa in Nicaragua’s main coffee growing region, the
farm has been under its current owner, Doña Helena, since 1975. Currently, three-fifths of the
acreage is devoted to producing organic fair trade coffee. Based on studies of the farm’s
87
Julie Guthman, “The Polanyiam Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance,” Antipode 39,
no. 3 (2007): 456-478.
88
Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World.
32
economic records, extended interviews, and participant-observation I trace the impact of the
issues raised in the previous two chapters on the land, agricultural practices, and lives of the
workers.
33
Chapter 1
Developing Disaster: 1950s-1970s, Setting Conditions for Future Coffee Chaos
In 2000, the most recent coffee crisis produced a new nadir for growers and zenith for
roasters. The price was driven down to a dubious record low of $.40/lb and subsequently forced
growers to abandon their farms or begin planting more lucrative and addictive plants such as
coca and qat. As was noted in the previous chapter, less and less surplus value created by coffee
sales flowed back to producers while roasters gained more. Sara Lee, for instance, reported a
17% profit from its coffee division.
1
This margin is attributed to higher retail prices in large
consuming countries and lower wholesale prices for green coffee imported from producing
countries. The average retail price for a pound of ground coffee at the close of the 2000 coffee
year was $3.99. Of that, 79.4%, or $3.17, came from value added—roasting, packing, and
branding—in consuming countries. Transportation costs accounted for 8.3%, or $.33. Value
added in producing countries—usually in the form of an export tax—factored in for 1.9%, $.07.
This means that of the $3.99 paid on average for a pound of coffee, 10.4% went to growers, $.42.
As a frame of reference, in 1980 the average price per pound in consuming countries was $4.17.
That price broke down in following manner: 51.7% ($2.16) from value added stayed in
consuming countries; 12.8% ($.54) for transportation; 16.8% ($.70) from value added in
producing countries; and 18.5% ($.77) went to growers.
2
The overwhelming consensus among scholars, non-governmental organizations, policy
analysts, and economists is that there was a singular cause for the crisis: the breakdown of what
1
Osorio, “The Global Coffee Crisis”; Oxfam, “Mugged”; and Wild, Coffee. Wild notes the decision some
growers have made to torch their coffee plants in favor of coca in Colombia and qat in Ethiopia, other addictive
drugs, is caused by low coffee prices. For a filmic rendering of these issues, see Black Gold: A Film About Coffee
and Trade.
2
Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 166.
34
would have been the fifth International Coffee Agreement (ICA) in 1989.
3
Removal of
export/import quotas coupled with the arrival of Vietnam as a major producer of robusta beans in
the early 1990s resulted in a flooded coffee market. A major frost destroyed much of Brazil’s
crops in 1995 and further complicated matters by causing a price spike that spurred producers to
sow more seeds with these temporary high prices in mind. Five years later—the amount of time
it takes a plant to mature and produce cherries ready for harvest—there was simply too much
coffee for the world to consume. In terms of why the ICA broke down, the answer most often
given is U.S. refusal to participate. Once again, there is a consensus as to why the U.S. did not
participate: the Berlin Wall fell. A key material and metaphorical barrier to U.S. and British led
capitalist dominance was eliminated. This created opportunities for further reregulation of trade
and finance in favor of capital and built on the momentum gained throughout the 1980s under
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. With the Soviet Union out of the picture, there was no
need to participate in an agreement that marginally protected countries like Brazil, Colombia,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador who depended on coffee for survival from market
conditions that would potentially push them to seek assistance from the USSR.
4
With the Cold
War over, a buffer between capitalist interests, dominated by the U.S. and Britain, and the rest of
the world disappeared.
5
3
David Goodman, “The International Coffee Crisis: A Review of the Issues,” in Confronting the Crisis:
Fair Trade, Sustainable Development, and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America, edited by Christopher M.
Bacon, V. Ernesto Méndez, Stephen R. Gliesmann, David Goodman, and Jonathan Fox, 3-25 (Boston, MA: MIT
Press, 2008); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World,
Second Edition (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010); and Seth Petchers and Shayna Harris, “The Roots of the
Coffee Crisis,” in Confronting the Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Development, and Ecosystems in Mexico and
Central America, edited by Christopher M. Bacon, V. Ernesto Méndez, Stephen R. Gliesmann, David Goodman,
and Jonathan Fox, 43-66 (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
4
This was a real possibility and one these countries often used to their advantage, in 1960 Brazil sent some
of their coffee surplus to Russia in exchange for oil, wheat, airplanes, and drilling equipment. Pendergrast,
Uncommon Grounds, 249.
5
Eric Toussaint, Your Money or Your Life! The Tyranny of Global Finance (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press,
1999). Also, Richard Peet, Geography of Power: The Making of Global Economic Policy (London, UK: Zed Books,
2007).
35
In this chapter I move the conversation about the coffee crisis of 2001 away from 1989 in
order to bring it back to 1989. The overtly ethnocentric, Malthusian—opportunistic and irrational
poor people cannot control themselves from growing too much coffee—and racist—situating
blame on new Vietnamese growers that deployed the trope of Yellow Peril—explanations for the
crisis do the insidious work of both shifting responsibility away from structural reasons for the
amount of coffee that hit the global market at the turn of the century and fostering a discourse
that makes broad anti-colonial, anti-capitalist solidarity difficult by pitting poor people against
poor people. These two reasons put forward by many analysts do not address how the crisis in
1990 and 2001 could happen so quickly. The point here is not to deny the material fact that when
the ICA broke down bag upon bag of coffee that was previously held back by export quotas hit
the Coffee Exchange in New York, or that a previously non-existent industry grew at the rate of
30% in Vietnam throughout the 1990s with the help of “a policy of privatization and economic
liberalization”.
6
Both did indeed happen, and both factored into these crises. However, they do
not explain why it was so easy for the crises to occur. By relying on classical economic analysis
these arguments do the discursive work of obscuring the conditions necessary that created these
allegedly unpredictable market corrections. They also perpetuate the myth that capitalism as a
form of organizing the social and material world, and the capitalist market as arbiter of positions
within the ensuing organizational structure, are self-sufficient and self-contained organisms
uncompromised by external interference. That is, they ignore the overlapping political, material,
economic, and social processes in mainstream development discourse and practices, agricultural
technologies, international trade agreements, and armed conflicts that developed the twin
disasters of 1990 and then 2000. Following the work of anti-colonial and or Marxian writers who
6
Dang Thanh Ha and Gerald Shively, “Coffee Boom, Coffee Bust and Smallholder Response in Vietnam’s
Central Highlands,” Review of Development Economics 12, no. 2 (2008): 312.
36
argue that crises of all kind—political, economic, ecological, environmental, social—are created,
I argue that three overlapping processes provided the architecture for the recent coffee chaos:
post-World War II development discourse and practice; the agricultural technologies of the
Green Revolution; and the ICA and Tokyo Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT). As these processes unfolded, they were met with revolutionary opposition to
these measures across the Américas that were subsequently crushed by U.S. political and
military forces after varying degrees of success.
7
From the insistence on “moving past”
subsistence and towards industrialization, to the widespread destruction wrought on various
places by counterrevolutionary forces, the imprint of colonial power is evident. If the U.S. did
indeed walk away from the ICA because the Berlin Wall came down, then perhaps we should
began at the historical moment that led up to its construction, the aftermath of World War II.
Post-World War II Development Ideology and Discourse as Prologue
During the first three weeks of July 1944, representatives from forty-four allied countries
convened the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington
Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to establish the architecture for a post-war global
economic and financial system. According to a press release issued on the opening day of what
is now known as the Bretton Woods Conference, the meetings were “the culmination of two
years of consultation and conferences between technical experts of over two-score Allied
Nations to organize a vital phase of post-war peace and economic stability.” The attendees’ goal
7
In particular, the work of Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It); Gilmore, Golden
Gulag; David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM
Press, 2011); Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Smith Uneven Development; Julie Sze, Noxious New
York: The Radical Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Wilson,
America’s Johannesburg; Woods, Development Arrested; and Daniel Worster, Dustbowl: The Southern Plains in the
1930s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979) is important here.
37
was, “to prepare a plan and text for consideration of the governments and peoples of the world
which will contribute solidly to world trade and prosperity.”
8
As part of the two-year process,
delegations from the larger allied countries met to outline what they perceived to be the best way
to create a “stabilizing influence in the international financial field.”
9
The “financial experts” and
“technical experts” led by the Canada, China, France, Great Britain, and the U.S., determined the
primary way to accomplish this was to establish an International Monetary Fund to organize
international financial cooperation including a “pattern of stable and orderly exchange rates”
10
that created conditions conducive for trade.
11
Secondary to this fund was the establishment of
global investment bank. According to the Mexican delegate, Eduardo Suarez, financial and
technical experts agreed that a Bank for Reconstruction and Development was necessary for
“encouraging sound international investment, thus contributing to economic reconstruction and
development.”
12
The importance of this conference is difficult to overstate. In drafting articles
for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD), the forty-four delegates codified longstanding de facto forms of colonial
global interconnection between Britain, France, Portugal, the U.S. and the rest of the world
organized by the logic of coloniality and enforced through colonial power.
8
United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, Document 9: “For the Press,” July 1
1944 No. 1., in Proceedings of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire July 1-22, 1944. Volume II, pp. 1147-48 (United States Printing Office: Washington, 1948), p. 1147.
9
United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, “Introduction,” in Proceedings of
the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Bretton Woods, New Hampshire July 1-22, 1944. Volume I,
pp. v-iv (United States Government Printing Office: Washington, 1948), p. v. Further references to United Nations
Monetary and Financial Conference materials will be abbreviated to UNMFC
10
UNMFC, Document 49: “Remarks by the Honorable Eduardo Suarez, Chairman of Committee III at
First Session,” July 3, 1944 No. 14, in Proceeding of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference.
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire July 1-22, 1944, Volume II, p. 1152-1154 (United States Government Printing
Office: Washington, 1948), p. 1153.
11
UNMFC, “Introduction,” p. viii.
12
UNMFC, “Remarks by the Honorable Eduardo Suarez, Chairman of Committee at First Session,” p.
1153.
38
Coloniality’s persistence in structuring global connection was and is evident in the
uneven economic and industrial development between colonizers and colonized, former or
current. The international trade, currency exchange, and infrastructure the delegates sought to
increase, stabilize, and convert to maximum peacetime operation were forged through settler
colonialism, genocide, slavery, and various forms of legal un-freedom. The nascent financial
capitalism symbolized by the IMF and IBRD depended on an industrial capitalism that depended
on mercantilism that was fueled by colonial expansion—where financial capitalism is a
capitalism composed of trade in stocks, futures, securities, insurances, and collateralized debt
obligations that structures our current political, social, and economic moment. In the words of
Eduardo Galeano, the global capitalist political economy is the result of centuries of pilfering.
13
As of 1944, most national economies were articulated into an interdependent international
capitalist system made over centuries. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto wrote that it
is important to note what forms interdependency takes,
While some national economies need raw materials produced by unskilled labor,
or industrial goods produced by cheap labor, others need to import equipment and
capital goods in general. While some economies become indebted to the financial
capital cities of the world, others are creditors. Of course, bankers need clients, as
much as clients need bankers. But the ‘inter-relationship’ between the two is
qualitatively distinct because of the position held by each partner in the structure
of the relationship. The same is true for the analysis of ‘interdependent’
economies in world markets.
14
Although it is true that “every country represented at Bretton Woods was concerned with
protecting its own interests,”
15
each country was positioned at various distances from the levers
13
Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America.
14
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans.
Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), xxi.
15
UNMFC, “Introduction,” p. vi.
39
of power that shaped the global political economy.
16
The “atmosphere of enlightened self-
interest” at the conference was tilted in favor of the receding and advancing global powers,
Britain and the U.S. respectively.
17
The participation of former colonies with economies
articulated into an increasingly intimate international system largely as sources for raw materials
and markets for capital goods signaled that forty-four financializing, industrialized, and
industrializing countries were going all in on a post-war development agenda supported by the
twin pillars of trade and investment.
Bretton Woods marked the institutionalization of Eurocentric capitalist development and
its attendant fields of representation as the calculi for measuring development at the global scale.
In Development Arrested, Clyde Woods argued that fields of representation, ways of describing
and explaining the world, are vital because they are the material from which dominant blocs
reinforce hegemonic ideological terrains.
18
The planters who formed the dominant bloc in the
U.S. Mississippi Delta used—and in many ways continue to use—a combination of Herrenvolk
republicanism, heteropatriarchy, and positivist social science to simultaneously legitimize their
practice of racialized plantation capitalism and subjugate the racialized labor force on whose
backs this system was built and is built. These fields of representation also did and continue to do
the work of delegitimizing the radical forms of social explanation and possibilities of being
embedded in the blues epistemology cultivated and transmitted across generations by Black
16
The idea of access to levers of power is from Gilmore, Golden Gulag.
17
World-systems analysts such as Arrighi would call Britain and the U.S. the centers of the third and fourth
cycles of accumulation in historical capitalism (The Long Twentieth Century), decolonial scholars such as Mignolo
would call them the centers of second and third modernities violently extending the reach of local history at the
global. See Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and The Idea of Latin America. If hosting the conference and
over-representation among the delegates were not enough to signal the shift in dominant world power, the U.S.
dollar tied to the value of gold as unit of measure for currency exchange rates provided the necessary proof.
18
Woods Development Arrested, p. 26.
40
workers and communities in the U.S. South.
19
The hegemony of racialized plantation capitalism
in the U.S. South yields and depends on a constant recalibration and reconstitution of these fields
of representation. At Bretton Woods, the dominant global bloc led by the U.S. and Britain in the
persons of Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes emerged with the consent of forty-two
other nation-states on what global development would mean. The articles of the IMF and IBRD
codified the capitalist marketplace and capitalist forms of relations as the ideological terrains on
which a post-WWII global economic and financial system would take shape. More specifically,
with the U.S. and Britain leading this new dominant global bloc, financializing capitalism
became the goal of development. Even more specifically, the U.S. was taking the dominant
position in the emerging global political economic order as evidenced by the fact the currency
rates would be tied to the U.S. dollar. It also meant that development would require
industrialization; that human and environmental resources would be seen as commodities to be
organized and combined to create profit; and that uniform formulas would be needed to measure
if and how progress along the prescribed developmental trajectory occurred. In short, it meant
fields of representation were needed that both reified the ideological terrains that were signed on
to and that delegitimized proposed or lived alternatives. The calculi created to measure the
progress of nation-states moving towards financializing capitalism did this, and more. A
universalizing historical thesis is embedded in post-WWII development discourse and counter-
discourse that I will discuss in the conclusion. At this point, it is important to understand the
world as it was re-shaped and rendered legible by development’s dominant fields of
representation after Bretton Woods. If financializing capitalism was the model and goal, a
19
Woods defined the blues epistemology as a “complex of social explanation and social action, a praxis”
and the blues bloc as “[t]he ontology, or worldview, embedded in these communities has provided a sense of
collective self and a tectonic footing from which to oppose and dismantle the American intellectual, cultural, and
socioeconomic traditions constructed from the raw material of African American exploitation and denigration” (p.
29).
41
grammar was needed to describe and measure different countries’ economic, social, and
infrastructural proximity to it.
In Encountering Development, Arturo Escobar analyzes how development was codified
post-WWII. According to Escobar, the year after the IMF and IBRD began operations marked
the beginning of a ten-year period in which global development economics as theory and practice
was consolidated. Between 1948-1958, global development economics was “concerned with
certain questions, performed by particular individuals, and entrusted with given social tasks.”
20
Primarily, this meant Western trained economists and social scientists working for the IMF and
IBRD crafting plans and policies for “underdeveloped economies” to move from underdeveloped
to industrializing to industrialized.
21
Charting the movement through these developmental stages
required establishing a global economic, social, and infrastructural baseline and as subsequent
benchmarks derived from a Western economical perspective achieved through capital
accumulation, deliberate industrialization, development planning, and external aid in the form of
loans.
Throughout the 1950s, the non-industrialized world was discursively made at the global
scale while local places were systematically unmade. Compared to Western countries and held to
Western standards, non-industrialized countries were circumscribed as poor. Western countries
and Western-led institutions empowered by a combination of their own history of ethnocentric
violence, belief in the universal applicability of their worldview, and the coercion and/or consent
of less dominant countries. This was achieved through treaties and institutional agreements that
deployed the discourse and practice of development to manage the newly created poor people of
the world. After 1945, the economic category of poor was established “in relation to the
20
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 73.
21
Ibid., 74.
42
standards of wealth of the more economically advantaged nations.”
22
In 1948, the IBRD made an
abstract idea concrete and “defined as poor those countries with an annual per capital income
below $100.”
23
Almost instantly, over two-thirds of the world’s population became poor. The
construction of poverty and the “poverty sector” was what Lakshman Yapa called a “discursive
materialist formation.”
24
Measuring poverty in terms of money and income rather than
approaching issues of social reproduction in terms of food, shelter, and health provides a
different guide to action. To put it differently, “the concrete question, “What causes hunger,
homelessness, and ill-health?” yields substantially different answers from those we get from the
question, “What causes poverty?”
25
As Escobar wrote, “if the problem was one of insufficient
income, the solution was clearly economic growth.”
26
In the development discourse and practice
after Bretton Woods, countries were imagined as GDPs, sites for investment, markets for capital
goods, and sources for raw materials not as peoples, communities, or cultures. Through the
constructed category of poverty, local places and histories were undone and placed in a global
context by a universalizing narrative of development.
Poverty as an act of statistical comparison hinged on economics, but it reverberated
across the cartographic, social, and material spheres of the places and people affected. Large
parts of the Central and Southern Américas became part of a new Global South.
27
Socially,
subsistence communities and peasants increasingly became undesirable or illegitimate forms of
22
Ibid., 23.
23
Ibid., 24.
24
Lakshman Yapa, “What Causes Poverty? A Postmodern View,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 86, no. 4 (1996), 707.
25
Ibid., 717.
26
Escobar, Encountering Development, 24. This is story that is part of this story: driven largely by the U.S.
and England, economic development vis-à-vis public intervention in the economy was exported to the Southern
Américas based on the success of programs such as the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Tennessee Valley
Authority (38). An example of locally based programs with global designs.
27
Parts of Africa and Asia were also circumscribed as part of the Global South, but those regions are out of
the purview of my work here. I am focusing on the Américas as a region and will refer to them only.
43
social reproduction and subject positions. Throughout the 20
th
century, increasing after WWII,
and continuing to the present, indigenous and poor people in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras,
Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru were forced into wage labor, off of communally
held land by enclosure movements, and criminalized for not entering wage-work.
28
Genetically
modified crops and chemically dependent plantations began appearing across the region,
changing its physical and ecological systems. All of this in the service of development as
imposed by the IMF and IBRD.
Beginning in 1949 and continuing for three decades, development strategies drawn up by
the IMF and World Bank Group (comprised of the IRDB and the International Development
Association [IDA]) materially unmade local places and remade then into global places in the
Central and Southern Américas, as well as the rest of the Global South. The development
economics of these strategies followed a liberal economic formula: savings + loans + investment
= productivity increases and net export of capital. Mainstream economists assumed that non-
industrialized countries could move through balance-of-payments stages as Britain and the U.S.
did on the path to financializing capitalism, “from being young debtors (like Third World
countries in the 1950s) to mature debtors (when aid is no longer required, countries having
28
See Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development and Territories of Difference: place, movements, life,
and redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America and Memory of Fire:
Century of Wind; Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez, When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and
Technologies of Terror (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005); June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines
Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines, Revised Edition (New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1993). This is not to mean that forced removal and genocide of indigenous and poor people did not occur
before, but that this different due to the financial attachments that followed dispossession and death. Also, there are
many ways in which U.S. domestic history and policy prefigured its foreign policy and practices-those it either
dictated directly or indirectly through U.S. backed or sympathetic regimes throughout the region. The policies
enforced on indigenous peoples and poor people in the Central Américas regarding their need to enter wage-labor or
face criminalization echo the Black Codes of 1965 in the U.S. South. The codes were devised to control freed people
and soon to be former slaves. They were passed throughout the U.S. South as the Thirteenth Amendment was in
process, having been passed by the Senate in 1964, the House in January 1965, and enacted December 1965.
According to Woods, the codes stated, “Blacks had to have a job by January 1966 or be fined as vagrants. If they
could not pay the fine they were ‘hired-out,’ with former owners given the first option” (Development Arrested, p.
64).
44
developed the capacity to use efficiently commercial loans) to new creditors to, finally, mature
creditors (net exporters of capital).
29
However, the historical contexts of the colonial past and
present for non-industrializing nations was and is completely different than that of Britain and
the U.S. when they went through these stages in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries. Whereas
Britain and the U.S. dictated the terms of their industrialization, the non-industrializing countries
of the 1950s had their terms dictated to them by the financializing countries. In addition, the
industrializing nations of the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries were extracting surpluses from their
colonies, many non-industrializing countries of the 1950s were entering the new global
economic system after years of supplying raw materials, slave and low-wage labor, and markets
for capital goods. In other words, the nations of Global South in this period had to borrow under
horrible conditions: deterioration in the terms of trade against them, extraction of surpluses by
financializing countries, and a subordinate position with regard to policy formation.
30
At the very
best, the industrialized and financializing countries demonstrated arrogance in suggesting that all
countries were beginning the post-Bretton Woods development era on a level field; at worst, they
knowingly used their dominant positions to force non-industrializing and industrializing
countries in the Américas into predatory and untenable loans that would further exacerbate the
economic, social, and material unevenness across the region.
31
After three decades of IMF and
29
Escobar, Encountering Development, p. 82.
30
Ibid., p. 83.
31
This unwillingness to acknowledge differences in positionality derives from Eurocentric refusal of
colonial difference: what decolonial theorists call the site of enunciation that simultaneously obliterates indigenous
and non-European epistemologies and contains within it the possibility for multiple ways of being, or pluri-versality
(Escobar, Territories of Difference, 12-13, 168;and Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs). The colonial
difference is a site of perpetual epistemic and ontological crisis, a place with many possible resolutions. Since 1492,
proponents of modernity/coloniality have deployed various violent and oppressive methods for resolving these crises
by creating an uneven interdependence that, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, has created a global social scale structured in
dominance (Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” 1980). Crisis is opportunity. Part of
what I am doing in “Colonial Brews” is pointing out that modernity/coloniality vis-à-vis capitalism is always in
multiple states of crisis and that these are the sites at which apertures to other forms of interdependence not only
appear, but are most tenable. Social movements—from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the female-led banana unions in
Honduras, to the Afro-Columbian communities of the Pacific—understand this and force crisis.
45
World Bank Group development, under- or un-serviced loans forced several countries into
structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that required loan payments, increased privatization, and
currency adjustments. In the 1980s, Latin America sent $30 billion more than it received in new
loans each year to financializing and financialized countries on average.
32
The aggressive
capitalist economic policies of post-WWII development permeated several aspects of life in the
Américas as the result of trying to meet newly established financial goals and loan obligations.
From the outset, development aimed to reshape the physical world in the service of
economic policy. That is, it sought to bend the physical world to the demands of capitalism.
According to a report written for the IBRD by surveyors in 1949, Colombia’s countryside had to
be altered in order to exploit it to its maximum potential.
Its rich natural resources can be made tremendously productive through the
application of modern techniques and efficient practices. Its favorable
international debt and trade position enable it to obtain modern equipment and
techniques from abroad. International and foreign national organizations [the
World Bank and IMF among others] have been established to aid underdeveloped
areas technically and financially. All that is needed is a determined effort by the
Colombian people themselves.
33
In these four sentences the surveyors distill development into its key components: remake the
physical world, borrow and trade to import the capital goods necessary to remake the world,
apply agricultural technologies and chemicals to move the process along, and a self-
determination that echoed the protestant work ethic.
34
Throughout the Américas, countries took
recommendations, loans, and grants from the IMF, World Bank Group, and other extra-national
institutions to import policies, capital goods, and technologies.
35
In the 1960s, the Green
32
Escobar, Encountering Development, p. 83.
33
International Bank 1950: 615, in Escobar, Encountering Development, p. 25.
34
Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (New York,
NY: Penguin Books, 2002).
35
Again, it must be noted that many of these countries were under the direct or indirect influence of the
U.S. Nicaragua, for example, took recommendations and loans from the IMF and World Bank Group while under
the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship.
46
Revolution provided a new wave of modern techniques and agricultural technologies to change
the world.
Green Revolution Technologies and the Remaking of the Américas
“…plantation production is one of the most monumental burdens ever placed on a
community. It disfigures every nation, region, and ethnicity it touches.”
“Plantation relations can be reproduced under a variety of conditions so long as there is not
systemic challenge to the dominant bloc.”
36
During the 1980s, farms and agricultural workers in the U.S. entered a prolonged crisis.
According to Woods, the combination of the inability to gain access to European markets, being
too costly for many poorer countries, and the overproduction of domestic crops such as
soybeans, wheat, and corn as well as increased U.S. investment in agriculture in other parts of
the world for inexpensive imports put many growers in a bind. Production in the cotton sector
was indicative of the difficulties facing U.S. agricultural workers, “yield-oriented federal and
private lenders require[d] farmers to adopt the most capital-, technology-, and chemical-
dependent forms of production. All these forces [operated] both to drive smaller farms out of
business and to encourage land consolidations.”
37
Addressing the plight of the overwhelmingly
Black labor force Woods wrote, “[t]he African-American communities in the Delta are in the
grips of a highly capitalized and subsidized internationally oriented agricultural complex that is
in the throes of a massive transformation having global implications.”
38
Given the increasing
appearance of tropical goods from the Central and Southern Américas in markets today, Woods’
words proved prescient. Small farm owners and agricultural workers across the U.S. were and
are increasingly at the mercy of a liberalizing international agricultural complex that aims to
36
Woods, Development Arrested, 271, 204.
37
Ibid., 230, 261.
38
Ibid., 231.
47
reduce friction in the movement of goods between places. Export/import levies, other
protectionist measures, and market regulation are quickly disappearing, making it easier for U.S.
consumers to purchase grapes during winter or inexpensive t-shirts year round. Writing in the
second half of the 1990s, Woods’ comments came after the implementation of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an agreement that increased free trade and has been
devastating to working class and working poor communities, with women bearing even more of
the violence.
39
In a way, the re-regulation of the coffee market towards large producers signaled
by the demise of the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) in 1989 was a pre-cursor of what lay
ahead. A valuable part of the international agricultural complex, coffee producers and workers
were heavily impacted by agricultural technologies that precipitated the crises and fueled
demand for more free trade by political leaders shaping and following post-WW II development
discourse.
The Green Revolution (GR) was the physical and material application of post-Bretton
Woods development discourse and policy that centered on measuring development in monetary
terms. Dominated by the U.S. through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as The
Ford Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, official state foreign policy in Harry
Truman’s Point Four Program and John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress administered by the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and leadership in the World
Bank, IMF, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO UN), and United
Nations Economic Council on Latin America (UN ECLA) the implementation of GR
technologies dramatically re-shaped the Américas in the second half of the twentieth century.
39
See David Bacon, The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2004); Fregoso, meXicana Encounters; Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and
Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006); and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “In the
Shadow of NAFTA: ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ Revisits the Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty,” American Quarterly
57, no. 3 (2005): 751-777.
48
The crisis small farm owners and overwhelmingly racialized and classed agricultural workers in
the U.S. faced in the 1980s was the same crisis ethnicized and classed small farm owners and
workers faced in the Central and Southern Américas beginning in the second half of the 1960s.
40
In both cases, the agricultural technologies of genetically engineered seeds, chemical fertilizers,
and mechanized labor exploited the political, economic, and physical differences between large
and small farmers and led to a greater disparity in the income earned by large and small farmers,
concentration in landownership, a proliferation of monoculture cash-crop farming, an increase in
the amount of people dependent on wage-labor, and significantly remade the physical landscape
of the Américas. The international agricultural politics of development discourse and policy is
vital to understanding how these processes unfolded.
The U.S. used its new hegemonic position to mold development discourse and policy in
non-industrialized countries and construct the international agricultural complex. The two were
often conflated and pitted against each other. On the one hand, development theorists and
economists with the World Bank, IMF, UN ECLA, FAO UN, Rockefeller Foundation, and Ford
Foundation, as well as U.S. policy in the Alliance for Progress and USAID encouraged
increasing agricultural diversity by adding non-traditional crops like broccoli, berries, sugar,
40
The predominantly Black and poor white agricultural workers in the U.S. south previously faced
displacement and enclosure as well. What they were experiencing in the 1980s were simply the side effects of the
latest Mississippi Delta Plan devised by the dominant plantation bloc to maintain plantation relations after abolition.
The point here is not to find a ‘prime mover’ with regard to dispossession and displacement, rather to point out that
this has been occurring across the Américas for many, many years. Woods’ thesis that plantation relations can be
reproduced under a variety of conditions is influential to my work. Mignolo’s idea of coloniality being maintained
through colonial power exerted across four domains of human experience is a heuristic I am using. However, the
plantation and plantation relations as method for organizing social, political, and economic life as theorized by
Woods is crucial as well. Regardless of location and/or application, the plantation and plantation relations that
exploited racial and ethnic difference to fatal ends settled in and permeated agricultural life across the Américas. In
addition, in the same way that Woods’ Development Arrested traces the ability of the plantation bloc to maintain its
dominant position in the face of crisis by violently suppressing, discursively delegitimizing or criminalizing, and/or
absorbing alternative planning practices, I am arguing that the U.S. and U.S.-based organizations have been able to
maintain their dominant position in the Américas by using similar tactics.
49
cattle, and cotton to foster the internal economic growth necessary to spur industrialization.
41
These organizations offered aid in the forms of credit and/or grants at the same time that they
encouraged foreign investment. On the other hand, the Alliance for Progress and USAID gave
away or sold surplus grains at subsidized prices to non-industrializing countries in the Américas
as part of U.S. foreign policy aimed at deterring them from pursuing a communist alternative
represented by Cuba after 1959. This had the twin effects of depressing the prices of agricultural
products on the international market and making it easier to feed workers in urban centers.
42
Food was at the center of both and provided a way for the U.S. to dispose of its mounting grain
surpluses and use agricultural aid for political and economic leverage at an important historical
moment in the construction of an international agricultural complex that fit its desires.
43
These
U.S. and U.S.-influenced international policies were grafted onto the internal agricultural
policies in the Américas post-WW II.
During the 1950s and 1960s, several countries in the Central and Southern Américas
briefly introduced land reform measures in attempts to broaden their agricultural bases and
participation in diversification policies. In each instance, the reform measures were short-lived
due to the context in which they occurred. Specifically, Cuba was in the middle of a revolution,
the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was beginning, and the U.S. was the clear
hemispheric hegemon intent on eliminating any administration, policy, or activity that faintly
41
This diverse agricultural approach was tabbed as the way for non-industrialized countries to industrialize
through imnport-substitution. Farshad Araghi, “Global Depeasantization, 1945-1990,” The Sociological Quarterly
36, no. 2 (1995): 345-49; David Carey, Jr., “ Guatemala’s Green Revolution: Synthetic Fertilizer, Public Health,
and Economic Autonomy in the Mayan Highland,” Agricultural History 83, no. 3 (2009): 297; Daniel Faber,
“Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis of Central America,” Latin American Perspectives 19, no. 1
(1992): 18-19; David Conrad Johnson, “The International Coffee Agreement and the Production of Coffee in
Guatemala,” Latin American Perspectives 37, no. 2 (2010): 37-38; Michael Taussig, “ Peasant Economics and the
Development of Capitalist Agriculture in the Cauca Valley, Colombia,” Latin American Perspectives 5, no. 3
(1978): 68, 71, 80, 87.
42
Araghi, “Global Depeasantization,” 349.
43
Araghi, Ibid, 348-49; Douglas L. Murray and Laura T. Raynolds, “Globalization and its Antinomies:
Negotiating a Fair Trade Movement,” in Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization, ed. Laura T.
Raynolds, Douglas Murray, and John Wilkinson (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007): 6-8.
50
appeared communist. In Guatemala, the administration of Jacobo Árbenz enacted land reform
under Decree 900. Although Arbenz was a proponent of capitalist development, the combination
of his administration’s commitment to redistributing unused land on estates larger than 672
acres, the impact of this reform on the landholdings of the United Fruit Company, and Fidel
Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago was too much for the U.S. to take. In 1954,
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engineered a successful coup that removed Árbenz from
office.
44
Between 1960-1964, several countries enacted agrarian reform as a way to appease
peasant and indigenous struggles for land in an attempt preempt armed struggles. Coffee
producing countries Guatemala—under U.S. approved conditions this time, Nicaragua, Costa
Rica, Colombia, and Brazil each passed reform measures that multiplied the amount of small
farms and small landowners.
45
Many of these new land titles were granted for previously unused
lands or unfarmed locations due to their difficult soil conditions as well as on land peasants
and/or indigenous people were settled on “illegally.” In fact, for many of those granted deeds as
a result of these reforms the land they were given was an insult after being forcefully removed
from their traditional lands.
46
It was on these plots designed to provide subsistence or marginally
supplement wages earned on plantations that small farmers were encouraged to enter into the
international agricultural market by pulling up perennials and traditional plants for non-
traditional agriculture. New peasant, subsistence, and small farmers were created across the
Américas. They were expected to compete with large capitalist plantations and owners with
volume advantages and decades of participation in the international market and control of the
44
Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 292; Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Century of Wind
(New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988): 149-53.
45
Araghi, “Global Depeasantization,” 346. Other countries that initiated reform during this time were the
Dominican Republic, Panama, Ecuador, Perú, Venezuela, and Chile. They are not mentioned above because they are
not major coffee growers, although Perú does export some.
46
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in Latin America,” 19.
51
export infrastructures. In practice—if not in theory—the plot sizes were too small to produce
enough for the farmers to fully detach themselves from seasonal wage-labor, but large enough to
subsidize the large plantations in the form of less expensive labor. The small farms lowered the
operation costs of the plantations by depressing wage rates: the owners did not need to pay the
laborers as much because they made their own personal contributions to social reproduction.
47
This functional dualism, peasant economics alongside capitalist economics, worked from the
time of the land reforms until the late 1970s when the gulf between large and small farmers grew
too large.
48
These were the internal national conditions onto which the U.S., international
financial and political institutions, as well as international and U.S.-based NGOs superimposed
agricultural diversification plans and inexpensive or subsidized grains. In the mid-1960s, land
reforms ceased. The same actors who pushed for agricultural diversification delivered a modern
scientific alternative to redistributing land. Rather than have more people tending more of the
soil, they preached putting more science into the soil.
Agricultural technologies of the GR arrived in the Américas as ways to fulfill the goal of
broad-based agricultural diversification in the service of national economic growth and
industrialization. Genetically modified high yield variety (HYV) grain, cereal, and plant seeds,
synthetic fertilizers, and labor mechanization were substituted for land reform as the methods to
achieve diversification. It must be noted that the mainstream economists and international
agencies pushing the GR did so out of the belief that they were doing something good; that they
were alleviating poverty and hunger. However, they were operating within a universalizing
mindset that saw capitalist development as the only answer. International and local political
47
Araghi, “Global Depeasantization,” 352; Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in
Latin America,” 24; Johnson, “The ICA and the Production of Coffee in Guatemala,” 43; and Taussig, “Peasant
Economics,” 86.
48
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in Latin America,” 36.
52
figures and development theorists and economists touted these technologies as a panacea for
everyone involved: large landowners no longer had to worry about losing acreage;
peasant/subsistence/small farmers could intensify production on their limited and difficult
acreage to produce higher yields; and both could modernize their production.
49
GR technologies
gave local national political elites a way to promise to “increase economic growth without
recognizing small scale farmers’ demands and strategies as legitimate.....[t]echnical progress was
regarded as an alternative to land reform.”
50
The immediate and long-term effects of the GR
were altered land holdings, physical landscapes, and socioeconomic structures of the countries
that implemented the various technologies. A contributing factor that precipitated these changes
was the capital necessary to implement the new technologies.
Access to credit and/or grants was distributed unevenly between large and small farmers.
Stated simply, smaller farmers were systematically denied credit and/or grants to change their
production from locally-based and years old practices to new Western-based, synthetic, and
chemically engineered agricultural methods. Quite often, smaller farmers were showed and
offered GR technologies but not extended the credit necessary to use them.
51
In one particular
instance, farmers in Colombia’s Cauca Valley followed the recommendations and pulled up their
perennials to make room for seasonal crops only to find that the aid promised to them was no
longer available to them.
52
Small farmers faced barriers to capital at two scales. Internationally,
financial institutions and development agencies preferred large-scale farmers because they were
49
See Araghi, “Global Depeasantization;” Carey Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution;” Faber,
“Imperialism, Revolution, and Ecological Crisis in Latin America;” Taussig, “Peasant Economics;” William C.
Thiesenhusen, “What Changing Technology Implies for Agrarian Reform,” Land Economics 50, no. 1 (1974): 35-
50; and Lakshman Yapa, “Ecopolitical Economy of the Green Revolution,” Professional Geographer 31, no. 4
(1979): 371-376.
50
Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 293.
51
A. Eugene Havens and William Finn, “Green Revolution Technology and Community Development:
The Limits of Action Programs,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 23, no. 3 (1975): 472; Johnson, “The
International Coffee Agreement and the Production of Coffee in Guatemala,” 39.
52
Taussing, “Peasant Economics,” 80.
53
considered better risks, more likely to return on investment to lenders, or provide a success story
for development agencies. On occasions small farmers did receive capital, it usually depended
“on the requirements of the donor country than on those of the recipient.”
53
For instance, in the
1970s USAID offered loans to small farmers in Guatemala on the condition that they produce
“mostly NTAs such as broccoli, snow peas, zucchini, strawberries, rice, and blackeberries.”
54
According to Thiesenhusen, “[b]ecause development is too often equated with growth in average
per capita output in the economy as a whole, investments [were] channeled to those projects
which promise the highest short-run rate of return.”
55
Two main reasons farmers who controlled
the most acreage were the ones who made use of the technologies were that they could absorb
potential problems—from infestation to disease to weather—more easily and they had private
savings to contribute.
56
Small farmers also encountered more obstacles to credit at the local national scale. They
were at the mercy of banks that essentially worked for the large landowners, U.S. owned lenders,
and oligarchic government agencies whose members usually doubled as large landowners and
sought to appease U.S. and international institutions. In Guatemala, local banks favored large-
scale farmers. In 1975, a U.S. owned lending institution received US$550,000 of the total
US$1.6 million the country received in aid while small coffee farmers received only
US$181,000.
57
Political elites, coffee oligarchs, and security forces that maintained U.S. backed
governments in El Salvador and Nicaragua routinely grifted economic aid coming in to fund
53
Thiesenhusen, “What Changing Technology Implies for Agrarian Reform,” 41.
54
Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 297.
55
Thiesenhusen, “What Changing Technology Implies for Agrarian Reform,” 49.
56
Havens and Finn, “Green Revolution Technology and Community Development,” 478; Thiesenhusen,
“What Changing Technology Implies for Agrarian Reform,” 42.
57
Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution, 297; Johnson, “The International Coffee Agreement and the
Production of Coffee in Guatemala,” 43.
54
large estates.
58
In Colombia, capital from the World Bank and U.S. investors helped sugar
plantations expand across the Cauca flatlands. Exports jumped from 2,000 metric tons in 1938 to
91,000 in 1969. Small coffee farmers received marginal support from the Rockefeller, Ford, and
Kellogg Foundation funded Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical that actually reduced
their annual income by 40%.
59
As large landowners received an unequal amount of capital to
increase production with GR technologies, small farmers removed traditional crops and
implemented GR methods with limited to no funding. Combined with cheap U.S. grains flooding
the Américas side effects, intentional or unintentional, planned or unplanned, occurred.
The disparity in capital made available to large and small farmers for agricultural
technology led directly to local food underproduction and land concentration. Without the land
or capital necessary for GR goods, small farmers saw their subsistence foods drop and the gap in
cash income between them and large farmers increase dramatically. According to a small coffee
farmer in Guatemala, “I don’t have any land or money resources. If I did, I would use Caturra
[sic] but it is only for those who have lots of land.” He added, “I haven’t cultivated it because it
is very costly due to the requirement of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides. How
can a poor person afford that when he can’t get credit?”
60
Small farmers who did convert their
farming with GR methods and/or converted to NTA with meager savings or minimal credit
literally uprooted sources of food and long held agricultural practices. In their place, they
instituted what former USAID chairman Clifton Wharton called “new farming skills and
expertise of higher order.”
61
The blatant ethnocentric dismissal of locally cultivated food and
agricultural practices laid bare the logic of coloniality behind development and the GR. Or, as
58
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in Central America,” 18, 35.
59
Taussig, “Peasant Economics,” 68, 80-83.
60
Havens and Finn, “Green Revolution Technology and Community Development,” 479.
61
Clifford Wharton, “The Green Revolution: Cornucopia or Pandora’s Box?,” Foreign Affairs 47, no. 3
(1969): 466.
55
Richard Peet and Michael Watts stated, it illustrated that “[d]evelopment was modernity on a
planetary scale in which the West was the ‘transcendental’ pivot of analytical reflection.”
62
On
the merits of Western developed agricultural technologies, Wharton added, “The new agronomic
requirements are quite different as regards planting dates and planting depths; fertilizer rates and
timing; insecticide, pesticide, and fungicide applications; watering and many others.”
63
A significant difference was the homogenization of agriculture at the global scale at the
expense of place specific horticulture. It was a local history—Western economic development
and agriculture—with global designs. Green Revolution agronomy obliterated local food and
agricultural practices sedimented over years with capital-intensive crops running on capitalist
time requiring additional capitalist commodities. Agriculture “as a technique for fixing the
radiant energy of the sun and converting it to a form that is directly usable by animal and man”
was replaced with a modern agriculture designed to bypass the sun and obtain its high yields in
windfall energy subsidies locked in non-renewable fossil fuels, meaning that any seed could be
fertilized anywhere. Farmers who did begin using new methods were not only changing their
local practices, but they did so with inputs dependent on a volatile oil market.
64
Many small
farmers who uprooted subsistence and traditional crops overexploited their limited resources, and
superexploited their familial units to try and ameliorate the volume disadvantage they operated
within.
65
At first, the GR technologies increased yields. However, over time, yields dropped,
more inputs were required, and the oil crisis of 1973 and collapse of the Bretton Woods system
drove the costs of seed and fertilizer up.
66
Already lacking subsistence foods, receiving low
62
Richard Peet and Michael Watts, “Introduction: Development Theory and Environment in an Age of
Market Triumphalism,” Economic Geography 69, no. 3 (1993): 232.
63
Clifford Wharton, “Green Revolution,” 467.
64
Yapa, “Ecopolitical Economy of the Green Revolution,” 375.
65
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in Central America,” 27, 33.
66
Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 302-306
56
wages in plantation employment, and selling their goods in a market with depressed prices due to
large-scale growers and cheap grains from abroad, farmers had to pay even more to maintain
their diminishing production. Instead of alleviating the need to work on large plantations and
estates, it was exacerbated by the new technologies.
The acceleration of market-oriented, capitalist farming eroded small peasant farming and
left little cash income to purchase food that was previously grown. In the mid-1970s, food costs
increased in Guatemala to the point where 75% of children were undernourished. According to
Escobar, by 1986 “[c]ountries that were self-sufficient in food crops at the end of World War
II—many of them even exported food to industrialized nations—became net food importers
throughout the development era.” He added, “Hunger similarly grew as the capacity of countries
to produce food necessary to feed themselves contracted under pressure to produce cash crops,
accept cheap food from the West, and conform to agricultural markets dominated by the
multinational merchants of grain.”
67
Adding dispossession to hunger, many small and peasant
many were unable to keep their land while going hungry as the GR continued and agriculture
changed around them.
In retrospect, land reforms initiated in the Américas during the 1950s and early 1960s
coupled with GR technology functioned to momentarily redistribute land only to reconcentrate it
a few years later. Increasing food and rent costs, depressed earnings and wages, and large-scale
farming came together to force many small and peasant farmers to sell or abandon their land.
The brief redistribution and subsequent reconcentration of land dramatically remade social and
economic life as well as the physical landscape in the Américas. Through coercion—
requirements attached to aid by development agencies—and consent—applying for meager
credit—small and peasant farmers and their agricultural practices were articulated into a nascent
67
Ibid., 306; Escobar, Encountering Development, 104.
57
international agricultural complex itself within a developing international system of
financializing capitalism, both dominated in the Américas by the U.S.. The break up and re-
congealing of land was illustrative of the changing same of colonial power and plantation
relations.
68
More than one hundred years later, the large-scale farms, estates, and plantations of
henequen and coffee that marked a second conquest of the Américas were replaced with cotton
and cattle, bananas and more coffee, and debt that marked another conquest of the Américas.
69
In
other words, the alchemy that turned petroleum into fertilizer also turned peasants and small
farmers into members of a growing international class of working poor people. These acts of
mass classing were the radical ontological and epistemic effects of the logic of coloniality
imbedded in the GR. The physical effects of colonial power expressed through the GR were seen
and felt in the landscape.
Land concentration coupled with synthetic agronomy remade the agricultural landscape
and devastated the ecology across the Américas. In the Central Américas, cotton and cattle
production brought the most dramatic changes in land use and the landscape. Between 1952 and
1967, cotton production increased by 400% in Nicaragua while food production was halved. By
1970, 80% of arable land along the Central American Pacific and 40% of all cultivated land was
occupied by cotton. This trend continued throughout the 1970s, making the Central Américas the
third largest producer behind only the U.S. South and Egypt.
70
Cattle ranching expanded along
68
Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music),” in Black Music, 205-242 (New
York, NY: Akashic Books, 2010).
69
Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil
During the Export Boom, 1850-1930 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998).
70
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in Central America,” 19. The ties between the
U.S. South and the non-industrial and industrializing world continue with cotton. In 1904, the Delta Experiment
Station was established in Stoneville, Mississippi with funding from the USDA. As Woods noted, by 1925 95% of
all cotton planted in the South descended from strains developed at the station. USDA funded research and
agricultural technology—including cotton—were exported abroad in the 1960s as GR aid to countries in the
Américas, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Brazil. Although Woods did not expand on the
specifics of how U.S. foreign policy in the Américas grew out of the dominant plantation bloc’s Mississippi Delta
58
the mountains throughout the Central American interior with funding from U.S.-based and
international agencies. During the 1970s, 15% of the region’s forests were destroyed for the
pasture needed to make deboned frozen beef the Central Américas’ fastest growing export
between 1961-1974. In these thirteen years, it increased 400%. In the 1980s, the rain forests
disappeared at a rate of 3500-4000 square kilometers per year. Between 1960 and 1992, “over
two-thirds of Central America’s (broad-leafed) lowland and lower montane rain forests, the
largest expanse north of the Amazon Basin, [were] destroyed.”
71
The concentration of land and
subsequent expansion of NTA and cash crops closed the door to the possibility of product
diversification leading to industrialization from within. Cotton and cattle, and to a lesser extent
sugar, were added to coffee, bananas, and other tropical commodities to once again position the
Central Américas as suppliers of cheap agriculture and raw materials in the international market.
In the mid-1970s, they accounted for 82-85% of extra-regional trade and 60% of the Central
Américas’ earnings.
72
The GR agronomy that catalyzed the export boom not only deforested and
gridded the landscape, it destroyed the land and people who worked on it.
Years of GR agronomy devastated the health of the landscape and people of the Central
and Southern Américas. The fossil and chemically fueled synthetic seeds created unnaturally
Plans it is clear that there are connections to be made (Development Arrested, 94, 101, 182). For instance, he noted
how “As a pillar of post-war US foreign policy, Green Revolutions were launched in Mexico, India, China, and
many other countries along the same strategic lines developed in the South. Internationally, a more dependent
agricultural and rural leadership was created through the reorganization of production and credit structures. Not only
did US foreign aid support the growth and power of those farmers most dependent on US-produced machinery and
chemicals, but new educational and health initiatives lent these extremely conservative and brutal rural elites the air
of legitimacy they needed in order to defeat the social movements of dispossessed peasants and workers” (Ibid.,
159). Unfortunately, I do not have the time to fully develop the connections and specifics of how in many ways
post-WWII development theory and practice should be theorized as the plantation and plantation relations writ large.
I do plan on doing this in turning this into a book manuscript as I feel that is where my work needs to go next.
Katherine McKittrick’s work is also vital to thinking about how the plantation needs to be understood as a planning
tool and how plantation relations persist.
71
Ibid., 20. According to Faber, in 1975 the 20 million acres of pasture used for cattle ranching exceeded
all other agricultural production combined (“Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis of Central
America,” 25).
72
Ibid., 21.
59
high yields on a faster timetable. Instead of working on a natural schedule of sowing and reaping,
GR agronomy brought the “speed up” and scientific management of Taylorism to agriculture.
Running according to the needs of the capitalist market and on capitalist time, the new
agricultural practices created capitalist crops that exploited the ground and soil to their maximum
limits. By moving off of the natural pace and intensity of solar powered agriculture and onto that
of GR technologies, both large and small-scale farmers sapped the soil of vital rest and nutrients,
significantly weakening it over time. According to a farmer in Guatemala, “The land lost
strength because it was not allowed to rest, the synthetic fertilizer is just like a cup of coffee for
breakfast, it wakes you up but it does not nourish you.”
73
The scale at which these new methods
were used degraded soil quality, eroded, and deforested vast amounts of land in the Américas.
By 1990, over 65% of Guatemala’s original forests were destroyed and abandonment of
traditional terrace farming caused up to 35 tons of soil loss per year; more than 95% of El
Salvador’s original tropical forests were destroyed and 77% of the country was suffering serious
soil erosion; in Honduras, soil erosion averaged between 100 and 500 metric tons per hectare
over 2.2 million acres of agricultural land; and 17% of Costa Rica was severely eroded and 24%
moderately eroded.
74
Reduced arability of the soil in the Américas was a key factor in the
diminishing yields produced by GR agronomy for export and subsistence. Parts of the Maya-
Kaqchikel of Guatemala people’s history told to Carey address these issues as well as the toll GR
technology had on the community’s health. It demonstrates how declining environmental and
ecological health caused by synthetic and chemical technologies directly impacted community
well being.
A long time ago there was not chemical fertilizer and because of that men were
tougher; they did not fall ill. They farmed and ate the pure strength of the land.
73
Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 302-03.
74
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in Central America,” 28-30.
60
Now chemical fertilizer weakens us. The corn is bigger but it has chemicals in it.
The land is no longer strong. It has disease in it. Furthermore, the underground
insect population and waste have increased. These insects and waste eat the
harvest. When there was not chemical fertilizer, nothing hurt. My grandfather
lived to be eighty-five and when he died he was never hurt.
75
The connection between environmental, ecological, and community health made by this
Kaqchikel elder revealed the effects of uneven exposure to chemicals along ethnic and class
lines. Small farmers who worked both on their land and on large-scale estates and plantations
were surrounded by what similarly ethnicized and classed agricultural workers thousands of
miles away called la medicina.
76
Chemicals in synthetic fertilizers and pesticides used in GR agronomical practices were
lethal to farmers and workers. Uneven exposure of small farmers, poor workers, and their
communities to the toxic elements in these artificial products resulted in an uneven distribution
of poor health and early death in the Américas. According to Ixxeq, another member of the
Kaqchikel community,
A long time ago my grandfather did not use chemical fertilizer, he only used
natural fertilizer from chickens and goats. He carried it in a sack when he went to
his land in the hills and then he would throw a little under each corn stalk. My
grandfather said that chemical fertilizer gives illness. That is why so many people
are sick now because of the poison from chemical fertilizer. In fact, there is more
poison than fertilizer. Now people only use poison. A long time ago there were
not many diseases because people did not use pesticides. Cancer is one of the
75
Quoted in Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution, “ 299-300.
76
Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice, 83. One of the components on the United Farm
Workers Organizing Committee’s (UFWOC) agenda was the effects pesticide use in Central California had on the
health of the workers, most of whom were people of color and/or poor. The UFWOC’s pesticide campaign of 1965-
71 was the result of years of experience with the very technologies small farmers and poor agricultural workers were
getting familiar with in the Américas. Agricultural workers in the Mississippi Delta also suffered from poor health
brought on by exposure to GR technologies. Once again, most of them are people of color and/or poor. The use of
toxic pesticides from the 1920’s forward caused widespread health crises in Black communities throughout the
region beginning in the 1950s and 60s (Woods, Development Arrested, 227). These cases of people of color and/or
poor people’s disproportionate exposure to hazardous materials while performing agricultural work show that
although the methods have changed, the international agricultural complex modeled on the plantation and structured
by plantation relations finds labor disposable.
61
grave diseases that this poison provoked. Now people die young because there are
so many diseases. A long time ago people lived much longer.
77
Three reasons for sharp increases in disease and death in communities who worked with
synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were application methods, working conditions, and chemical
saturation of the subsistence food supply. Farmers and workers applied fertilizer to crops with
their bare hands, exposing their skin to the same “burn” risks as the plants. Pesticides were
carried in a plastic backpack fitted with a metal hose and hand-pump to create the necessary
pressure for spraying all the crops. Fertilizer and pesticide application assaulted workers’ bodies
by exposing them to toxic materials in multiple ways: contact with bare skin, inhalation, eye and
ear contact, and direct incorporation in the blood stream through broken skin. Working
conditions compounded the dangerous effects of application methods. Quite often, workers ate
lunch in the middle of their labor without washing their hands—both for expediency and because
of lack of facilities. Seasonal workers—full time workers as well—usually lived in housing
camps on the large estates and plantations they worked meaning they were subject to “pesticide
drift.” Sometimes, the facilities not only lacked adequate protection from pesticides, but running
water as well. With no other options, workers and their families used contaminated sources of
water, such as irrigation ditches and streams, around the fields.
78
Ingestion of dangerous
materials extended past work and into home life, as the chemicals found their way from the soil
crops were sowed in to the crops themselves. Reaping, gathering, and fishing became a double-
edged sword. Hunger was sated, but at a high health cost.
79
All of these factors combined to
77
Quoted in Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 300.
78
The information on application methods and working conditions comes from Carey Jr., “Guatemala’s
Green Revolution,” and Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis in Central America.” I also
witnessed some of these issues during my fieldwork at the farm that is the subject of Chapter 3.
79
Woods also addresses this with regard to Black agricultural workers in the Mississippi Delta, “the
common practice of fishing, hunting, and picking of fruits, nuts, and vegetables to supplement diets becomes a
double-edged sword. On the one hand, many attempts to secure food are defined as trespassing and, on the other
62
displace the toxicity of GR technology into the bodies of small farmers and poor workers to
produce disease. During the 1960s and 70s, Honduras and Nicaragua were the world leaders in
per capita illness and death from pesticide poisoning. Costa Rica reported 19,000 pesticide
poisonings between 1971-1976. As a region, the Central Américas experienced 73,230 cases of
acute pesticide poisoning in the 1970s.
80
Many of these practices continue today and directly created the organic and fair trade
markets to contrast conventional farming. The farce of course being that there is nothing
conventional about GR technology, nor was there when it became the common sense of
agricultural production across the Américas—in the U.S. in the 1930s, and the Central and
Southern Américas in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1990s, over 1,000 Costa Rican banana
workers had been rendered infertile from exposure to the soil fumigant and nematode (worm)
killer 1,2-Dipromo-3-Chloropropane (DBCP), a carcinogen.
81
The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency prohibited its use on agriculture in 1985, but the damage was done. In
addition to causing infertility, high rates of exposure to DBCP may cause cancer. A study by the
National Toxicology Program (NTP) reported “High incidences of tumors of the nasal tract,
tongue, adrenal cortex, and lungs of rodents.”
82
In 1992, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans were
recorded as the population with the most Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) stored in
their fatty tissue on the planet.
83
Although DDT was banned from use in the U.S. in 1972, its use
in other parts of the world has persisted.
84
DDT is known to have adverse ecological effects and
hand, there are numerous contaminants in the environment which have led to numerous bans on commercial fishing
and on drinking river water, from Memphis to New Orleans” (Development Arrested, 227).
80
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis of Central America,” 23.
81
Ibid..
82
1,2-Dibromo-3-Chloropropane, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, last modified November 6, 2007,
http://www.epa.gov/ttnatw01/hlthef/dibromo-.html.
83
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis of Central America,” 23.
84
A recent conversation with my father revealed that DDT was also used for disease control among people.
He grew up on a farm in Siuna, a small mining town near the Atlantic coast in northeast Nicaragua. I asked him if he
63
is carcinogenic. It caused liver tumors in laboratory animals exposed to it for extended periods.
What makes DDT so dangerous is that it persists in the ground and air and stores in the fatty
tissue of humans long after exposure has ceased.
85
Of the twenty-five most popular
agrochemicals used during the GR, nineteen are carcinogenic and persistent with long term
effects likely continue to accrue for quite some time.
86
As recently as 2009, the continued use of
agrochemicals contributes to “the approximately twenty-five million occupational agrochemical
poisonings that occur worldwide each year. In Guatemala, about 1,200 cases of acute pesticide
intoxication (short-term reaction) are reported every year.”
87
* * * * *
GR agronomy began with grains, cereals, and NTA, but it eventually seeped into
longstanding crops such as coffee as well. As was the case with other agricultural products, new
technologies were introduced with the hope of helping coffee growers increase production and/or
diversify as needed to avoid redistributing land. New methods were introduced in the 1960s, but
intensified in the 1970s. In Brazil, agronomists and biological engineers worked long hours in
labs to develop robusta plants more resistant to roya (Hemlieia vastarix), coffee rust. Funded by
the Rockefeller International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), Jerry Harrington and Colin
McClung “figured out that zinc and boron were essential micronutrients for coffee cultivation,
and with the massive addition of lime and fertilizer.”
88
Previously unusable cerrado lands could
knew that there was so much DDT residue in Nicaragua and if he knew folks who used it in his community. He
answered, “I’m not surprised. We did not use it, pero cada año pasaba un helicóptero que botaba un polvo fino y
blanco en todo el pueblo (every year a helicopter passed by that would drop a fine white powder on the whole
town). You could see it. It looked like snow. You could drag it off of buildings with your finger. And we knew, “El
P. It was actually really pretty.”
85
DDT, A Brief History and Status, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, last modified May 9, 2012,
http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/factsheets/chemicals/ddt-brief-history-status.htm.
86
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis of Central America,” 23.
87
Carey, Jr., “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 302.
88
Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 269.
64
now grow even more coffee. The scientific meddling went one step further when Brazilian-based
researchers successfully produced hybrid plants. “Capable of withstanding full sunlight, the new
trees didn’t require shade trees, but they did demand fertilizer to grow so prolifically without
mulch,” usually produced by nearby foliage. The catuai plant was the product of 1950s
development discourse and the belief in the salvific power of science routed into material
existence by GR research. The Mundo Novo, another GMO plant, was also ‘found’ during this
time. It is an arabica tree that resists roya, matures in three years instead of four, and produces
far more.
89
In 1966, one year after the original International Coffee Agreement (ICA) went into
effect—an important international agreement that will be discussed soon—Brazil produced 87
million bags of green coffee. The ICA required Brazil to sit on 65 million of them. However,
unforeseen weather in the 1970s wrought havoc on the Brazilian coffee industry, and by
extension, the international coffee market. But this is putting the cart before the horse. Before
moving on to the impact of the ICA, it is necessary to more fully understand the impact the GR
had on coffee production in the Américas.
Biological engineering and technification also impacted Colombia’s coffee industry. In
Antioquia, income, land ownership, and coffee production were concentrated as the result of the
uneven adoption of technologies were adopted unevenly. The National Federation of Coffee
Growers made two new coffee varieties engineered for higher yields, Caturra and Bourbon, and
fertilizers available to growers in 1965, but not credit. A study by Havens and Finn found that
the farmers in the municipality of Támesis who adopted the new plants and methods increased
their income far more than their counterparts who did not. The average income of those who
incorporated the new methods rose from COL$6,731 in 1963 to COL$11,620. For those who did
not adopt, their average income only rose from COL$4,509 to COL$6,274. Broken down by
89
Ibid., 226.
65
income per acre, adopters made COL$290 in 1963 and COL$1,642; non-adopters brought in
COL$222 and COL$632 respectively.
90
Farmers who adopted the technologies experienced
a173% increase in real income and a 566% increase in income per year over the life of the study.
The corresponding figures for those who did not alter their production were 139% and 285%. As
was the case with most GR technology, their availability was unevenly biased to larger
landowners who were deemed safe credit risks.
Table 1. Changes in Farm Acreage for Adopters and Nonadopters of New Coffee Varieties, Támesis,
Colombia, 1963-1970
91
Acres in Farm Adopters Nonadopters
1963 1970 1963 1970
0-5 17.6% 17.6% 64.2% 64.2%
5.1-10 11.8 17.6 12.8 17.8
10.1-15 11.8 17.6 10.2 2.6
15.1-20 17.6 0.0 2.6 2.6
20.1-25 17.6 17.6 0.0 0.0
25 Plus 23.6 29.6 10.2 12.8
Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%
Average Number
of Acres
18.86 33.13 7.97 6.42
As Table 1 shows, 23.6% of the adopters already owned more than twenty-five acres of land
whereas 64.2% of nonadopters owned five acres or less. The table also shows that land was not
only concentrated in favor of adopters, but also within adopters. Over the course of seven years,
the average acreage of adopters increased 176%, where the average acreage of nonadopters
90
Havens and Finn, “Green Revolution Technology and Community Development,” 476.
91
Ibid., 477.
66
decreased 19%. Within the two categories, polarization is also evident. Among adopters, 17.6%
worked between 15.1 and 20 acres in 1963, none did so in 1970. Instead, that population moved
up and down: the percentage working 25 acres or more rose from 23.6% to 29.6; the percentage
working 5.1-10 and 10.1-15 increased from 11.8% to 17.6 in both subcategories. Havens and
Finn’s study show how GR agronomy facilitated income, land, and therefore coffee production
concentration. Again, smaller farmers did avoid the new coffee varieties and artificial fertilizers
as much on principal as they did due to lack of credit. As one grower put it, “I don’t have any
land or money resources. If I did, I would use Caturra but it is only for those who have lots of
land.” Another added, “I haven’t cultivated it [Caturra] because it is very costly due to the
requirement of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides. How can a person afford that if
he can’t get credit?”
92
The case of growers in Támesis demonstrates what was the case for
development post-Bretton Woods and the GR, modern/colonial development planning and
modernization schemes did little but further concentrate power with domestic elite.
93
Because
post-Bretton Woods development theory measured productivity at the national level—GDP—
these figures could be read as proof that the GR was working. In the same way that a bullish
New York Stock Exchange obscures high unemployment rates, low real income, and rampant
foreclosures, rising GDPs can hide the concentration of wealth and land. Although both Brazil
and Colombia, the two largest coffee exporters, implemented GR agronomy, they were not
alone. Coffee growers in the Central Américas also moved to synthetic and artificial agronomic
practices.
In Guatemala, use of GR agricultural practices in coffee production and their effects
replicated those of the GR at large. Specifically, they created and quickly exacerbated class
92
Ibid., 479.
93
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 264.
67
divisions, concentrated land, and damaged local ecologies. Although synthetic and artificial
agronomic practices were in use since the 1950s, they did not really take hold in coffee until the
1970s when coffee plants were struck by disease and infestation. Coffee crops experienced an
outbreak of roya as well as a broca plague after remaining largely disease and pest-free since its
introduction to Guatemala in the 1750s. Broca (Hypothenemus hampei) is an insect that burrows
into coffee berries and reduces the amount of the tree produces. These scourges moved the
Asociación Nacional de Café (ANACAFE) to encourage “technification” in coffee production
because it “allowed farmers to use scientific information and apply pesticides/fungicides to
protect their crops from damage” and “because of the prestige associated with modern farming
techniques.”
94
It must be noted that the ethnocentricism that degraded local agronomy is part of
the arrogance imbedded in the logic of coloniality that drives the belief in the universality of
modern/colonial thought and practice. As was the case elsewhere, small farmers received little to
no support in the form of grants or credit to implement the modern techniques while finqueros
(large coffee growers) received aid and used their private resources. By 1980, adopters of
technification had net profits of almost four times the amount of nonadopters: US$2,274 versus
US$867.
95
Concentration in income was directly tied to the concentration in coffee production.
At the end of the 1970s,
Four thousand producers grew 83 percent of the coffee, while 56,00 producers
grew only 17 percent of the coffee. Large farms used technification to grow 16
bags of coffee per manzana (0.7 hectare), while small farms without
technification had a yield of only 10 sacks per manzana. In addition to lower
productivity per manzana, the size of the farm dictated the price that the coffee
grower received for arabica [sic], once again demonstrating the disadvantages
confronting small producers. These same small producers received fewer quetzals
per manzana primarily because they could not afford to operate a coffee mill and
had to rely on large producers to process their coffee.
96
94
Johnson, “The International Coffee Agreement and the Production of Coffee in Guatemala,” 40, 43.
95
Ibid., 42.
96
Ibid., 44.
68
In Guatemala, GR agronomy concentrated wealth and land while creating and sharpening class
divisions. Small producers did not disappear altogether, but they were beholden to large
producers as well as the international coffee market they were unevenly articulated into. Michael
Taussig argues that when compared side-by-side, small producers are actually more efficient
than large ones but are unable to make up their volume disadvantage. In other words it is the
“bigness” of the large-scale producers that allows them to compensate for their inefficiencies.
Taussig wrote, “bigness and technology are not in themselves inherently more efficient,” rather
they provide the political—and economic, social, and material—muscle necessary to shape
policies and practices.
97
The same “bigness” that protected large producers from inefficiencies
also protected them from the international market in ways smaller producers could not. This
became evident in the coffee crisis of 1999 and 2001. The large-scale implementation of GR
technology meant not only high yields, but large-scale ecological pollution as well.
Coffee production creates an array of byproducts that can be recycled, composted, and
otherwise repurposed. However, when done as a means to the end of profits and the international
marketplace without regard for local ecologies, large-scale coffee production is incredibly
damaging. Arsenic, boron, and chloride are three of the more common pollutants found in the
wastewater of coffee mills. According to Faber, as of 1992, beneficios (coffee mills) in Costa
Rica “produce 66 percent of the country’s water contaminants. In El Salvador, more than 200
such plants dump contaminated wastewater directly into the country’s rivers and streams.”
98
In
Honduras, pesticides and organic waste from coffee production are the most common sources of
97
Taussig, “Peasant Economics,” 66.
98
Faber, “Imperialism, Revolution, and the Ecological Crisis of Central America,” 22.
69
water pollutants.
99
The same holds true in Nicaragua, where the drinking water of the country’s
coffee centers—Jinotega and Matagalpa—are constantly contaminated by production runoff
originating from the farms just north of both departamentos (departments) on the Pan-American
Highway.
100
Coffee production is so conducive to pollution because of the hulling necessary to
remove the pulp and mucilage on coffee cherries and turn them into oro (gold), or green coffee
ready for roasting.
There are three dominant methods of hulling: dry, semi-washed, and washed. Dry hulling
requires little water, but also results in an inferior bean. Using this method coffee cherries are
laid out on a floor until the outer layer of the cherries dry sufficiently for them to be shaken and
hulled mechanically. The semi-washed method involves putting cherries in a water-filled
cylinder that pushes them through tubing that provides enough pressure to remove most of the
pulp and mucilage, the final bit embedded in the center cut of the beans is removed mechanically
after they have dried. Fully washed processing requires an additional step than semi-washed.
After de-pulping and mucilage removal, the coffee beans are fermented in a water bath for
approximately twenty-four to thirty-six hours during which the last bit of pulp falls off and sinks
to the bottom of the container and the beans develop flavor. The fully washed method produces
the highest quality coffee and is widely used in the Central Américas where Arabica plants
predominate. It is is also the method that creates the most pollution. The pulp, mucilage, and
acidic water leftover from the process are often dumped in local waterways and on land
contaminating rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers.
101
99
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Pesticides, The Caribbean Environment Programme, accessed
April 2, 2013, http://www.cep.unep.org/publications-and-resources/marine-and-coastal-issues-links/persistent-
organic-pollutants-pops-and-pesticides.
100
“The Nicaraguan Environment…A Legacy of Destruction”, Envío, accessed April 2, 2013,
http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/2756.
101
The information on coffee processing comes from interviews used for the oral history of Copa Viva
plantation in chapter three. Specifically, with Doña Mausi, the owner, and Don Pablo, the roaster.
70
* * * * *
After WW II, U.S. dominated development theory and practice turned on increasing the
income of non-industrializing and industrializing countries at the individual and national level.
This occurred in a context in which U.S. and Britain-led Bretton Woods conference established
the IMF and IBRD as an international clearinghouse for investment and loans at an early stage of
financializing capitalism. Incubated in the U.S., GR technology and agronomical practices were
exported to the Central and Southern Américas as investment opportunities that promised higher
yields, easier harvests, and diversification so that non- and industrializing could develop the
infrastructure to become industrialized by import substitution. They also obviated the land
reform small and peasant farmers sought and momentarily achieved in the early 1950s and
1960s. The GR was a materialization of post-WW II development theory. It may not have been
determined by it, but it did depend on it. Uneven credit and grant availability resulted in the
uneven application of GR technology which eventually reconcentrated land ownership, remade
the physical landscape, devastated local ecologies, and deteriorated the health of the workers’
communities. In the overlapping years at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s,
coffee—as well cotton, cattle, sugar, non-traditional agriculture—production and income were
on the rise even as small and peasant farmers were articulated into an international working poor.
These years marked the start of the first ICA and the demise of the Bretton Woods system. At a
time when development theory and practice coupled with the GR once again articulated the
Central and Southern Américas into the international economy as exporters of agricultural
commodities and raw materials, two contradictory agreements went into effect: the second ICA
in 1968 and the Tokyo Round of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1972.
71
Regulating an Oncoming Flood
In 1959, representatives from coffee producing and consuming countries met in
Washington D.C. to outline a series of studies designed to outline the parameters for a coffee
agreement that would stabilize a volatile international coffee market. According to the ICA, the
governments signed on to it
Aware of the risks that the present imbalance between coffee production and its
consumption represent, and of the constant accumulation of stocks in the
producing countries, whose economies and standards of living are dependent
mainly on the trade of this basic product,
Agree that it is necessary, at the earliest possible opportunity, to effect studies that
will permit coming to a long-term agreement capable of providing adequate
solutions to a situation that is injurious equally to the interests of producers and
consumers, and to ensure normalization of trade in the coming years…
102
The Coffee Study Group (CSG) established the previous year was charged with accomplishing
these tasks with the help of related and interested organizations such as the UN FAO and IBRD.
The studies were supposed to form the foundation for a long-term agreement. In the immediate-
term, a temporary ICA was signed onto by producing and consuming countries “to prevent the
deterioration of prices, which are injurious to the economies of all” as well as “to express the
spirit of solidarity and cooperation which should serve as inspiration for the long-term agreement
desired by all, a spirit which the Latin-American countries have already shown in the last two
coffee years.”
103
Coming at the end of the 1950s, the temporary ICA must be contextualized
within international coffee trade and international politics to better understand why consuming
countries, led once again by the U.S., would be so interested in regulating coffee trade at a
moment when development theory and practice, the GR, and the Havana Charter/GATT pushed
towards production increases and trade liberalization.
102
British Secretary of State, International Coffee Agreement, Washington, September 24, 1959 (London,
England: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1962), 30.
103
Ibid.
72
The 1950s marked an interesting time in the international coffee market. At the beginning
of the decade, prices rose on the production and consumption ends of coffee commodity chains
peaking in 1954. After that, prices dropped steadily. Two events combined to drive up prices.
First, WWII ended, which re-opened the European market to coffee imports. During the war,
Nazi occupation cut Europe off from coffee, increasing demand. Afterward, coffee helped fuel
the rebuilding effort and consumption expanded rapidly.
104
In other words, demand for coffee
was high while supply was simultaneously low. The Inter-American Coffee Agreement of 1940
ensured this. Engineered by the U.S., it established import and export quotas with the political
purpose of keeping Latin American countries out of the sphere of Nazi or Italian Fascist
influence.
105
As the only market for coffee, the U.S. acted in self-interest on two fronts: the
import quotas assured a constant supply of and stable price for coffee; the export quotas based on
national production assured all coffee producing countries of a market for their product.
106
Second, Brazil, long the world’s largest coffee producer, was still harvesting below pre-1930s
levels. During that decade, Getúlio Vargas came to power and angered the coffee oligarchs by
ordering trees to be destroyed and coffee reserves to be burned as a way to force prices
upward.
107
Vargas’ actions combined with the Inter-American Coffee Agreement brought
stability and relatively good prices for coffee growers from 1940 through the end of the war.
Low yields in Brazil due to nutrient-poor soil from years of plantation farming and broca
infestations between 1947-49 kept prices high after the war. In the same way that the agreement
104
Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 55.
105
Germany has a strong presence in the Central Américas. Pendergrast notes the strong pro-Nazi
sentiment of German Guatemalans during the 1940s (Uncommon Grounds, 200-01). During my fieldwork in
Nicaragua, I learned of the long history of insular German communities just north of Matagalpa. Local people call
them los cheles—the fair skinned, light-eyed people. The impact of Germans migrants and expatriates on
Nicaraguan coffee production will be discussed more thoroughly in chapter three and four.
106
Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 200-202.
107
Ibid.; Richard B. Bilder, “The International Coffee Agreement: A Case History in Negotiation,” Law
and Contemporary Problems 28, no. 2 (1963): 335.
73
and low levels of production pushed prices up, the combination of no agreement and production
expansion drove prices down.
The end of WWII saw the end of Inter-American Coffee Agreement and the beginning of
subsequent coffee proliferation. In 1948, the U.S. allowed the quota-based agreement expire, but
the price for the low supply available continued to climb upward, breaking US$1 for the first
time in January 1954.
108
By the end of the year, harvests of new expanded production sites in the
Américas and Africa quickly reversed the price. In the post-Bretton Woods development context,
rising coffee prices seemed like a way to increase income in the non- and industrializing
world.
109
In 1949, while the prices were climbing, Brazil began planting new plants in Paraná,
the southernmost geographic limit for coffee. On July 4, 1953, ahead of the first harvest expected
to include Paraná, a frost settled over the region as if to prove the danger of testing the limits of
coffee production. The frost pushed the inevitable oversupply back one year, at which point it
coincided with rising harvests from various African countries struggling for independence from
Britain, France, Portugal, and Belgium. In Kenya, in the midst of the Mau-Mau Rebellion,
Britain instituted land reforms that resulted in African controlled coffee production. These new
sites produced some of the finest arabica in the world. In Ethiopia, small farmers in the Kaffa
province also increased production. 1954 also marked the first year the then French colony Côte
D’Ivoire exported robusta to the U.S., surging past Portuguese Angola for lead exporter of
robusta. During the early 1950s, the Belgian Congo also became a significant robusta exporter.
110
All of this new coffee was too much for the international market, even with Europe importing
108
Ibid., 227.
109
Research and development that led to the application of GR technology and agronomy with regard to the
Américas began at this time as well. William Cowgill, an agronomist with the USAID, developed a coffee tree that
produced fourteen pounds of cherries. On average, non-GMO trees yield one pound of cherries. Cowgill worked as a
consultant throughout the Central Américas as well as Colombia, Ecuador, and Perú. Soon after, research stations
popped up in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Brazil with support from the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled IBEC
(Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 226).
110
Ibid., 236-37.
74
once again. As the decade reached the halfway point, coffee prices began to fall and producers
throughout the Américas began to worry. Drawing on the recent past, several countries convened
to establish an export quota system to force better returns for their crops.
Over the course of two years, producers in the Américas twice signed agreements to
limit exports. In 1957, seven countries met in Mexico City and hastily put together a stop-gap
agreement. Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Brazil voted
to reduce their exports based on quarterly quotas so that they could adjust and be flexible based
on production. Unfortunately, participants could not agree on quotas low enough to affect a price
increase. The Mexico City Agreement lasted only one year. In 1958, the U.S.-based Coffee
Study Group (CSG) was organized and convened a meeting between twenty producing and
consuming countries to address the immediate problem of declining prices as well as the long-
term problem of oversupply. It is not clear whether the CSG was organized out of concern that
producing countries were organizing themselves, but it is reasonable to assume that this played a
significant factor.
111
The meeting produced the Latin American Coffee Agreement. Once again,
it was a temporary fix that went into effect in October and lasted one year. According to the
agreement, fifteen producing countries in the Américas would hold parts of their harvest
111
Bilder, “The International Coffee Agreement,” 337. The Inter-American Coffee Agreement was the
direct result of U.S. fear of German influence in the region. At the turn of the century, Brazil valorized the price of
its coffee by withholding large amounts and buying back the product that did hit the international market. Angry
over the fact that Brazil figured out a way to play the international trading game to its benefit as evidenced by the
rising cost of coffee—.1275/pound in 1911—U.S. Attorney General George Wickersham sued Herman Sielcken, the
German born business man who helped devise the plan (Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 78-89). Even as the U.S.
Attorney General was engaged in a lawsuit over market manipulation the U.S. was enjoying a 30% tax break on
flour exported Brazil (Ibid.). When the Mexico City Agreement was signed, the U.S. was in the middle of disposing
of excess grain purchased from its growers in the Américas under the guise of aid. Between 1945-1970 U.S. wheat
exports increased 35%, maize 50%, and soy 90% (Araghi, “Global Depeasantization,” 349). At the 2003 WTO
Ministerial Meeting in Cancún, representatives and agricultural producers from non- and industrializing countries
pressed the U.S. and other industrialized countries to eliminate subsidies to its growers that artificially depressed
prices for everyone. These requests were ignored. In other words, the U.S. is not opposed to market manipulation in
its favor, it is opposed to manipulation that favors other countries. It used its “bigness” to exert colonial power and
used its “bigness” to overturn—with policy and/or violent means—challenges to its hegemony.
75
according to their share of the international market. The following year, the first ICA was drafted
and signed.
Sixteen coffee producing countries, Great Britain, Portugal, and France ratified the first
ICA. Britain and France participated on behalf of their African colonial holdings at the time.
Britain signed for Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika Territory (part of current day Tanzania) and
France for Cameroon. Portugal signed for Angola. As previously noted, the purpose of the
agreement that lasted from October 1, 1959 to September 30, 1960 was “to adapt the supply of
coffee to the demand for it, to insure the orderly placement of the product in world markets, and
to foster its consumption throughout the world, thus contributing to the intensification of trade
between producing and consuming countries.”
112
Again, a quota system was set to limit the
amount of coffee exported by producing countries based on local production. The countries
agreed to a two-tier quota system: “(a) a figure of 90% of the exports that took place during the
best calendar year of the last decade (1949-1958); (b) a maximum figure of 88% of the actual
exportable production, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.” In addition,
“Quotas are understood to be applicable to traditional consumers,” with exports to new markets
not counting against the quotas.
113
112
International Coffee Agreement, 30. Each country contributed US$.25 per exported bag, except for
French Cameroon and Portuguese Angola which contributed US$.15 per bag, to fund the “Work Program for the
Publicity Campaign to Increase Coffee Consumption” (Ibid., 37).
113
Ibid., 31. Countries that produced less than two million bags of coffee (60 kilograms/bag) automatically
had their quota adjusted to the 88% maximum. The concept of no quotas to new markets ended up serving an
interesting role in the coffee trade. During the 1980s, producing countries would use new markets to funnel more
than their allotted quota to traditional consuming countries. “Tourist” coffee visited for a day before moving onto
another market (Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 76).
76
Table 2. Foreign Export Quotas for the Coffee Year 1959-60
114
Country Thousands of 60 Kilogram Bags
Brazil 17,431
Colombia 5,959
Costa Rica 694
Cuba 312
Dominican Republic 398
Ecuador 455
El Salvador 1,259
French Cameroon 638
Guatemala 1,085
Haiti 500
Honduras 176
Mexico 1,303
Nicaragua 344
Panama 10
Perú 251
Portugal 1,165
Venezuela 660
The following summer, on June 11, 1960, the agreement was renewed to begin on October 1,
1960, new members were added, and future quotas agreed to be based on the two-tier system.
France did not sign the extension. The year before, they signed on behalf of Cameroon. France
issued a statement clarifying their position,
114
Ibid., 35.
77
Due to the changes which have occurred, with the full approval of the
Government of the French Republic, or to changes which may occur in the
immediate future, with regard to the character of the institutional and
constitutional ties which exist between the French Republic and the countries or
the States which constitute the community, as well as the countries which were
formerly under trusteeship that is, Togo and Cameroun; the Delegation of the
French Republic and the Community, desirous of respecting the rights and
prerogatives of said States and of those countries which have already attained
their international sovereignty or which will soon attain it, at this time cannot
promise to accept the extension of the International Coffee Agreement signed on
September 24, 1959, in Washington, in representation of the countries or States
which through the Delegation had adhered to the Agreement.
115
Other movements followed Cameroon’s independence in 1960 across Africa, adding another
political layer to the international coffee trade. Once again, the USSR’s potential influence
swayed U.S. action.
Cold war politics and the consolidation of the coffee industry in the U.S. and Europe
contributed to the first long-term ICA in 1962. Nazi Germany’s advance through Europe in the
1940’s hastened the Inter-American Coffee Agreement, the Cuban Revolution altered U.S.
policy in the Américas and heavily influenced development theory, practice, and economics, and
independence movements in Africa and Southern Asia at the beginning of the 1960s contributed
to the push by coffee consuming countries to create a more stable market through a long-term
coffee agreement. As the world’s largest consumer, U.S. participation was necessary for serious
market regulation. The Eisenhower administration generally opposed intervening in international
commodity regulation. Coming on the heels of Cuba and in the middle of African independence
movements, the Kennedy administration appeared to be taking a different position. On March 13,
1961, President Kennedy delivered his Alliance for Progress speech in which he stated, “the
United States is ready to cooperate in serious case-by-case examinations of commodity market
problems. Frequent violent changes in commodity prices seriously injure the economies of many
115
Ibid., 49.
78
Latin American nations, draining their resources and stultifying their growth. Together we must
find practical methods of bringing an end to this pattern.”
116
In August of that year, U.S.
Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon announced that the U.S. was ready to “join a
workable coffee agreement, to use its good offices to urge the participation of other consuming
countries, and to help in the enforcement of export quotas through the use of import controls” at
the Special Meeting of the Organization of American States Inter-American Economic and
Social Council in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
117
Driven by the rise of the USSR, the Kennedy
administration doubled down in the Américas through the GR and coffee regulation in attempts
to keep Soviet and communist influence out of the hemisphere first, and the African continent
second.
118
However, the U.S. and Europe also received pressure from within to act and stabilize
the erratic coffee market.
Consumers appreciated the lowering cost of their morning cup, but importers, roasters,
and retailers sought stability. This was not only a turning point for coffee production, but for
coffee retail and consumption in the U.S. and Europe. While production expanded
internationally, the national markets of the U.S. and Europe consolidated. In the U.S., the market
share of the top four coffee roasters increased from 46% in 1958 to 69% in 1978.
119
In 1965,
eight roasters accounted for 75% of all sales.
120
The instant coffee sector saw even more
concentration because it was so capital intensive. Between 1958 and 1978 the top four roasters in
116
Quoted in Bilder, “The International Coffee Agreement,” 338. Attempts to stabilize international
commodity markets did not preclude the use of military aggression. Merely one month after this speech the U.S.
invaded Cuba in La Batalla de Girón, the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
117
Quoted in Bilder, “The International Coffee Agreement,” 339.
118
Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 53-55. Soviet influence was a real possibility. In 1960, Brazil sent a
delegation to the USSR to work out a trade of coffee for Soviet oil, wheat, airplanes, and drilling equipment. The
U.S.—and the rest of the coffee world—knew this was not an empty threat. Thirty years before, Brazil agreed to
politically recognize Soviet Russia and trade coffee for wheat or hides (Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 167,
249).
119
Ibid., 52-53.
120
Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 255.
79
the U.S. increased their market share from 72% to 91%. European concentration occurred at the
same pace.
121
The National Coffee Association in the U.S. and roasters in Europe were eager to
create a stable coffee market that led to reliable coffee production and availability. International
cold war politics and internal coffee concentration provided the right conditions for the first
long-term ICA with participation from consuming countries.
The ICA was negotiated at the United Nations in New York City between September 24-
November 30, 1962. The political purpose of the ICA was to stabilize Latin American countries
to deter communist influence, the economic purpose was to reduce the price swings prompted by
overproduction and supply shock.
122
Three reasons included in the preamble are of particular
importance. First, according to the preamble, the countries came together “Recognizing the
exceptional importance of coffee to the economies of many countries which are largely
dependent upon this commodity for their export earnings and thus for their development
programmes in the social and economic fields.” This is true, but belies the importance of coffee
to importing countries. A fact that becomes evident almost immediately. The preamble
continues, “Finding reason to expect a tendency toward persistent disequilibrium between
production and consumption, accumulation of burdensome stocks, and pronounced fluctuations
in prices which can be burdensome to producers and consumers.” It is here that market stability
is revealed to be important to consumer countries as well. Finally, the agreement inadvertently
states that unregulated trade creates havoc, albeit only in special circumstances: “Believing that,
in the absence of international measures, this situation cannot be corrected by normal market
forces.”
123
Specifically, industrialized countries led by the U.S. sought regulation when it came
121
Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 53.
122
Johnson, “The International Coffee Agreement and the Production of Coffee in Guatemala,” 35.
123
British Secretary of State, International Coffee Agreement, New York, September 28-November 30, 1962
(London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Service, 1965), 2.
80
to a commodity that can only be produced in the tropics. In other words, the U.S. found
regulation to be in its interest when a circumstance arose that threatened to potentially alter the
distribution of power dynamic in the hemisphere through market exploitation. An important fact
that often goes unmentioned or is actively downplayed is that regulation protects consumers—
and importers, roasters, and retailers, the capitalists making the most off of commodities. The six
objectives of the ICA were:
(1) to achieve a reasonable balance between supply and demand on a basis that
would assure adequate supply of coffee to consumers and markets for coffee
to producers at equitable prices, and which will bring about long-term
equilibrium between production and consumption;
(2) to alleviate the hardship caused by burdensome surpluses and excessive
fluctuations in the prices of coffee to the detriment of the interests of both
producers and consumers;
(3) to contribute to the development of productive resources and to the promotion
and maintenance of employment and income in the member countries, thereby
helping to bring about fair wages, higher living standards, and better working
conditions;
(4) to assist in increasing the purchasing power of coffee-exporting countries by
keeping prices at equitable levels and increasing consumption;
(5) to encourage the consumption of coffee by every means possible; and
(6) in general, in recognition of the relationship of the trade in coffee to the
economic stability of markets for industrial products, to further international
co-operation in connexion with world coffee problems.
124
In addition to setting export quotas and import limits, the 1962 ICA established the International
Coffee Organization (ICO) headquartered in London to enforce the agreement, keep coffee data,
research production, and promote consumption and to be financed by the ICO member
countries.
125
An executive board was created with have fourteen members, seven from exporting
countries and seven from importing countries charged with, among other tasks, setting the quotas
for each coffee year which spanned October 1-September 30.
126
Even though importing countries
124
Ibid.
125
Ibid., 6, 12, 22.
126
Ibid., 9-10.
81
signed on to the ICA, the amount of surveillance they were subject to was minimal. Specifically,
they allowed to minimally import coffee from non-member countries.
127
There was no price
regulation in the forms of price floors and ceilings. By and large, the ICA regulated the market
by policing production and export.
The ICA was colonial power in the guise of international cooperation. It was paper
imbued with the power to police non- and industrializing countries. To be clear, the producing
countries did participate willingly; they did consent to it with their own interests in mind. A
nefarious part of international diplomacy is that it offers the patina of justice or coeval relations
between countries that are clearly not on a level power field. Regarding certification processes,
Lawrence Busch wrote, in the “modern principle of commutative justice if parties are uncoerced
the price reflects an equivalence.” He adds, “hence it is said to be just. Thus equivalence is
presumed to exist when a monetary exchange takes place.”
128
The same could be said about bi-
or multi-lateral agreements. The unequal distribution of power that exists beyond the edges of
the negotiating table is always affecting the relations at the table. This unequal power manifests
itself in the ICA by forcing the producing countries to do all the regulating required to create
equilibrium in the coffee market. Although producing countries previously worked together to
self-regulate, this was altogether different. It is the difference between assuming a position and
being ascribed a position.
129
Producing countries were to self-police through export quotas. The
ICA stipulated that they were to be set for the first three years and beginning in 1965 they would
be established the month before the next coffee year and to be based on data gathered by the ICO
that forecasted the demand and supply, in that order. The quotas could then be adjusted quarterly
127
Ibid., 21.
128
Lawrence Busch, “The Private Governance of Food: Equitable Exchange or Bizarre Bazaar?,”
Agriculture and Human Values 28 (2011), 346.
129
The Malthusian subtext is palpable. It is difficult not to conceptualize production controls as a type of
forced agricultural contraception.
82
as harvests came in.
130
The ICO policed producing countries in two ways. First, new measures to
curb production were included in the ICA with the belief that export quotas combined with
decreased production would create stabilization. Article 59 of the ICA required producing
countries to submit plans for and results of reduction schemes.
131
In order to keep track of
exports, the ICA introduced Certificate of Origin paperwork to be included with each bag of
coffee. The information required on the certificate included exporting country, which bag
number (to keep track of export quota), importing country, and whether it was green or
roasted.
132
Finally, to make sure that the capitalist market was the only legitimate place to
conduct coffee business and that capitalist relations the only dynamic allowed, using coffee to
barter was criminalized.
133
The first ICA to include importing countries was ratified by forty-
seven countries and acceded to by an additional twelve during the life of the agreement.
In 1968, the ICA was renewed and included two important changes. Article 27
introduced the idea of a price floor. It put more emphasis on the export and import quotas
purpose of price stability and stated, “To attain these purposes through the fixing of quotas as
provided for in this Chapter and in other ways carrying out the provisions of the Agreement, the
Members agree on the necessity of assuring that the general level of coffee prices does not
decline below the general level of such prices in 1962.”
134
For the first time, a price floor was put
into effect, US$.34 per pound. The second important change was Article 54, which established a
Diversification Fund.
135
Both ICAs overlapped with the implementation of GR agricultural
practices, the second one tried to help diversification in the Américas, but was unsuccessful
130
Ibid., 14-16. In the event that a country exceeded its quota the amount would be deducted from the next
quota period. Member countries with annual exports less than 25,000 bags were not subject to quotas (Ibid., 18).
131
Ibid., 24.
132
Ibid., 20, 231.
133
Ibid., 26.
134
British Secretary of State, International Coffee Agreement, New York, March 18-31, 1968 (London,
England: Her Majesty’s Stationery Service, 1968), 14.
135
Ibid., 28.
83
because local national governments and agricultural programs were in charge of allocating the
funds. As previously discussed, the funds were disproportionately given to oligarchs and large
estates. For example, in Guatemala only 2% of the annual export revenue was earmarked for
diversification.
136
While the Diversification Fund was largely unsuccessful, the price control
worked. As the five-year agreement was about to expire, the price of coffee hovered at US$.40.
Hailed a success, the 1973 ICA was ratified without export quotas. An unintended side effect of
the ICA as it dovetailed with the GR is that production levels outside of Brazil and Colombia,
historically the largest producers, increased. Unable to export all its coffee and forced to reduce
their operations, the relative decline in Brazilian and Colombian exports pushed everyone else
up. Essentially, the ICA created a situation of controlled chronic over-production. All that was
needed for the market to become flooded was for those walls in form of quotas to come down. In
1972, the Tokyo Round of the GATT significantly loosened trade and eliminated trade
protections. That year marked a turning point in international trade towards a reregulated market
that favored capital, and it only picked up steam in the 1980s.
* * * * *
Prior to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994, GATT rounds of negotiations
established the rules for world trade from 1948 to 1994. “The original intention was to create a
third institution to handle the trade side of international economic cooperation, joining the two
“Bretton Woods” institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”
137
The
International Trade Organization never materialized as originally planned. The WTO happened
instead. Until then, the GATT served the purpose of liberalizing the trade of goods among the
countries who signed on. In 1947, twenty-three members signed on to the first round of
136
Johnson, “The International Coffee Agreement and the Production of Coffee in Guatemala,” 39.
137
The GATT Years: From Havana to Marrakesh, World Trade Organization, accessed April 15, 2013,
http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/fact4_e.htm.
84
negotiations in Geneva. In 1965, industrializing countries were brought into the negotiations.
They were incorporated into the sphere of multilateral low tariff trade with the help of the
International Trade Center (ITC), a committee established “to help developing countries in trade
promotion and identification of potential markets”.
138
It is important to understand the ITC’s
purpose: help non- or industrializing countries who were becoming dependent on one or two or
three crops which were genetically engineered to produce high yields at this same historical
moment become better members of a system whose sole purpose was—and is—to make it easier
for people to trade their goods as cheaply as possible. By 1972, there were 102 members. That
round, called the Tokyo Round, marked the beginning of a shift to real free trade. The tariff
reductions agreed to were worth $300B. Tariffs on manufactured goods between industrialized
countries fell from 7 to 4.7%—meaning that cars could move around the industrialized world
cheaply. The first real concrete result of the round was the reduction of import duties and other
trade barriers by industrial countries on tropical products exported by developing countries.
139
In
other words, the industrialized world had easier and cheaper access to grapes, rice, bananas,
wheat, and coffee beans.
In 1975, nature interceded in the coffee market once again. A frost settled over the Paraná
region of Brazil and destroyed 1.5 billion coffee trees.
140
Brazilian coffee growers trying to
recapture their historically dominant position in world production pushed planting a little too far
south. Two years before, the ICA was renewed without export or import quotas. Three years
before, the Tokyo GATT eased the movement of tropical goods to industrialized countries.
Coffee producing countries that made up smaller portions of the market saw an opening created
by the combination of no quotas, free-er movement of tropical goods, and supply shock.
138
WTO, 2008.
139
The GATT Years: From Havana to Marrakesh.
140
Johnson, “The International Coffee Agreement and the Production of Coffee in Guatemala,” 40.
85
Throughout the Américas, smaller producing countries rushed to take advantage of the soaring
coffee prices. Brazil immediately and permanently moved all production away from Paraná in
addition to planting new trees to make up for those lost in the frost. However, this rush by
smaller countries and Brazil to fill the coffee void occurred at an unparalleled rate.
Using GR technologies and agronomic practices, everyone planted at a pace that signaled
a huge bubble burst in 1980—the year Brazil’s newly planted trees were forecasted to mature.
141
Coffee production at the end of the decade foreshadowed the effects post-WW II development
theory and economics, the GR, and unrestricted trade would have in 1990 and 2001. The land
concentration that resulted from the uneven use of GR technologies and agronomy due to the
uneven availability of funding for small and peasant farmers to implement the new agricultural
practices in conjunction with their nutrient-poor land further facilitated the use of technified
production practices by large landowners in the late 1970s. In 1978, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa
Rica, Ecuador, and Perú all experienced record harvests.
142
A 1979 USDA report confirmed the
obvious: technification, not land reform and subsequent use led to the huge increases.
143
In the
political, economic, and social context created by post-WW II development theory and
economics that emphasized GDP as an indicator of development and was materially expressed
through the GR this report was deployed as proof that capitalist development was working.
144
However, in the midst of the mid-1970s supply shock in the international coffee market led to
another ICA with export and import quotas.
141
Ibid., 42.
142
Ibid.
143
Ibid.
144
The contemporary U.S. equivalent is using the stock market to measure the “health” of the everyday life
of working and poor people. In other words, as bull market is not an accurate reflection of the social lives of most
people.
86
In 1976, a third ICA between producing and consuming countries was ratified. A year
after free market conditions favored producing countries, consuming countries wanted to renew
the export and import quota system to lower the price they paid for coffee. Coming in the context
of liberalizing trade that favored industrialized and financializing countries—or non-intervention
as intervention—the desire to re-establish an ICA—or regulation as intervention—demonstrated
the mobilization of “bigness” by industrialized and financializing countries to simultaneously
expand and contract the international supply of goods in their favor. It demonstrated how these
countries mobilized colonial power to control the economic and social lives of non- and
industrializing countries. A new feature of the 1976 agreement was a quota system with triggers
that relaxed or tightened the quotas if the price of coffee rose too high or fell too low. The system
worked as intended in 1980, when the coffee bubble burst as forecasted and coffee prices
dropped quickly.
145
The 1983 ICA kept the export and import quotas, price floors and ceilings,
and reintroduced production decrease requirements.
146
However, a precedent was set. Post-WW
II development policies and practices, the GR, and the ICA and GATT overlapped to create
conditions where producers were perpetually on the brink of crisis: increasingly consolidating
roasters and retailers were guaranteed a stable flow of coffee from producers operating at
maximum capacity and with access to GR agricultural technologies. During this period, coffee
shops started appearing in the U.S., further contributing to the uneven concentration of value in
coffee commodity chains. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was founded in 1963, Peet’s Coffee &
Tea in 1966, Seattle’s Best in 1970, Starbucks in 1971, and The Coffee Beanery in 1976.
147
In
1989, when the ICA expired and Vietnam began producing coffee at rapid rates using GR
agricultural technologies the crises were inevitable. Vietnamese production may have flooded the
145
International Coffee Organization, “History.”
146
Ibid.
147
Clark, Starbucked and Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds.
87
market and caused prices to drop, but it happened so quickly because of the conditions
established between Bretton Woods and 1989. In other words, the coffee disaster of 2001 and
2001 were created. Although the industrialized and financialized countries led by the U.S.
deployed “bigness” and exerted colonial power to shape the international economy and nascent
international agriculture complex during this period, they did not do so without opposition.
Several opposition movements in countries throughout the Américas dependent on coffee
occurred during this period. Resistance in Guatemala and Nicaragua are but two examples of
many local movements that fought U.S. hegemony in the region. The U.S. response to them
demonstrates that violence is always ready and willing to uphold the juridical arm of colonial
power.
Fighting for Alternative Developments
Popular movements across the Américas fought for different forms of development and
social and political organization in the midst of U.S. hegemony. This section highlights
movements in Guatemala that were violently suppressed by covert and overt U.S. military
operations. The actions against these popular movements demonstrated a shift to coercive tactics
by the U.S. when people did not consent to the hegemonic development ideals. A summary of
the actions in Guatemala here functions as contemporary context for the Frente Sandinista de
Liberación Nacional’s (Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN) revolution in Nicaragua
that is part of the next chapter. The purpose of both of these movements was to put into practice
locally based development theories at odds with those being crafted and imposed at the
international scale. They demonstrated struggles for other worlds as well as U.S. commitment to
foreclosing on them.
88
Often described as a civil war, the large-scale genocide of ethnically Mayan and poor
people of Guatemala who struggled against the U.S. backed ruling elite occurred between 1960
and 1996. Members of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (Guatemalan Labor Party or PGT)
were the first victims of U.S. sanctioned Guatemalan state terror during a mass protest in
1962.
148
After the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) “Operation PBSUCCESS” ousted
popularly elected Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, it installed the military general Carlos Castillo Armas
as president, he was succeeded by General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes.
149
Under the Armas and
Ydígoras administrations agricultural reforms were undone, the PGT was deemed illegal, and
“peasant and labor activists and intellectuals faced detention, torture, and sometimes death.”
150
On 13 November 1960, several discontented army officers serving in the increasingly oppressive
Ydígoras government attempted a coup d’etat and failed. The officers disbursed and participated
in various resistance movements. In 1961, students and PGT members protested the Guatemalan
government training of mercenaries for participation in La Batalla de Girón. Security forces
opened fire on the demonstrators and killed three. In 1962, students, labor groups, and middle
class allies protested the Ydígoras administration with the purpose of getting him to step down.
Instead, security forces once again opened fire and killing many. In 1963, on the verge of
congressional elections, another U.S. backed military invasion strengthened military control of
the country and Minister of Defense Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia was installed as
president.
151
During this time, several resistance forces came together and formed the Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces, FAR) and began guerilla strikes
148
Patrick Ball, Paul Krobak, and Herbert F. Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1966: A
Quantitative Reflection (Washington D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999), 14.
149
Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh, CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents, National
Security Archive Electronic Briefing Booklet No. 4, Accessed April 15, 2013,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/, Document 5.
150
Ibid., 13.
151
Ibid., 14.
89
against the U.S.-backed military government. In 1966, the patina of free and democratic
elections that resulted in university professor and lawyer Julio César Méndez Montenegro
assuming the presidency was quickly shattered when the U.S.-backed military forced him to sign
a pact indicating that the government would not interfere with or try the tactics used by the
military against the guerrillas.
152
In other words, the military could operate with impunity—and
it did so immediately.
In 1966, the first of many disappearances was documented. A secret cable from the
USAID revealed that U.S. Public Safety Advisor John Longan advised and assisted the
Guatemalan military in establishing an urban counter-terrorist task force, devising effective
police raids, and creating a database of resistance forces. Longan also reassured the military that
they would continue to have access to U.S. military advisors, supplies and equipment.
153
No
longer president, but still in charge of the military, Col. Peralta “was outspoken in his
appreciation for the help and interest of the U.S. government.”
154
In March, no less than twenty-
eight members of the PGT and other resistance groups were detained. “They were never arrested,
nor tried, nor freed, nor did there bodies ever turn up. They were simply ‘disappeared.’”
155
However, the U.S. knew otherwise. In a cable to CIA headquarters, the CIA Station in
Guatemala City reported the secret execution of several leaders of the PGT on March 6, 1966.
Among those killed was Victor Manuel Gutierrez, leader of the PGT.
156
Several law students
with the University of San Carlos tried to use the juridical system to force the government to
152
Ibid., 15.
153
Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio, U.S. Policy in Guatemala, 1966-1996, National Security Archive
Electronic Briefing Book No. 11, accessed April 15, 2013,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/, Document 1.
154
Ibid.
155
Ball, Krobak, and Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 15-16.
156
Doyle and Osorio, U.S. Policy in Guatemala, Document 2.
90
present the detainees. They were promptly disappeared as well.
157
These events marked a shift in
the scale of repression the Guatemalan military used against resistance forces. For the next thirty
years, the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military violently subdued popular opposition movements in
the service of the local elite. After 1966, the resistance forces ramped up their action as well,
targeting the Guatemalan military, civilian opponents, and U.S. diplomats and advisors who
came to the country to help with counterinsurgency tactics. As Ball, Krobak, and Spirer wrote,
With U.S. guidance, Guatemalan society had become subject to an increasingly
powerful military apparatus without any responsibility to civilian authority. The
government established a wide-reaching network of counterinsurgency
surveillance that it would employ for the next 30 years not only to battle the
guerrilla organizations but to also exercise control over the civilian population.
Fresh from the conflict in Vietnam, U.S. advisers had the army authorize
thousands more military commissioners who became privileged local
representatives of the counterinsurgency.
158
Clandestine death squads quickly multiplied and terrorized the civilian population by announcing
future targets with “Death Lists” and leaving behind bodies decorated with anti-communist
propaganda—all with no threat of being held responsible for the killings.
159
In campaign after campaign, the Guatemalan government and military violently repressed
popular opposition. In the early 1970s, mass protests were orgazined over recently installed
President Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio’s agreement with EXMIBAL, the local subsidiary of a
Canadian mining company. The agreement gave EXMIBAL control over 385 square kilometers
in El Estor, in Q’eqchi territory, for forty years. Arana responded by ordering mass arrests and
suspending the right to mass assembly. When demonstrations continued, the military occupied
the University of San Carlos, killed law professors Julio Camey Herrera and Adolfo Mijangos
157
Ball, Krobak, and Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 16.
158
Ibid.
159
Ibid., 17.
91
López, and went after opposition leadership.
160
In 1975, President General Kjell Laugerud
García introduced terror to areas with a high concentration of ethnically Mayan communities in
northern Guatemala. The Ejército Guerillero de los Pobres (Guerilla Army of the Poor, EGP)
began in 1972 and organized labor, collectives, and communities mostly in the departments of
Huehuetenango and Quiché. Military leaders and death squads began killing and disappearing
organizers and resistance guerrilla fighters in these areas in 1975.
161
Once again, General
Laugerud used U.S. weapons and advisors to complete these acts.
162
Three years later, General
Romeo Lucas García became president and immediately hiked up the prices of many basic
goods. His hike on bus fare from five to ten cents was met with opposition by a broad-based
urban movement in Guatemala City. After a few weeks of heated clashes in the street, the García
administration capitulated and reduced the fare back to five cents. In the wake of this popular
movement victory, the Ejército Secreto Anticomunista (Secret Anticommunist Army, ESA)
published a death list of thirty-eight. The first person on the list was the secretary general of the
University Student Association, Oliveiro Castañeda de Léon. He was machine-gunned to death
after giving a speech at a rally in Guatemala City’s central park. Many people witnessed the
murder, including police. No arrests were made.
163
As the 1970s came to a close, it was clear that
the Guatemalan military and government had become indistinguishable and that they would kill
any opponents using any and all means. Along with the PGT and the EGP, the Organización del
Pueblo en Armas (Organization of People in Arms, ORPA), the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes
(Armed Rebel Forces, FAR) and the Comite de Unidad Campesina (Campesino Unity
Committee, CUC) continued resisting the military government and fighting for alternative forms
160
Ibid., 19.
161
Ibid., 22.
162
Doyle and Osorio, Document 11.
163
Ibid., 21.
92
of development and social and political organization. However, the beginning of the next decade
brought unparalleled repression unevenly borne by the Mayan people of El Quiché.
Figure 4. Map of Guatemala
A group of K’iche’ and Ixil peoples descended on Guatemala City to protest the
kidnapping and murder of nine peasants from El Quiché in early 1980. The Lucas García
administration denied the group’s request to be seen by congress. On 31 January, protesters
occupied the Spanish embassy to alert the rest of the world about the scale of violence the people
of Guatemala were suffering. General Lucas García, police chief Germán Chupina Barahona,
and Minister of the Interior Donaldo Alvaro Ruíz met briefly and decided to expel the group by
93
force rather than negotiate. Police rushed the embassy, threw incendiary weapons, lit Molotov
cocktails the protesters carried, and blocked the doors shut while firefighters watched helplessly.
Thirty-nine people were burned alive and the military government showed the world it did not
care who witnessed its atrocities, no opponents survived.
164
Up to this point, much of the
violence occurred in urban areas. In 1981, it began to shift west and north towards the Mayan
highlands—the same communities struggling and dealing with GR poor crops.
The EGP’s recruitment in El Quiche was quickly repressed by the military government.
The 1979 victory by the FSLN in Nicaragua reverberated across the Américas and cut two ways.
Guerrilla resistance groups like the EGP, ORPA, and CUC were encouraged to try and expand
their influence in rural parts of the country. The military government and death squads inceased
disappearances, tortures, and killings. In April 1981, the EGP and civilian allies attacked an army
base in Nebaj in the Ixil jungle. The army suffered five deaths, one officer and five soldiers.
165
In
response, the army attacked the village of Cocob On 17 April 1981. According to a CIA cable
regarding the attack on the village, a “reinforced company of airborne troops” entered, were
greeted by fire from guerrillas, and rocks thrown by angry villagers. The troops responded by
returning fire on the guerrillas and unarmed civilians, killing many of both in the process.
Afterward, the military went from house to house and found ammunition, EGP support materials,
and “a series of sophisticated fox holes similar to the ‘spider holes’ used by the Viet Cong.”
Using these findings as justification, military leaders stated, “the soldiers were forced to fire at
anything that moved. [redacted phrase] The Guatemalan authorities admitted that ‘many
civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of them were undoubtedly non-combattants .”
166
In the
same way that the massacre at the Spanish embassy signaled a shift to carry through on violence
164
Ibid., 23.
165
Doyle and Osorio, Document 12.
166
Ibid.
94
no matter who watched, the mass and indiscriminant killing of non-combattants and civilians in
rural Cocob signaled a shift to all out repression and destruction in the Mayan highlands. In
November 1981, the Lucas García administration introduced Operacíon Ceniza—Operation
Ashes—in the region. “The army first committed mass killings and burned villages to take
control of the Pan-American Highway running through Chimaltenango and southern Quiché.
Then some 15,000 troops participated in a slow sweep through the department of El Quiché, into
Huehuetenango, and all the way to the border with Mexico.”
167
Rather than be intimidated by the
military government’s action, the guerrilla groups came together. Rather than engage in talks of
any kind, the military run government ratcheted up the violence.
In 1982, solidarity described the key resistance movements and scorched earth described
the actions of the military government. On 7 February, the EGP, FAR, ORPA, and PGT came
together and formed the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National
Revolutionary Unity, URNG) “en su afán por tomar el control del Estado y llevar acabo una
revolución política y social en Guatemala” (in their eagerness to take control of the state and
implement a political and social revolution in Guatemala).
168
Merely a month later, an army coup
installed General Efraín Ríos Montt who immediately suspended constitutional guarantees,
established secret courts to try rebels, and unleashed a level of violence previously unseen.
Within six months his administration had combined massacres with population control programs,
and forced villagers to turn in rebels in their communities to create desolation and call it
peace.
169
Another coup replaced him in late 1983 with General Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores.
Although the repression in terms of numbers peaked in the Ríos Montt regime, it continued
167
Ball, Krobak. And Spirer, State Violence and Guatemala, 27.
168
Origen y Desarollo, URNG-MAIZ, Accessed April 15, 2013, http://www.urng-
maiz.org.gt/queesurng.html.
169
Ball, Krobak, and Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 27.
95
through the 1980s, into the 1990s, and returned to Guatemala City after the rural countryside was
devastated: union activists were tortured and killed in 1984; human rights movement Grupo de
Apoyo Mútuo’s (Group for Mutual Suport, GAM) founders were murdered in 1985; El Quiché
once again suffered violence in 1987 when the military government launched a year-end
offensive; student activists were captured and tortured in 1989; and civil patrols continued
searching out human rights activists for detention, torture, and death into 1993.
170
In 1994, peace
talks began between the URNG and the government. Two years later, an agreement was signed.
After thirty-six years of violence, the war on Guatemala’s resistance movements ended.
Human rights groups and activists that persisted through the repression forced a truth
commission on the war as part of the peace agreement. In 1999, the Comisión para el
Esclarecimiento Histórico (Historical Clarification Commission, CEH) declared that acts of
genocide took place in El Quiché’s Ixil region as well as other areas in the country.
171
Although
much of the mainstream press described and continue to describe the violence as a civil war, the
information gathered by the CEH make it clear that the military government—with U.S. support
in the forms of advisors, training, and weapons—conducted a genocidal campaign against the
Mayan communities of El Quiché.
172
Over the course of thirty-four years, the indigenous people of Guatemala bore the brunt
of the state’s violence. According to the CEH, Maya people constituted 83.33% of all
170
Ibid., 28-32.
171
Kate Doyle, The Pursuit of Justice in Guatemala, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Booklet
No. 373, accessed April 15, 2013, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB373/index.htm.
172
There was plenty of violence and killing in urban centers as well, but more often conducted by
clandestine death squads making a complete data set difficult to compile. The CEH registered a total of 42,275
victims, but combined with the results of other studies of political violence in Guatemala puts the total estimate of
people killed or disappeared by the state at well over 200,000 (The Tragedy of Armed Confrontation, Guatemala,
Memory of Silence: Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification, Conclusions and Recommendations,
accessed April 15, 2013, http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/conc1.html.
96
documented human rights violations.
173
As Figure 2 shows, violations were concentrated in the
Mayan highlands; Figure 3 shows the concentrated and ethnically targeted characteristics of the
violence. According to the data, the violence was far from a war between equals, nor were the
violations remotely equally divided. Figure 4 shows the division of responsibility for human
rights violations between all actors.
Figure 5. Number of Massacres by Department. Reproduced from Guatemala: Memory of Silence. Available at
http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/graphics/charts/page83.gif.
173
Percentage of Identified Victims by Ethnic Group, Guatemala, Memory of Silence: Report of the
Commission for Historical Clarification, Conclusions, and Recommendations, accessed April 15, 2013,
http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/graphics/charts/page85.gif. Violations are any instances of killing,
disappearance, torture, and/or kidnapping. Ball, Krobak, and Spirer’s State Violence in Guatemala is based on
34,363 cases (11). Both reports acknowledge that the actual violations are much higher.
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
Number of Massacres by Department
97
Figure 6. Percentage of Victims by Ethnic Group. Reproduced from Guatemala: Memory of Silence. Available at
http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/graphics/charts/page85.gif.
Figure 7. Forces Responsible for Human Rights Violations and Acts of Violence. Reproduced from Guatemala:
Memory of Silence. Available at http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/graphics/charts/page86.gif.
For over three decades, the military governments of Guatemala responded to popular movements
for alternative forms of development and social and political organization with repressive
Percentage of Victims by Ethnic Group
(1962-1996)
Maya 83.33
Ladino 16.51
Other .16
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Forces Responsible for Human Rights
Violations and Acts of Violence
98
violence. The concentrated targeting of indigenous communities reveals two important issues.
First, indigenous resistance to colonizing practices embedded in post-World War II development
reveals the danger anti-colonial practices pose to capitalism-dependent practices backed by
hegemonic power, ie. the U.S.. As such, indigenous resistance movements across the Américas
should garner the attention of other anti-colonial movements interested in remaking
interdependence structured by mutuality for coalition building. Second, it demonstrates how
difference can be leveraged with fatality to create homogeneity. In other words, difference as
indigineity was used in Guatemala to create class through genocide and appropriation of land.
The dispossession that began during the GR was completed with Operación Ceniza and the
destruction of war. Ethnicity was used to create class and further ensconce a group of people and
a place onto a particular teleology and thesis of history.
Conclusion
The coffee disaster of 2001 was created over the fifty years after World War II. The
overlapping processes of post-World War II development discourse and practice, the agricultural
technologies of the GR, and the ICA and Tokyo GATT combined and created the necessary
conditions for the disaster. However, they did more than this. These processes unfolded at the
global scale, with coffee in the Américas a regional expression of a global transition from
industrialized capitalism to financialized capitalism institutionalized in the World Bank, IMF,
and GATT that would become the World Trade Organization (WTO). The epistemic and
ontological effects of this further entrenchment of a capitalist telos have been to impact the
imagination and limits of resistance movements to capitalism in all it forms. In the subsequent
years, movements across the Américas have often defined themselves in relation to capitalism or
99
in capitalist terms. From the FSLN in Nicaragua in the 1980s to Fair Trade and labeling
initiatives today, opposition has often responded within the same epistemic or ontological frames
that undergird capitalism, classical economics and consumer activism in the capitalist
marketplace. This does not mean these efforts must be dismissed. Rather they must be examined
again to look for portents to other ways of knowing, being, and shaping our world. Any effort to
make a new world on top of our current one will not be easy and requires broad participation and
generosity towards previous efforts in order to learn from them.
100
Chapter 2
Caffeinated Consent: Certified Coffee as Crisis Management
Figure 8. Fair Trade USA label Figure 9. USDA Organic Seal
These labels are ubiquitous. Once found mostly in specialty shops or alternative grocery
stores, the Fair Trade USA label can be spotted not only on the shelves of your local mainstream
market but also in increasingly hybridizing Target and Wal-Mart stores. Quite often, that label is
joined by another one that signifies the coffee you are about to purchase has not only been
purchased at a price that includes a social premium, but was also grown organically. It is more
expensive than “conventional” coffee, but the container makes you feel good about the price
premiums. For instance, the copy on “Trader Joe’s Organic Five Country Espresso Blend” reads,
“Fair Trade guarantees small-scale growers a fair price for their harvest, giving them access to
better housing, healthcare, and education. By choosing Fair Trade Coffees from Trader Joe’s,
you are supporting economic independence for coffee farming families, and getting a great cup
o’ Joe to boot.” In other words, the sixteen-ounce package of beans you hold in your hand is
beneficial to you and the growers and workers who produce it. You get the all-natural help you
need to wake in the morning or revive in the afternoon, they receive social infrastructure they
might not otherwise and are exposed to fewer chemical pesticides and inputs.
101
One of the aims of certification is to make visible the links between consumers and
producers.
1
Product packaging conjures a direct connection between people across space into
existence that obscures the social, political, and economic context in which it is formed. These
terrains beyond the frame maintain, reproduce, and extend the reach of colonial power.
Certification and labels outline the imaginative capacities of neoliberal capitalism to maintain
and create relationships structured in dominance across space. They hide the infrastructure that
enables and impinges on the connections forged among consumers, retailers, and producers by
appearing to reveal more than they do.
Both the fair trade and organic labels are recent developments. The Fair Trade USA label
debuted in 1999 on certified coffee at the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA)
exposition.
2
The very next year, Fair Trade Certified became the fastest growing segment of the
U.S. coffee industry. The USDA Organic label regulated by the National Organic Program
(NOP) made its first appearance in 2001 and is currently used by 30 000 farms worldwide.
3
That
both labels began to circulate at the turn of the twenty-first century is not a coincidence. Neither
1
Gavin Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice (Toronto,
Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Guthman, “The Polanyian Way?”; and Laura T. Raynolds, Douglas
Murray, and John Wilkinson, Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2007).
2
What is Fair Trade? History, Fair Trade USA, accessed January 22, 2012, http://fairtradeusa.org/what-is-
fair-trade/history. Fair Trade USA first appeared in the U.S. as TransFair USA. The organization changed names in
2010. According to their website, the reason for the change was “The updated, simplified name and brand identity
will support our efforts to increase awareness of Fair Trade among a broader consumer audience” (Fair Trade USA
2010) The emphases on brand identity and consumption are important because they reveal part of fair trade’s
purpose—to fill a niche in a capitalist marketplace.
3
National Organic Program: Organic Certification and Accreditation, United States Department of
Agriculture, last modified December 31, 2012,
http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateN&navID=OrgCertLinkNOPFA
QsHowCertified&rightNav1=OrgCertLinkNOPFAQsHowCertified&topNav=&leftNav=&page=NOPAccreditation
andCertification&resultType=&acct=nopgeninfo .
102
is the fact that fair trade and/or organic certified goods continue to increase sales even during the
worst economic conditions since the 1930s.
4
This chapter demonstrates how certification both maintained and extended the reach of
colonial power as it operates through neoliberal capitalism. Operating as a form of crises
management when it first appeared, certification quickly became a way to broaden the reach of
neoliberal capitalism on the social, political economic, and material terrains it maneuvered
beyond the label.
Beginning with the 1990s, continuing through the coffee crisis of 2001 and into the
present, I argue that the introduction of certified coffee first managed crises of overproduction,
surplus land and labor, and saturation. Moving past the label, outside the neoliberal capitalist
marketplace, and onto the social, political economic, and material terrains of specialty retail
stores, the certification structure, and producer sites I also argue that certification extended the
reach of colonial power. Furthermore, and most dangerously, certification manufactures consent
to colonial power as expressed through neoliberal capitalism by commodifying political action
and re-centering the capitalist market as the forum for fixing capitalism. In other words, it is
dangerous because it manufactures consent to the idea that capitalism is the way to solve the
problems of capitalism. The point here is not to criticize or malign the workers who depend on
certified coffee for their livelihood—either in the central or southern Américas—or here in the
U.S. Neither is the point to overlook the social infrastructure certified goods have created for
many coffee farms. Rather, the point is to think critically about how certification maintains
colonial power through this; how even the good intentions of people who participate in one way
4
Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee; Julie Guthman, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in
California (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Jaffee, Brewing Justice; and McNally, Global
Slump.
103
or another in certification programs contribute to the maintenance of colonial power. In other
words, how these good intentions pave a path to the hell that is colonial interdependence.
The (Recent) Past as Prologue
A key facet of most perishable goods produced for participation in an increasingly
tangled global economy is that they are affected by international trade terms and agricultural
practices. Coffee is no different. It was affected by overlapping developments in trade and
agriculture in the 1990s. The events that led to the appearance of the Fair Trade USA and USDA
Organic labels are related, but distinct. This section is a schematic overview of key moments and
actors involved in events leading up to the appearance of the certification programs to highlight
how the two began and developed as responses to crises.
Fair Trade-An Abridged History
At this juncture, a brief history of the fair trade system is useful. It was originally
conceived in the same context as the three-part international financial and trading regime
composed of the International Monetary Fund, International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Several alternative trading
organizations (ATOs) were organized that formed parts of a nascent network for a movement
focused on forming and maintaining relationships between producers and consumers in an
increasingly intertwined global economy being shaped by the Bretton Woods institutions.
5
In the
5
This network and movement as originally imagined is akin to what is known today as direct trade. The
ATOs can be divided by their affiliation—as religious or secular based—as Jaffee does (2007) to highlight the
differences in their reasons for being involved. He argues that religious groups do so out of Christian responsibility
and takes on the form of charity. However, this glosses over strains in Christian thought and practice that stress
solidarity with marginalized people. That groups in this tradition established these first ATOs is not accidental. The
reason for the relationships is not as important as the fact that both religious and secular organizations tried to forge
relationships with people and communities separated by distance, who were brought together by the aftermath of a
second world war that revealed how quickly distance can be breached with profound effects. Because of this, I use
Fridell’s division of ATOs based on how they use the fair trade network: as the infrastructure for an alternative trade
104
1940s, The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) developed trading relationships with poor
communities in the Southern U.S. as well as Puerto Rico and Jordan to generate work and
income. The goods—usually textiles—were sold in U.S. congregations and women’s bible study
groups. During the waning years of World War II (WWII), a group of Quakers in Oxford formed
a committee to raise funds for famine relief thus forming Oxfam UK. In 1950, it began selling
crafts made by Chinese refugees. Also organized in the wake of WWII, Sales Exchange for
Refugee Rehabilitation (SERRV) imported clocks made by refugees throughout Europe for sale
in U.S. parishes of the Church of the Brethren.
6
In the 1950s, the MCC established an Overseas
Needlepoint and Crafts Project in Jordan for Palestinian refugees (renamed SELFHELP in
1968).
7
In 1959, members of a Catholic political party formed S.O.S. Wereldhandel in the
Netherlands that focused first on vocational training in poor communities in Southern Europe.
Eventually, S.O.S. began purchasing products made in these communities for re-sale in the
Netherlands.
8
During the 1970s and 1980s, Twin Trading in Britain, Oxfam Wereldwinkels in
Belgium, Stichting Ideele Import in the Netherlands, and Equal Exchange in the U.S. were all
movement or a regulated capitalist marketplace. In his formulation, fair trade labeling initiatives mark the turning
point for the fair trade network from the basis for alternative trade to a niche part of the dominant neoliberal
capitalist marketplace. Fridell argues that the ICAs and the new use of the network through labeling initiatives
constitute Polanyian double movements—market regulations that accompany the extension of self-regulating
industrial capitalism as political solutions for the latter’s destructive effects. Using Polanyi’s language, coffee
labeling initiatives disembed trade relationships and create a mediated marketplace. I push this further back to Marx
because what Polanyi is describing in the ‘double movement’ and the problems with disembeddedness of market
exchanges are the fetishization of value creation and production processes. See Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944])
6
By the 1980s SERRV had annual sales of over U.S.$ 3 million (Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee, 41).
7
The first SELFHELP retail store opened in the U.S. in 1972. By the end of the 1980s there were over 120
retail stores in the U.S. and Canada (Fridell 2007, 41). SELFHELP is now Ten Thousand Villages.
8
This led to one of the first ‘world shops’ in Europe—retailers that sold goods and crafts made abroad at
fair prices for the producers. S.O.S. worked with Cane Sugar Groups to open a store that first sought better prices for
southern European beet farmers and expanded to sell other fair trade handicrafts.
105
formed to create markets for products from then socialist countries such as Mozambique, Cuba,
North Vietnam, and Nicaragua.
9
In 1988, the first certification label was created. The Max Havelaar label was placed on
coffee sold by the Dutch solidarity organization Solidaridad for a group of coffee farmers in
Oaxaca who formed the Unión de Comunidades Indígenas del Región del Istmo (UCIRI). After
considering creating and marketing its own brand, the two decided on a label they could place on
any brand that certified the farmers who grew the coffee received a “fair return.” “The newly
created Max Havelaar foundation licensed the use of the label to existing coffee roasters and
retailers who agreed to comply with its criteria of fairness in trade.”
10
The Max Havelaar label began a shift in the ATO network from alternative trade to fair
trade; from creating anti-capitalist relationships to mediating exchanges between producers and
consumers as a niche part of the dominant capitalist market. In 1989, over forty ATOs and
representatives from producing countries formed the International Federation for Alternative
9
The information for this brief history and on these ATOs come primarily from Jaffee, Brewing Justice;
Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee; and Laura T. Raynolds and John Wilkinson, “Fair Trade in the Agricultural and Food
Sector: Analytical Dimensions,” in Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization, edited by Laura T.
Raynolds, Douglas Murray, and John Wilkinson, 33-47 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007).
10
Jaffee, Brewing Justice, 13. Jaffee described this direct trading relationship between Solidaridad and
UCIRI as a symbolic gesture and increased access to the larger capitalist marketplace as an act that would make a
significant monetary impact in the lives of the farmers (13). Although it is true the increased distribution of the
coffee made a monetary impact in the farmers’ lives, the characterization of the gesture as symbolic is interesting.
When the relationship between UCIRI and a small number consumers who purchase the coffee fairly directly it is
symbolic because not much money is being generated; when the relationship between an increased number of
consumers is mediated by not simply Solidaridad but additional retailers then it becomes significant. By quantifying
significance in terms of market saturation and market access this falls into a Neo-Smithian fallacy that focuses on
unequal access to the market as the reason for the persistence of poor peoples (Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee). The point
here is not that the original more direct relationship between UCIRI and the consumers of its coffee through
Solidaridad was ‘better,’ but that it was not symbolic. It constituted a different form of interdependence between
producers and consumers that was not organized by or as dependent on the burgeoning neoliberal capitalist market.
The crisis UCIRI tried to resolve through the Max Havelaar label was one caused by a contracting Mexican state’s
social infrastructure (brought on by an IMF/World Bank structural adjustment program implemented in 1982) that
reduced the amount of resources flowing to Oaxaca and a weakening international coffee market that diminished
UCIRI members’ ability to stay alive. The point I am raising here is that UCIRI sought a capitalist solution to a
problem produced by capitalism—and that this was seen as the significant act. This highlights the fact that we need
anti-colonial solutions to problems created by modernity/coloniality and its various expressions, ie. neoliberal
capitalism.
106
Trade (IFAT).
11
By the middle of the 1990s, each country in Europe had its own national
labeling initiative with coffee as the lead fair trade product. In 1997, the national organization
came together and formed Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) as a worldwide
umbrella certifier. That same year, Transfair was organized as the certifying organization in the
U.S., Canada, and Japan.
12
Leading to Fair Trade in the U.S.
In 1989, one collapse led to many others. On November 9, people began chipping away
at the Berlin Wall. What began as a wire fence twenty-eight years prior and grew into a cement
border was torn down. The material demise of the wall marked the symbolic demise of
communism, which eventually led to the actual demise of communism as expressed through the
USSR. This event is often imagined as a moment when the people and ideas east of the wall
pressed westward, likely because those are the images that circulated heavily—East Germans
scaling cement en masse. It is equally if not more important to realize that people and ideas west
of the wall moving eastward contributed to the collapse. The Berlin Wall was as much about
keeping people and ideas out as it was about keeping them in. The Soviet Union was a symbol of
the possibility for a different world order to the one shaped in large part by the U.S. and Great
Britain—especially for liberation and anti-colonial movements in the Américas.
13
It is not my
intention to romanticize the USSR as a non-capitalist utopia, but rather to point out that U.S. and
Great Britain centered colonial power contributed heavily to these events and that while many
11
Ibid., 15.
12
Ibid.
13
Even though communism as manifested in the USSR was, and in many respects still is, an important
symbol for anti-capitalist and liberation movements throughout the world, it was not anti-colonial in practice. That
is, it was rooted in the modern idea of a universalizing historical trajectory imagined at a global scale that required
social evolution from peasant to proletarian. For work on how this theorization of communism and socialism
affected the practices of liberation struggles in the Américas. See Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination
in the Americas. For current conceptualizations and writing on the idea of communism see Costas Douzinas and
Slavoj Zizek, The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010).
107
people ran west, ideas and agreements that regulate and shape economic, political, social, and
material practices went east. After 1989, colonial power created through neoliberal capitalism
could dominate and structure life in ways and at a scale it could not previously.
The last International Coffee Agreement (ICA) of real regulatory substance also began to
collapse in 1989. Without the U.S., the world’s single largest coffee importer (see Figure 10), the
ICA signed in 1983 could no longer effectively regulate export quotas, floor prices, or ceiling
prices that had kept a volatile coffee market steady since the 1970s.
14
As many scholars argue,
the key factor for U.S. refusal to renew a version of the ICA with a strong regulatory component
was the imminent demise of the USSR.
15
With the threat of more Cubas gone, any incentive for
the U.S. to participate in an agreement that created relative stability in a volatile commodity
market much of the Américas depended on then—and still depends on today—disappeared as
well (see Figure 11).
Figure 10. Breakdown of global coffee imports by country and percent, 1990. Source, International Coffee
Organization (ICO), available at http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp
14
The 1983 ICA was the fourth version of the original signed in 1962.
15
Goodman, “The International Coffee Crisis;” Jaffee, Brewing Justice; Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds;
Petchers and Harris, “The Roots of the Coffee Crisis;” and Talbot, Grounds for Agreement.
28%
20%
10%
7%
7%
4%
4%
4%
3%
15%
Percent of Global Coffee Imports 1990
U.S. Germany France Japan Italy
Netherlands Spain United Kingdom Belgium/Luxemborg Rest of the World
108
Figure 11. Breakdown of global coffee exports by country or region and percent, 1990. Source, ICO, available at
http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp
The ICA worked by setting export quotas for producing countries as well as floor and ceiling
prices. If the price of coffee started to approach the floor, then the export quotas would be
tightened to drive prices back up by further limiting the amount of coffee on the market. If the
price approached the ceiling, the exports quotas would be loosened to lower prices by making
more coffee available. Effects of shifting reregulation in favor of importing countries—where
most coffee is roasted, sold, and consumed—were immediately seen and felt in the forms of
saturation and price drops. Without export quotas to serve as levees that kept large producers
from flooding the market, the amount of exportable coffee simply outpaced the world’s ability to
absorb it. Brazil and Vietnam led the race to makeup the fall in prices through volume (see
Figure 5). Both produce mostly Robusta, Arabica’s cheaper, easier to grow relative. However, it
is not considered as high quality as Arabica and is reflected in their market prices. Not only was
the overall supply of exportable coffee pushing prices down, the kind of coffee being produced
23%
21%
18%
15%
15%
5% 3%
Percent of Global Coffee Exports 1990
Africa Asia/Oceania Brazil Central Américas/Caribbean Colombia México Rest of Southern Américas
109
lowered it still.
16
In short, the 1990s was a decade of disaster caused by a crisis of
overproduction. Aside from a small jump in 1995 caused by the latest of many infamous
Brazilian frosts that ruined much of the country’s harvest, prices fell dramatically (see Figure
13).
Figure 12. Exportable coffee production by leading seven countries from 1990-1999 in 1000 bags of 60-kg each.
“A” represents Arabica and “R” Robusta. Source, ICO, http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp
16
As many scholars note, a key contributing factor to increasing Robusta production and sales is the
growing trend among roasters to blend the two kinds of beans together to reduce expenditures and maintain or
increase profits (Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee; Jaffee, Brewing Justice; Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds; and Talbot,
Grounds for Agreement). This led Arabica producers to either decrease planting and diversify to survive (Jaffee
2007), or seek new ways to capture value to survive, or both. Fair trade will play an important role for farmers who
grow Arabica varieties. For more on the idea of value capture see chapter three in Guthman, Agrarian Dreams.
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Exportable Production, Crop Years 1990-2000
Vietnam [R]
Indonesia [R/A]
Guatemala [A/R]
Colombia [A]
Brazil [A/R]
110
Figure 13. Composite indicator price of coffee from 1980-2000 in hundreds of cents. Source, United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development statistics available at http://unctadstat.unctads.org
The symbolic crumbling of the 1983 ICA in 1989 was followed by its actual demise as a
regulatory document when it expired in 1993 after multiple extensions and failed negotiations.
17
The U.S. refused to sign on for more regulation as prices kept falling in a post-USSR and ardent
neoliberal capitalist context. The ICA was one of the final agreements with a strong regulatory
component at a global scale. Traders, consumers, and producers could count on stability in a
market with an extensive history of wild swings. It protected actors in a global commodity
market with an uneven dependence on each other in that they were located at varying distances
from the trading floors that determine the cost of coffee and at different risks when exposed to
free trade.
After the 1983 ICA expired in 1993, new institutions and agreements came into place that
favored actors at the top of an increasingly interconnected global economic hierarchy shaped by
17
International Coffee Organization. “History.” Accessed January 31, 2012.
http://www.ico.org/icohistory_e.asp?section=About_Us.
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000
Composite Price of Coffee Per Pound 1980-2000
111
and operating through colonial power in the form of neoliberal capitalism.
18
In 1994, a plan was
put into place to pursue a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) at the first Summit of the
Americas hosted by the Organization of American States (OAS) in Miami.
19
That same year, the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, freeing capital and goods to
move with less friction between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico.
20
In 1995, the Uruguay Round of
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) gave way to the World Trade Organization
(WTO) whose main function is “to ensure that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as
possible.”
21
Although neoliberal capitalism gained momentum throughout the 1990s,
reregulating the rules of trade and finance to benefit actors with the economic, political, and
material resources to take advantage of rapidly decreasing barriers to the movement of goods it
did not do so without resistance.
Opposition to these advances of neoliberal capitalism in the Américas appeared almost
immediately across the region. For instance, in 1993, the Afro-Colombian and indigenous
communities who organize themselves as the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) along the
Colombian Pacific fought for and got passed Ley 70 which granted cultural and territorial rights
18
A new ICA was agreed to in 1994, but it did not include any regulatory mechanisms: no export quotas,
no price floors, no price ceilings. It actually continues to exist, though it is mostly a professionalization and
marketing arm of the global coffee industry. The ICO still oversees ICA negotiations, it functions mostly as a data
and statistics clearinghouse for global coffee trade.
19
Summit of the Americas, “First Summit of the Americas: Declaration of Principle,” accessed January 25,
2012, http://www.summit-americas.org/i_summit.html and “First Summit of the Americas: Declaration of
Principle,” accessed January 25, 2012, http://www.summit-americas.org/Isummit.html. The theme of the summit
was “Partnership for Development and Prosperity: Democracy, Free Trade and Sustainable Development.” The
FTAA was to be established by 2005. The deadline came and passed without an agreement due largely to lack of
resolution on two items: the U.S. wanted more protection on intellectual property and many of the countries in the
Central and Southern Américas wanted the U.S. to eliminate agricultural subsidies to its farmers. That the FTAA is
dead at the moment does not mean free trade across all the Américas is not actively being pursued—even in light
other sub-regional overlapping processes of integration and articulation. The following Summit of the Americas
occurred between April 14-15, 2012 in Cartagena with the theme “Connecting the Americas: Partners for
Prosperity.”
20
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, “North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),” accessed
January 25, 2012, http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade
agreements/north-american-free-trade-agreement-nafta.
21
World Trade Organizaation, “About the WTO-A Statement by the Director General,” accessed January
25, 2012, http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/wto_dg_stat_e.htm.
112
to Black communities.
22
The PCN was formed in response to the massive influx of African palm
trees being planted in the Pacific as a neo-liberal development strategy that necessitated the
appropriation of previously communal lands and destruction of the local ecology.
23
The Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) released its Declaración de la Selva Lacandona as a
communiqué in direct opposition to NAFTA the day it went into effect.
24
It opened with a
defiant “¡Hoy decimos BASTA!”. The final order of the Declaración—which is a declaration of
war—for the newly formed EZLN was “Suspender el saqueo de nuestras riquezas naturales en
lugares controlados por el EZLN.”
25
At the Third Ministerial Meetings of the WTO in 1999,
thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of Seattle to protest free trade and policies that put
corporations ahead of people through the systemic violence of capitalism.
26
22
Escobar, Territories of Difference, 4.
23
Ibid., 75-84. The PCN and indigenous communities of the Pacific met in 1995 for the conference
Conceptos de Los Pueblos Indígenas y Negros del Pacífico Colombiano to articulate an organizing statement of
collaboration in defense of their cosmovisiones. These are their four principles for interethnic relations with the state
that they put under the rubric Territorio, etnia, cultura e investigacíon en el Pacífico Colombiano: a. the Pacific is
‘an ancestral territory of ethnic groups; b. these groups are culturally diverse and seek to respect differences both
among themselves and in relation to Colombian society; c. from this position of mutual respect and difference they
assume the coordination of the defense of their territories; d. their traditional knowledges are fundamental to their
relation to nature and to their identity and should be recognized a such (2-3).
23
This coalition was formed to work in the context of Ley 70. This became vital because in spite of the supposed
sovereignty of these communities, as the coalition was taking shape, shrimp farming was being introduced and by
the mid-1990s had destroyed many hectares of mangroves which are an important part local belief systems (88). By
the end of the decade, much of the sovereignty the communities were supposed to have had disappeared.
24
Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “Declaracion de la Selva
Lacandona,” accessed January 25, 2012, http://palabra.ezln.org.mx/.
25
Ibid. The translations for the statements from the Declaración are: “Today we say ENOUGH IS
ENOUGH!” and “Stop the extraction of natural resources in areas controlled by the EZLN.”
26
Maria Fannin, Sarah Fort, Jeanine Marley, Joe Miller, and Sarah Wright, “The Battle in Seattle: A
Response From Local Geographers in the Midst of the WTO Ministerial Meetings,” Antipode 32, no. 3 (2000): 215-
221. Perhaps because of filmic representations such as Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart Townsend (Hyde Park
Entertainment, 2007) and much writing about the Seattle WTO protests—including Rebecca Solnit and David
Solnit’s The Battle of the Story of “The Battle in Seattle” (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009)—they have come to
occupy a large space in mainstream constructions of what is called the anti-globalization movement. I do think that
Seattle was an important event, but focusing on privileges a modern/colonial notion of class and a particular
conceptualization of industrialized nation-states it at the expense of the longer histories of struggles against what I
call colonial power. In other words, people were responding to and fighting against what is labeled globalization but
might more accurately be called colonial power working through capitalism and its attendants: colonialism, racism,
and hetero-patriarchy.
113
In the ten years that led up to the debut of fair trade certified coffee certified at the SCAA
annual meeting, not only did the ICA cease to be a regulatory instrument, but neoliberal
capitalist political economic policy and practice achieved institutionalization in proliferating free
trade agreements that reached their apotheosis in the WTO. Opposition to this expression of
colonial power manifested itself in various ways and in various places across the Américas—the
PCN, EZLN, and ‘Battle in Seattle’ are only three examples. The appearance of fair trade coffee
in the U.S. must be understood in this context—one of heightening anger over and awareness of
lowering barriers to the movement of goods that clearly favored the accumulation of resources—
financial, material, and human—through dispossession.
27
Coffee was no exception.
In 1999, the amount of real value generated by coffee sales returning to growers
decreased while the retail price has remained high. Roasters and retailers were able to maintain
profit margins by passing both the cost of the diminishing value of the U.S. dollar and spikes in
coffee prices on to producers and consumers. As Figure 7 shows, retail prices per pound of
coffee rose as the bidding price of the U.S. dollar against the Swiss franc has gone down and the
price returning to growers has remained relatively level.
28
Breaking down the costs of coffee
further reveals that roasters and retailers are capturing more of the retail price and producers less,
not simply in actual money but as percentage of the total cost per pound (Figures 15 and 16).
27
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
28
The data begins in 1973 because that is when the ICA that was the predecessor to—and foundation for—
the 1983 agreement was implemented. The spikes in prices returning to growers are attributed to bad weather
ruining much of the Brazilian crops. Not only does this drive up the cost on the global market because it is the
world’s largest producer, but again, because it produces Robusta beans. This means that when they are off the
market not only is there less coffee available for purchase, what is more readily available is traditionally more
expensive.
114
Figure 14. Coffee prices per pound for retail and returning to growers with the value of U.S. dollar against Swiss
franc. Sources, “Where Did Your Coffee Dollar Go In 1975/76-2000/01?” in Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 167-
169; ICO Indicator Prices available at http://www.ico.org/coffee_prices.asp and
http://www.ico.org/new_historical.asp; and the Federal Reserve Board Foreign Exchange Rate – H.10 available at
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h10/hist/.
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000
U.S. Cents
Coffee Prices: Retail and to Growers, 1973-2000
Retail Price Per Pound 151 US/CHF Rate 316.99 Price to Growers Per Pound 32.3
115
Figure 15. Retail price in U.S. cents per pound of coffee broken down. Source, “Where Did Your Coffee Dollar Go
In 1975/76-2000/01?” in Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 167-169.
Figure 16. Retail price in U.S. cents per pound of coffee broken down. Source, “Where Did Your Coffee Dollar Go
In 1975/76-2000/01?” in Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 167-169.
29
29
The price going back to producers is reaching an all-time low both in monetary value and as a percentage
of the total retail price, but so is the amount of value captured in the producing countries. This is often overlooked
19.2
48.9 43.1
27.2
51.4
33.3
26.5
41.8
60
17.7
11.2
7.5
61
64.5
97.6
49.5
90.3
41.5
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1975 [200.6] 1980 [310.7] 1985 [429.6] 1990 [439.2] 1995 [569.6] 2000 [399.1]
Year and Retail Price Per Pound of Coffee in U.S. Cents
Breaking Down the Cost of Coffee: Value in U.S. Cents of Total Price
Value Added in Consuming Countries Transport Costs and Weight Loss
Value Added in Producing Countries Paid to Growers
9.6
15.7 10
6.2
9
8.3
13.2
13.5
14
4
2
1.9
30.4
20.8
22.7
11.3
15.8
10.4
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1975 [200.6] 1980 [310.7] 1985 [429.6] 1990 [439.2] 1995 [569.6] 2000 [399.1]
Year and Retail Price Per Pound of Coffee in U.S. Cents
Breaking Down the Cost of Coffee: Percentages of Total Price
Value Added in Consuming Countries Transport Costs and Weight Loss
Value Added in Producing Countries Paid to Growers
116
The appearance of fair trade certified coffee in the U.S. came at a moment when
producers were reaching the lowest amount for their work. This drove thousands of small
growers to work not only for themselves, but for larger plantations as wage-laborers in efforts to
keep their small operations afloat. Many had to abandon their farms—and communities—
altogether to look for work in either their immediate urban centers such Ciudad de México,
Guatemala, and Managua or more distant ones like Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Houston, and New
York.
30
In other words, the effects of northern traders, roasters, and retailers financial
accumulation through dispossession in the global coffee trade was already or on the verge of
creating a crisis of surplus land and workers on top of the overproduction of coffee.
By 1999 the European fair trade market was becoming saturated. Producers worked
through the many third party certification programs and national labeling initiatives seeking to
make up losses brought on by the collapse of the ICA and the subsequent crisis of oversupply
that drove down prices. According to the European Fair Trade Association (EFTA), although
sales grew throughout the 1990s and more so after FLO was organized in 1997, the numbers hid
troubles. Most of the increased sales volume came in countries where fair trade was new, “in
several countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and the UK where the
concept has been developed over forty years, several Alternative Trade Organizations are
and is a way to demonstrate how disproportionately trade rules and conditions favor industrialized countries. For
instance, the tariff rate for coffee entering the E.U. between 2001-03 was “0 for unprocessed green beans, 7.5 per
cent for roasted beans, 8.3 per cent for decaffeinated green beans, 9 per cent for decaffeinated roasted beans, and
11.5 per cent for substitutes containing coffee such as instant coffee” (EFTA, Fair Trade Yearbook, 60). This means
that producing countries are penalized for attempting to create and capture value at the point of departure. As Figure
8 shows, roasting and branding are two key ways to add value which consuming countries use to mark up the retail
price for coffee to create profits and absorb the occasional spike in the price of coffee. This trade policy is designed
to keep countries who depend on the export of large amounts of a raw commodity in a state of perpetual pre-
industrialization.
30
Jaffee, Brewing Justice.
117
registering very sluggish growth, sometimes even decline and crises.”
31
New products were also
integral to driving market expansion, with coffee—the previous catalyst—plateauing (Figure 17).
Figure 17. Estimated retail sales for fairtrade labeled market in Europe, 1995-2001, in £’s. Reproduced from FLO
International: Annual Review 2000/01, accessed July 12, 2012. http://www.fairtrade.net/annual_reports.html
For EFTA analysts, this seemed to indicate there is a “certain level of sales or market share
which then seems very difficult to pass.”
32
Importantly, the solutions offered for by the EFTA
and FLO International were the same: advertise more and tap new markets.
The introduction of fair trade certified coffee in the U.S. helped ease the crisis of market
saturation in Europe. The surplus coffee, land, and workers created by processes of dispossession
and accumulation of financial, material, and human resources needed a release valve. As the
31
European Fair Trade Association, Fair Trade Yearbook: Challenges of Fair Trade, 2001-2003 (Gent,
Germany: European Fair Trade Association, 2001), 36.
32
Ibid.
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
45000
50000
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001
Estimated Retail Sales (£000's)
Fairtrade Sales, 1995-2001
Coffee Sugar Cocoa/Chocolate Tea Honey Bananas
118
largest consumer of coffee in the world, the U.S. represented the ideal market for expanding the
sales of fair trade goods.
Fair Trade Coffee in the U.S.
Fair Trade USA coffee opened the door to a new market for all FLO certified products.
The national labeling initiative for the U.S., Fair Trade USA followed the model set by its
European predecessors and used coffee to establish brand recognition. As expected, the U.S.
market was a boon. This was certainly true for coffee (Figures 18, 19).
Figure 18. Sales of FLO certified coffee in metric tons. Source, FLO Annual Review and Reports 2003-2010,
accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.fairtrade.net/annual_reports.html
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
80000
90000
100000
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
FLO Certified Coffee Sales, 2001-2010
Roasted FLO Certified Coffee Sales (MT)
119
Figure 19. Growth rate in sales of FLO certified coffee. Source, FLO Annual Review and Reports 2003-2010,
accessed February 6, 2012, http://www.fairtrade.net/annual_reports.html.
Between 1999-2009, Fair Trade USA registered double-digit growth in every year except for one
(Figure 19). At first glance, it would appear that the expansion of the certified goods market was
and is a positive development: consumers purchase coffee, tea, cocoa, or one of several other
products that are certified fair trade and producers small, medium, and/or co-operative growers
supposedly receive a ‘fair price’ for their goods that enables them to build a social infrastructure
they might not be able to otherwise. Or, increasingly, consumers purchase organic fair trade
certified coffee that is not only economically fair, but is also supposed to ensure minimal
artificial/chemical inputs which makes for more all-natural products for consumers and safer
working environments for workers. Incentive programs, grants from NGOs, grants from private
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
FLO Certified Coffee Sales Growth
Annual Percent Increase in FLO Certified Coffee
120
companies, and requirements included in fair trade contracts are making it very difficult for
producers to receive a fair trade price without having their farms certified organic.
33
Organic certification is closely tethered to fair trade certification as it relates to coffee,
but is distinct. Perhaps most significantly, it has more domestic origins. Where fair trade came to
the U.S. largely through commodities that are not grown domestically—coffee, tea, and cocoa—
organic certification began with U.S. agricultural producers. Much like fair trade, organic began
as a movement before mutating into a label and market based method to capture value and
subsequently splintering into different permutations. Organic certification means that producers
are paid a premium on top of the market rate or fair trade rate for adhering to approved
production practices designed to reduce use of artificial and chemical materials. With ties to the
“back to land” movement in the 1960s, the organic movement in the U.S. started as group of
farmers who opposed the use of chemical inputs and the rise of agri-business. Over the years, as
the demand for the “all-natural” products grew, especially during the 1980s, a few small farmers
expanded their operations and eventually became different versions of the big farmers they
originally opposed. California, Washington, and Oregon were key actors in the organic
movement and were the earliest users of the term organic on their products.
In 1979, California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) helped push through the first
piece of legislation charged with defining organic and regulating its use on products. In short, the
Organic Food Act was the first pass at creating and regulating an organic market in the U.S. The
act was not really enforced, leading CCOF to push for a more stringent law and stricter
enforcement. This resulted in the California Organic Foods Act of 1990 (COFA) that established
33
Jaffe, Brewing Justice. It is understandable that roasters and retailers would want to sell products with
dual certification as they are opportunities to ‘double-down’ on consumers already prone to pay a premium. An
important aspect that merits further inquiry is given a choice between fair trade or organic certified coffee, which do
consumers prioritize? This could provide insight into what is more important to them: more fair exchange or the
health of themselves and workers.
121
a legal definition for organic practices and included enforcement provisions. In 1990, congress
passed the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) that created the National Organic Standards
Board (NOSB) charged with defining and enforcing national organic standards. This was the first
step on the path to a national label for certification. After years of internal drama and external
opposition from the USDA—the federal agency that was to administer the act—a definition was
reached and the National Organic Program (NOP) was established in 2002. According to the
NOP website, “The NOP is a marketing program housed within the USDA Agricultural
Marketing Service. We are responsible for developing national standards for organically-
produced agricultural products. These standards assure consumers that products with the USDA
organic seal meet consistent, uniform standards. Our regulations do not address food safety or
nutrition.”
34
Third-party agencies work through the NOP for accreditation that allows them to
turn around and certify producers. Where the purpose of fair trade certification is to ensure
producers are paid a “fair price” for their work, the purpose of organic certification is to ensure
all (or more) natural products for the consumer. However, the emphases in the standards focus
on minimums and inputs, not process or land. Some of the leaders of the original organic and
back to land movements and inheritors are simultaneously pushing for distinction in the labeling
(100 percent organic for instance) and a different label altogether. Agricultural and horticultural
producers in this camp posit the idea of “Beyond Organic.”
35
34
National Organic Program: About Us, United States Department of Agriculture accessed July 21, 2012,
http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateA&navID=WhoWeAreNOPNat
ionalOrganicProgramHome&rightNav1=WhoWeAreNOPNationalOrganicProgramHome&topNav=&leftNav=Natio
nalOrganicProgram&page=NOPAboutUs&resultType=&acct=nopgeninfo.
35
For additional reading on the rise of organic certification—with particular attention to California—see
Guthman, Agrarian Dreams. For more reading on U.S. back to land, organic, and beyond organic movements
specifically and some of the ideas that inform them see the writing of Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America:
Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1996); Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable,
Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008); Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater’s
Manual (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York, NY:
Penguiun Books, 2009), and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York, NY: Penguin
122
It is undeniable that certified coffee has made a difference in the lives of thousands of
producers in the Américas. The schools, clinics, homes, roads, and coffee technology
certification has contributed to is well documented.
36
The text on the packaging of certified
coffee narrates all of this to consumers to make them aware how their consumption can have
positive effects in the lives of farmers. Because certified coffee requires documentation of origin,
consumers can also imagine they are establishing relationships with particular places—Oaxaca in
México, Antigua in Guatemala, Matagalpa in Nicaragua, Tarrazú in Costa Rica, Tolima in
Colombia—or particular cooperatives or estates. Yet the growth of the certified coffee effected
and is effecting more than the amount of coffee traded at a fair price and social infrastructure for
original producing communities. It also occurred across social, political economic, and material
terrains not readily apparent and had profound effects that built on and extended colonial power
expressed through neoliberal capitalism. Beginning with two key retail sites that helped the
certified market grow, continuing with changes in the political economy of certification, and
ending with developments at sites of production due to the scale of the fair trade market, this
section charts the various travels of certified coffee hidden by labels.
I. The Social Terrain: Retail
Trader Joe’s: The Friendly Face of Colonial Redux and Agricultural Opacity
Books, 2007); Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and
Keep Us Safe (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2011); and Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories
From the Local Food Front (Swoope, VA: Polyface, 2007) and Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for
Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (New York, NY: Center Street, 2011).
36
Francis and Francis, Black Gold; Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee; Jaffee, Brewing Justice; Oxfam, “Mugged;”
Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds; Raynolds, Murray, and Wilkinson, Fair Trade;
123
A popular specialty grocery store, Trader Joe’s (TJ’s) was one of the first retail sites for
certified coffee. Originally a wine and chocolate store in Pasadena, California, TJ’s has become
one of the largest specialty grocery store chains in the U.S. with a loyal—almost cult—
following. TJ’s growth coincided with the growth of certification. It also reinforced ideas that
perpetuate colonial ideas about the Américas and weakened organized labor in the U.S. at the
expense of workers.
The text and imagery on most TJ’s coffee containers relies on tropes that reproduce
colonial relationships with the Américas. The container for TJ’s Nicaraguan coffee depicts
stylized map of the country on the right side (Figure 20) and employs a stylized type-face on the
left (Figure 21).
Figure 20. TJ's Nicaraguan Right Figure 21. TJ's Nicaraguan Left
Compare the container with the following map of Nicaragua circa 1859 (Fig. 22).
124
Figure 22. Map of Nicaragua, 1859
The map on the side of the container recalls a historical moment in which present-day Nicaragua
was literally mapped into existence by the U.S. cartographers of J.H. Colton & Co. at the same
time that William Walker was slowly but surely naming himself president of the twenty-year old
republic.
Maps are representations of space imbued with power from without and within the text.
They are often created at the request of external and centralized authorities and institutions. The
mapping process itself is an act of power in that it organizes places and normalizes territorial
configurations. Through maps, J.B. Harley wrote, “The world is disciplined. The world is
normalized. We are prisoners in its spatial matrix”.
37
In the case of what we now call Central
America, the European mapping that began in the 16
th
century and was taken over and continued
by the U.S. in the 19
th
century disciplined not only the space of Central America, but the people
who lived there by fabricating territories that would eventually become the spatial configurations
37
J.B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” in Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, edited by John
Agnew, David Livingstone, and Alisdair Rogers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 439-40.
125
we call Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize. These
new configurations and their mapped representations radically altered the relationship of the
indigenous people of Central America to the places they lived in and the world by interpellating
them three times over: as colonial, imperial, and citizen-subjects. The text and imagery on TJ’s
Organic Fair Trade Nicaraguan Coffee reveal the persistence of colonial power and colonial
interdependence. Nicaragua is a distant tropical place that remains in a state of arrested
development, frozen in time since the 1800s. Its purpose to produce goods for consumers in the
industrialized world as depicted in a promotional image entitled “Sandy Springs” (Figure 23).
Figure 23. Sandy Springs
The unmistakably colonial trading ship makes clear that workers on the production end of goods
sold in TJ’s stores exist to ensure tropical goods are always arriving from exotic locales. Workers
on the consumption end in retail sites in the U.S have benefited from sale of the loot on those
ships. The ‘crew members’ who work at the stores receives a relatively high per hour wage and
benefits package that make it a viable part-time employment option. But, TJ’s employment and
operation politics must be understood in a broader context.
* * * * *
126
At the end of 2003 and into 2004, workers represented by the United Food and
Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) voted to go on strike after failed contract
negotiations with Albertson’s, Kroger (Ralph’s), and Safeway (Vons). The grocery stores wanted
employees to reduce their contributions to healthcare and retirement costs as well as introduce
two-tiered wage system—one for current employees and one for future employees.
38
The
average UFCW worker earned $12 an hour and was guaranteed only twenty-hours a week
meaning the healthcare and retirement benefits were a main reason kept the jobs. Grocery store
employment was a vital way for working people to gain access to healthcare. Over 141 days
from October 10, 2003 to February 27, 2004, the strike spread from local stores to distribution
centers to locations across the U.S.
39
In the end, the agreement reached between the union and
grocery stores was detrimental for UFCW workers by setting the precedent for a multi-tiered
wage system, and reduced healthcare and retirement benefits.
40
Ironically, the strike itself was
detrimental to workers because it set the stage for growth among non-union grocer stores in the
area, not least of which was TJ’s.
38
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, “UFCW News 10/10: UFCW Supermarket
Workers Reject Employers’ Offer Vote Overwhelmingly to Protect
Healthcare and Retirement,” accessed February 6, 2012,
http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=46.
39
UFCW, “Southern California supermarket workers extend picket line to Northern California
Safeway/Vons,” accessed February 6, 2012, http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=59;
“UFCW News 10/10;” and “Statement of UFCW International President Doug Dority on the Southern California
Strike,” accessed February 26, 2012, http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=82.
40
In September 2011, the UFCW and Southern California grocers Ralph’s (Kroger), Vons (Safeway), and
Albertsons (Supervalu) reached an agreement that prevented another strike. The new agreement increased wages and
helped protect healthcare benefits—although members do contribute $7 more a week for individuals and $15 more a
week for families. See, Nikolai Smith, “UFCW Reaches Grocery Agreement in California,” The Socialist Worker,
accessed February 6, 2012, http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/28/ufcw-reaches-grocery-agreement and UFCW,
“UFCW members Reach Tentative Agreement with Southern California Grocers,” accessed February 6, 2012,
http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=565.
127
During the strike, TJ’s 74 southern California locations registered dramatic sales
increases. Over the twenty weeks, they experienced a 30% increase in revenue.
41
As a non-union
retail chain, TJ’s became an alternative for consumers supporting the strike. In other words, the
chain’s profits grew in the midst of a labor dispute that substantially weakened the UFCW; but
more poignantly, with the wallets of people respecting the picket line. Adding insult to insult,
this all came on the heels of a failed attempt by the union to organize the employees of the
original TJ’s in Pasadena. There were plenty of workers ready to create the first organized store.
However, management’s use of scare tactics successfully coerced them into abandoning their
efforts. In this context, TJ’s ‘above union wage’ pay is telling of how much control of labor
matters in capitalism. It is also important to see who and what lurks in the shadows cast by the
high per hour wages and benefits packages.
42
41
Deutsche Welle. “The American Way of Aldi,” accessed January 27, 2007,
http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,1564,1091106,00.html#. TJ’s is based in Monrovia, and Southern California is its
strongest market. The company is relentlessly secretive about all its operations. Industry estimates have TJ’s taking
in $8 billion annually, David Gardetta, “Enchanted Aisle,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, accessed February 22,
2012, http://www.lamag.com/features/story.aspx?ID=1515075 .
42
Aldi is the other half of the food market empire owned and operated by the Albrecht Trust in Germany. Theo and
Karl Albrecht opened the first Albrecht Discount in Essen, Germany in 1953. In the ensuing years, the brothers
divided their growing food market empire into Aldi (short for Albrecht Discount) Süd run by Karl and Aldi Nord
run by Theo. In 1976, the first Aldi operated by Aldi Süd opened in southeastern Iowa. Aldi Nord has been
operating in the U.S. as TJ’s since it was purchased from founder Joe Coulombe in 1979 (Aldi, “The Aldi Way:
Honest to Goodness Savings,” accessed February 22, 2012,
http://www.aldi.us/us/html/company/5561_ENU_HTML.htm; Gardetta, “Enchanted Aisles;” Thomas Shulz, “Aldi
and the Big Apple: As Americans Save, German Discount Grocer Moves In,” Spiegel Online International, accessed
February 22, 2012, http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,755863,00.html. Aldi is the inverse of TJ’s
in just about every manner imaginable. It begins when you arrive at the storefronts. The red carts available for
customers to use for free at TJ’s are blue and cost $.25 to use at Aldi. Once inside, it is not uncommon to find a TJ’s
employee in every aisle either restocking shelves or asking a customer if any help is needed. It is not uncommon to
find no employees in any of the aisles let alone restocking any shelves. More often than not, there are no more than
five employees working at any given time of day. See Stephen Gray, “Aldi: A Grocer for the Recession,” Time,
accessed February 22, 2012, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1854348,00.html. The shelves are
stocked with opened boxes of products available for purchase. At TJ’s, cashiers carefully pack your purchases and
make generous use of sturdy paper bags, often double bagging to make sure heavy items do not fall through the
bottom. When completing your purchase at Aldi, you either pack your items in a reusable bag you brought with you,
or into plastic bags you purchase for ten cents each (Gray, “Aldi”). By paying its few employees significantly less
than their TJ’s counterparts and passing as much labor and operation expenditures onto consumers, Aldi is able to go
a long way towards selling its private label goods for prices that range from 15-20% cheaper than their counterparts
in Midwestern U.S. Wal-Marts and 30-40% less than local supermarkets. See Marianne Lueck, “Pinch helps
Discount Supermarkets,” BBC News, accessed February 22, 2012, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7739606.stm
128
TJ’s makes the packaging for all of its products—but that is as far as its production
operations extend. It relies on myriad regional producers and suppliers to stock its shelves. The
yogurt or lettuce sold in Washington is not the same as the yogurt and lettuce sold in South
Carolina. No matter where they are located, all producers and suppliers must maintain a sealed
relationship—in the form of a non-disclosure agreement—with TJ’s.
43
The reach of certain
regions in the U.S. extends farther than others due to specialization. Tomatoes are produced in
several parts of the U.S., but more are grown in Florida than anywhere else. Immokalee, a small
town thirty-five miles southeast of Fort Myers is the tomato capital of the U.S.
44
It is also home
to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community-based organization of
predominantly Latino, Mayan, and Haitian immigrants.
Founded in 1993, The CIW fights for safe working conditions and fair wages for the
region’s agricultural workers as well as access to cheaper and better housing. As part of creating
safe working conditions, the CIW has organized many Florida tomato and citrus farms and
exposed contemporary slave practices in the state’s agriculture industry. In 2001, it launched the
Fair Food Campaign with the aim of improving the lot of Florida agricultural workers by having
and Schulz, “Aldi and the Big Apple.” It is able to make it the rest of the way by securing inordinately secretive
agreements with producers and suppliers of products it then passes off as its own—a tactic TJ’s replicates.
In January 2010, more than 200 Aldi store managers in thirty-two states filed a lawsuit saying that they should have
been classified as hourly employees and paid overtime. The suit claims that although hired as management, the 212
plaintiffs’ duties were indistinguishable from hourly employees but routinely worked fifty to sixty hours per week,
sometime reaching seventy hours per week. The suit argues that because the managers rarely oversaw more than two
employees, never did management work, or did not have the ability to hire or fire employees Aldi was in violation
of the Fair Labor Standards Act. See Janet Cho, “Aldi Grocery Store Employees Accuse Chain of Violating Federal
Wage Laws,” accessed February 22, 2012,
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2010/01/aldi_sued_over_misclassifying.html.
43
From time to time internet sites such as Chowhound will try and figure out what is actually being sold at
TJ’s stores based on ingredients, portions, and taste. For instance, they believe that ‘Trader Joe’s Soyaki is Soy Vay
Veri Veri Sauce that has been relabeled; the Vienna Style Lager is Gordon Biersch in a different bottle; the Organic
Tofu Veggie Burgers are Wildwood SprouTofu Burgers in disguise; and This Strawberry Walks into a Bar breakfast
bars are really Full Circle Strawberry and Fruit Cereal Bars slumming as tarts in drag (Gardetta, “Enchanted
Aisles”).”
44
Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
(Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011).
129
major fast-food and supermarket corporations agree to a four-point program: pay one penny
more per pound of tomatoes; abide by an enforceable code of conduct for suppliers; market
incentives for agricultural suppliers that respects workers’ human rights even when those rights
are not guaranteed by law; and 100% transparency for tomato purchases in Florida. Whole Foods
Market became the first grocery store to sign in 2008.
45
In early 2011, the CIW targeted TJ’s for
the same reason it sought out Whole Foods, it presents itself as a worker-friendly employer.
On April 7, TJ’s released a statement on its website addressing the campaign. It said that
the grocer retailer had no problem paying the extra penny per pound for tomatoes coming from
Florida and agreed with the need to establish a code of conduct. But it would not sign any
binding legal agreement with the CIW going so far as to say it “does not sign agreements that
allow third party organizations dictate to us what is right for our customers.”
46
On May 11, TJ’s
released a “Note to our customers about Florida tomatoes and the CIW” as more and more
customers asked about the increasing demonstrations and rallies occurring at different stores—
including a multi-sited demonstration on May Day headquartered from the East Village store in
Manhattan.
47
The note claims TJ’s already does what the CIW is asking for in its relationships
with the wholesalers through whom it makes tomato purchases. CIW leadership immediately
refuted these claims and drew attention to a problem with the opacity in current producer-
retailer-consumer commodity chains that bring goods like tomatoes to market: the buck—
metaphorically and literally—is easily passed onto another actor. That is, TJ’s tried to clear its
name by saying it is doing what it should be doing and that it agrees with the CIW and it trusts
45
Coalition of Immokalee Workers, “Campaign for Fair Food,” accessed March 7, 2012, http://ciw-
online.org/101.html#cff.
46
Sydney Brownstone, “Trader Joe’s Tomatoes a Target of Sundays Labor Protest,” The L Magazine, April
29, 2011, accessed March 7, 2012, http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2011/04/29/trader-joes-
tomatoes-a-target-of-sundays-labor-protest.
47
Ibid.
130
the wholesalers to uphold these ideals—if there is a problem, it is with them. Astutely, the CIW
called TJ’s on this:
Trader Joe’s statement: ‘We purchase (Florida tomatoes) through wholesalers
who aggregate the product and package the tomatoes for shipment to our
warehouses that supply our stores. These wholesalers have indicated to us that
they have agrees to pass along an extra ‘penny per pound’ to the workers who
harvest these tomatoes.’
Fact Check: Trader Joe’s wholesalers have not agreed with the CIW to do
anything. Over a month ago, two of Trader Joe’s wholesalers called us, and we
discussed various ways in which we might work together to achieve the purpose
of the Fair Food Program. They indicated they would discuss each of the
alternatives with Trader Joe’s, and get back to us. They never called again.
Trader Joe’s Statement: ‘Additionally, these wholesalers are willing to provide
reasonable ‘audit’ rights to the CIW or their agents to verify the pass through for
all of their purchases.’
Fact Check: Again, Trader Joe’s wholesalers have not agreed with the CIW to do
anything.
48
TJ’s does not want to practice one of the CIW’s four key claims, 100% transparency for all
purchases of Florida tomatoes. If this is achieved, it can be held accountable for some of the
abhorrent labor practices in Florida’s agriculture, which include indentured servitude and
slavery. In a creative act of making power within the limits of neoliberal capitalism, the CIW
slightly displaced the pressure put on its workers by local farm owners—which is put on them by
wholesalers—onto TJ’s through several actions. For close to a year, the CIW and supporters held
demonstrations and rallies outside stores—favorite slogans were ‘Don’t be a Traitor Joe’ and ‘Be
a Fair Trader Joe.’
In October 2011, a Southern California rally may have accelerated the agreement process.
Close to 400 workers rights supporters including families, students, and clergy gathered outside
the Monrovia store and marched to TJ’s nearby headquarters to deliver two letters. One had the
48
CIW, “Point by Point Response to Trader Joe’s Second “Note to Our Customers on Florida Tomatoes
and the CIW,” March 23, 2011, accessed March 7, 2012, http://ciw-online.org/2011/05/23/tj_point_by_point/.
131
signatures of 109 rabbis and the other the signatures of 80 California pastors, both asked
management to address the labor practices of Florida tomato workers. Marchers carried a bucket
of tomatoes that was passed from the back of the line to the front like an Olympic torch as a
symbol of solidarity. The delegation reached the offices where it was greeted by a lone security
guard who refused to let them in. Because none of the employees were willing to come outside to
receive the letters, a marcher taped them to the office doors. The crowd shouted, “Let them in!
Let them in!” According to Rev. Sarah Halverson, workers inside the building scurried out of
sight when they noticed her peering inside the windows and that as she walked away someone
opened the door and ripped the letters off the doors and crumpled them. Police arrived and
dispersed everyone. Commenting on the series of events said Rev. Halverson said, “I do a lot of
workers’ justice actions and I’ve never experienced a reaction like that. Even Walmart always
sends someone to accept our letters. I didn’t expect the president of the company to come out and
greet us, but they could have at least sent an assistant from the PR department. It’s hard to
believe that a group of rabbis and pastors was threatening” (Estabrook 2011b).
49
Three months
after this action, TJ’s relented. On February 9, 2012 the CIW and TJ’s released a joint statement:
Monrovia, CA/Immokalee, FL – Trader Joe’s and the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers (CIW) announced today that they have signed an agreement that
formalizes the ways in which Trader Joe’s will work with the CIW and Florida
tomato growers to support the CIW’s Fair Food Program.
49
Barry Estabrook, “Trader Joe’s Locks the Doors to Rabbis and Ministers,” The Atlantic, accessed March
7, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/trader-joes-locks-the-doors-to-rabbis-and-
ministers/247527/. Also see, Terry Miller, “Hundreds Protest Trader Joe’s Refusal to Sign Fair Food Agreement
With CIW,” Monrovia Weekly, accessed March 7, 2012 http://monroviaweekly.com/community/hundreds-protest-
trader-joe%E2%80%99s-refusal-to-sign-fair-food-agreement-with-ciw/; and Eduardo Soriano-Castillo, “Tomato
Pickers: Trader Joe’s is Rotten,” Labor Notes, October 28, 2011, accessed March 7, 2012,
http://labornotes.org/2011/10/tomato-pickers-trader-joes-rotten.
132
The Fair Food Program is a groundbreaking approach to social responsibility in
the US produce industry that combines the Fair Food Code of Conduct – a set of
labor standards developed in a unique collaboration among farmworkers, tomato
growers, and the food industry leaders who purchase Florida tomatoes – with a
small price premium to help improve harvesters’ wages. The goal of the Fair Food
Program is to promote the development of a sustainable Florida tomato industry
that advances both the human rights of farmworkers and the long-term interests of
Florida tomato growers.
50
One of the signs at the October rally posed the question, “Traitor Joe’s: A wolf in sheep’s
clothing?” Presumably, the answer to the rhetorical question changed from yes to no once the
grocer signed the agreement in February. This assumes that an extra penny per pound and an
enforceable set of labor standards do more than dress up a system of accumulation and mode of
production that depend on tearing houses down and devouring those inside. It is in fact more
important to ask the question in the aftermath of the agreement between TJ’s and the CIW. Not
rhetorically, but out loud and critically, “Trader Joe’s: A wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
* * * * *
Whole Foods: Paragon of Rational Self-interest
51
In 1978, John Mackey and Rene Lawson Hardy borrowed $45,000 from family and
friends to open a natural food store, SaferWay. Two years later, the college dropout and his
friend partnered with Craig Weller and Mark Skiles to merge SaferWay with Clarksville Natural
Grocery and created the first Whole Foods Market (WFM).
52
It opened on September 20, 1980
50
Trader Joe’s, “Trader Joe's and The Coalition of Immokalee Workers Sign Fair Food Agreement,”
February 9, 2012, accessed March 7, 2012, http://www.traderjoes.com/about/customer-updates-responses.asp?i=60.
51
Mackey is a professed libertarian and devotee of Ayn Rand and her work. He argues that she is actually
trying to convey a philosophy centered on the enlightened individual. See Nick Paumgarten, “Food Fighter: Does
Whole Foods’ C.E.O. Know What’s Best For You?.” The New Yorker, January 4, 2012, accessed March 29, 2012,
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten. Rand lays out her argument for
rational self-interest—where one’s own happiness is the focus of being and any positive affects this has at a social
level are unintended by-products—in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York, NY: Signet, 1964).
52
Whole Foods, “Whole Foods Market History,” accessed March 7, 2012,
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company-info/whole-foods-market-history .
133
with 10,500 square feet of retail space, nineteen employees, and was organized around seven
‘core values’:
• Selling the highest quality natural and organic products possible.
• Satisfying and delighting our customers.
• Supporting team member happiness and excellence.
• Creating wealth through profits and growth.
• Caring about our communities and our environment.
• Creating ongoing win-win partnerships with our suppliers.
• Promoting the health of our stakeholders through healthy eating education.
53
As part of its commitment to these values, most of the products WFM sells are certified fair trade
and/or organic. Beginning in 1984, WFM began expanding beyond the Austin city limits—first
to Houston, then Dallas, then New Orleans. Today, WFM is the largest organic grocery store in
the U.S. with locations in Canada and the United Kingdom.
In 1991, WFM went public and immediately embarked on an aggressive merger and
acquisition spree that enabled it to achieve the status of largest organic grocery store chain. The
timeline of mergers and acquisition and the locations WFM was subsequently able to permeate is
as follows:
• 1991 – Wellspring Grocery: The Triangle community of Raleigh-Durham-
Chapel Hill in North Carolina.
• 1992 – Bread and Circus: Northeastern New England, based out of Boston
with stores throughout Massachusetts.
• 1993 – Mrs. Gooch’s: Southern California, based out of West Los Angeles
with stores on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.
• 1996 – Fresh Fields: Based out of Rockville, MD with twenty-two stores in
four market areas including markets including Washington D.C./Baltimore,
Philadelphia, New Jersey/New York/Connecticut, and Chicago.
• 1997 – Bread of Life: Ft. Lauderdale and Plantation which served as WFM
original bases for its Florida region.
• 1997 – Merchant of Vino: Six stores in the greater Detroit area.
53
Whole Foods, “Our Core Values,” accessed March 7, 2012, http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/mission-
values/core-values.
134
• 1997 – Allegro Coffee: Serves as the in house roaster for WFM and is sold in
stores by the Allegro name.
• 1999 – Nature’s Heartland: Bedford, MA.
• 2000 – Food for Thought: Sonoma County in California with stores in
Sebastopol, Santa Rosa, and Petaluma.
• 2001 – Harry’s Farmer’s Market: Alpharetta, Gwinnett, and Cobb Georgia.
• 2004 – Fresh and Wild: Several stores in London and surrounding environs.
• 2007 – Wild Oats Markets: Based out of Boulder with 109 stores in twenty-
three states—but concentrated in the western U.S.—and in British Columbia,
Canada.
54
In 2007, WFM moved to purchase Wild Oats but met resistance. After a several years long fight
and multiple complaints and appeals by the Federal Trade Commission, the WFM/Wild Oats
merger was finally allowed to go through with some concessions from WFM (Martin 2008;
Skidmore 2009; Paumgarten 2010).
55
Unlike previous takeovers, the Wild Oats merger has not
gone well. In its aftermath, in a deepening recession, WFM stock dropped and was forced to
raise capital.
56
Although WFM’s profit margin increased due in large part to the wallets of a clientele
that buys into the image of a grocery store that takes care of its workers and producers as part of
its ethics—it is frequently on trade lists of best companies to work for—the company’s politics
and practices are decidedly anti-union and anti-labor. Employees who earn the least do so at
54
Whole Foods, “Whole Foods Market History.”
55
See Andrew Martin, “Union of Whole Foods and Wild Oats is Put in Doubt,” New York Times Magazine,
July 30, 2008, accessed March 29, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/business/30food.html; Sarah
Skidmore, “Whole Foods, Wild Oats Integration Challenged by FTC,” Huffington Post, January 12, 2009, accessed
March 29, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/12/whole-foods-wild-oats-int_n_157222.html; and
Paumgarten, “Food Fighter.”
56
In addition to buying and hollowing out its competition, WFM also has sited itself near impermanent
competition—farmer’s markets. For instance, WFM, and TJ’s, opened locations across the street from Union Square
in Manhattan, the site of the Green Market. The politics of race, ethnicity, and class bound up in the siting practices,
consumption experiences, and food distribution of WFM, TJ’s, and farmer markets though not directly relevant are
tangential and in need of further writing.
135
what most would be consider a living wage, on average $13.15 per hour.
57
In addition to this
relatively high wage, workers are also compensated with health insurance and retirement
benefits. However, wages have remained the same for two decades, turnover occurs at a rate of
25% year, and most employees work no more than four years.
58
Over the past several years, WFM has repeatedly conducted anti-union campaigns.
Mackey’s antagonism towards organized labor is longstanding and well documented. In the early
1980s, he famously said about organized labor, “The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill
you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your
lover.”
59
In 2002, workers at the Madison, Wisconsin store successfully unionized. However,
both the local store and the corporation refused to recognize the employees’ affiliation with the
United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local chapter. According to one of the women
who helped organize the campaign, management scheduled and rescheduled bargaining
agreement meetings for over a year. Even as these ‘scheduling conflicts’ kept on happening,
Mackey flew to the store to hand out pamphlets titled “Beyond Unions” to the employees.
Eventually, due to both the protracted nature of the contract ‘talks’ and the usual high employee
turnover rate the union disbanded.
60
The company managed to break up the first—and only—
organized store. One of Mackey’s goals for 2013 was still on track: remain 100% union free.
In March 2009, WFM teamed with Costco and Starbucks to launch the Committee for a
Level Playing Field for Union Elections. The three companies put together this coalition to
defeat what they felt was a threat: the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). One of President
57
This is the lowest average start rate. The average employees pay rate is $16.50 per hour. As part of the
company’s critique of executive overcompensation no person can be paid more than nineteen times the average
employee wage, Paumgarten, “Food Fighter.” Nineteen times $16.50 is $313.50 per hour, or a $652,080 annual
salary.
58
Sharon Smith, “What Smells at Whole Foods?” The Socialist Worker, May 7, 2009, accessed March 29,
2012, http://socialistworker.org/2009/05/07/smells-at-whole-foods.
59
Paumgarten, “Food Fighter.”
60
Smith, “What Smells at Whole Foods?”
136
Obama’s stated priorities, the EFCA would have changed current workplace organizing efforts
by altering the way unions are recognized. Instead of requiring a majority in a secret ballot
before forming a union, employees would have been able to form a union by simply collecting a
majority of signed pledge cards. Opponents of the act argued that pro-union workers could use
coercive measures to acquire the necessary signatures and that the lack of anonymity would
expose employees in opposition to danger.
61
Proponents of the act argued that the secret ballots
are not very secret and easy to manipulate. The point here is not about whether or not unions are
the answer for mitigating or eliminating exploitative relationships between management and
labor; much has been written on the discriminatory, xenophobic, and sexist politics of many a
union.
62
The point is that unions challenge a key component of the ideology that drives
neoliberal capitalism as an economic system and the politics required to maintain it: the free and
self-determining individual is the scale from which to organize the world and s/he must be
protected at all costs. Or to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no such thing as a
society, only individual men and women.”
63
As the second largest anti-union food retailer behind
only Wal-Mart, WFM’s—in spite of its employee friendly image—anti-union activities reify the
primacy of the individual over the collective as the scale from which to organize and think about
the world. The EFCA never made it through congress.
Most recently, and perhaps most infamously, Mackey published an opinion piece in the
Wall Street Journal titled “The Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare.”
61
Josh Harkinson, “Are Starbucks and Whole Foods Union Busters?” Mother Jones, April 6, 2009,
accessed March 29, 2012, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/are-starbucks-and-whole-foods-union-
busting; Smith, “What Smells at Whole Foods?;” and Annie Shattuck and Zoe Brent, “Calling Out Whole Foods:
Whole Foods Quietly Cutting Employee Free Choice,” Food First: Institute for Food & Development Policy,
August 28, 2009, accessed March 29, 2012, http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2547.
62
Chomsky, Linked Labor History; Frank, Buy American and Bananeras; and Colleen Lye, America’s
Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
63
In Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
137
“Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic
ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals.
While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people
have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?
Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best
provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful
reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not
reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't
any. This "right" has never existed in America.”
64
Many liberal shoppers who thought WFM stood for a particular set of ideas and ideals were
outraged and organized boycotts. Conservative shoppers responded by organizing buy-cotts.
Regarding the fallout Mackey said, “People had an idea in their minds about the way Whole
Foods was. So when I articulated a capitalistic interpretation of what needed to be done in
healthcare that was disappointing to some people.”
65
He added, “Whole Foods itself is a market
based solution. We are a corporation. We are in capitalism. We have to compete with Safeway
and Wal-Mart and Kroger and Wegman’s and Trader Joe’s. What’s odd about this is that we
have always been. We’re not a co-op.”
66
Mackey makes clear that WFM takes care of itself first
and always will. This forces a reframing of not just WFM, but certification. That is, if the largest
seller of certified goods, is in the business of making money and extending its reach, what is the
function of certification?
2. The Political Economic Terrain: Certification
In the years since the appearance of the Fair Trade USA and USDA labels in 1999, the
political economy of certification has changed in important ways. As sales in certified
64
John Mackey, “The Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare,” The Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2009,
accessed March 29, 2012,
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070?mg=reno64-
wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.ht
ml.
65
Paumgarten, “Food Fighter.”
66
Ibid.
138
commodities grew, shifts occurred that directly corresponded with the amount of space big
corporations occupied in the fair trade and organic apparatuses. By the middle of the decade
between 2000-2010, large retailers increasingly dominated the fair trade and organic markets.
The years 2005-2007 marked a turning point for certified products. Fair trade and organic
certified sales peaked in terms of growth during this time. They increased 47% in 2007 and 21%
in 2006 respectively.
67
With regard to coffee, fair trade sales went up 53% globally in 2006 and
organic coffee imports increased 33% in 2007 (see Figure 12).
68
In the U.S., fair trade and
organic coffees reached their highest rates of growth in 2004, 79%, and 2006, 22%.
69
These high
rates occurred during the same period for both kinds of certified coffee due to two events that led
to large retailers entrance into and increasing influence over certification.
In 2005, yet another in a long line of frosts struck Brazil. As in previous frosts, it sent the
price of coffee soaring on the “C” market.
70
Slowly but surely, the price crept closer to the fair
trade minimum price of $1.26. Partway through 2007, the price for conventional Columbian
milds (Arabicas) caught up. This triggered a mechanism in fair trade agreements that ensured
certified coffee would still secure more income for growers: whenever the New York price
matches or exceeds the fair trade floor, the formula for setting the floor price for certified coffee
becomes New York + twenty cents.
71
Since 2007, the market price for conventional Columbian
milds has remained above the fair trade floor—even after it was raised from $1.21 to $1.25 in
67
Organic Trade Association, “U.S. Organic Industry Overview, 2011,” accessed March 29, 2012,
http://www.ota.com/pics/documents/2011OrganicIndustrySurvey.pdf.
68
International Trade Center, “Trends in the Trade of Certified Coffees” (Geneva: International Trade
Center, 2011).
69
The growth rate for the U.S. was 43% in 2006 (FLO, Annual Report 2007). During the same year, FLO
certified sales in North America was 103% (ITC, “Trends in the Trade of Certified Coffees”).
70
The “C” market is located in New York and tracks the price of Arabica. When Brazilian Robusta is not
available it drives the price of the already expensive Arabica even higher.
71
ICO, “ICO Indicator Prices, Annual and Monthly Averages: 1998-2013,” accessed March 29, 2012,
http://www.ico.org/prices/p2.htm; and Fairtrade Foundation, “The Arabica Coffee Market, 1989-2011: Comparison
of Fairtrade and New York Prices,” (London: Fairtrade Foundation, 2011).
139
2008 and again to $1.40 per pound in 2011.
72
Until then, the difference between the two prices
was more significant (Figure 24).
Figure 24. Comparing the prices per pound of coffee from 1999-2011. The fair trade price went from $1.21 to $1.26
in 2008, and to $1.40 in 2011. The premiums rose from $.05, to $.10, to $.20. The New York Price is for Columbian
milds and is what the fair trade price is tied to. The ICO Composite Price is for Columbian milds, other milds, and
robustas. Sources, “ICO indicator prices. Annual and monthly averages: 1998-2012,” accessed March 29, 2012,
http://www.ico.org/prices/p2.htm; and “The arabica coffee market 1989-2011: Comparison of New York and
fairtrade prices,” accessed March 29, 2012, http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/resources/reports_and_briefing_papers.aspx.
As the figure shows, the New York price has not fallen below the fair trade price since 2007. For
large corporations, the shrinking price difference between certified and conventional coffee has
made the decision to purchase fair trade and/or organic coffee palatable as the $.40—$.20 over
New York + $.20 premium—can easily be recouped or surpassed through retailing by passing on
the cost to consumers and/or producers. A market-based reform measure, fair trade became a
facile way for corporations to appease parts of a consuming public who wanted a gentler
72
Ibid. When many people refer to the minimum fair trade price they are actually referring to the minimum
plus the fair trade premium. The premium was originally $.05 and increased to $.10 and $.20 when the minimum
price went up.
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
U.S. Cents
Comparison of Price Per Pound of Coffee,
1999-2011
Fair Trade + Premium New York Price ICO Composite Price
140
capitalism as the effects of current practices of neoliberal capitalism were brought to light in
filmic—Black Gold (2006)—and textual—Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007)—representations while
maintaining or increasing profits.
73
A development in U.S. organic certification further facilitated
corporate participation.
In 2002, the National Organic Program (NOP) successfully established a national
definition for use of the term organic on product packaging. To the disappointment of a large
faction of the organic producers who emphasized process, the national definition focused almost
exclusively on input regulation. With a standard in place, the NOP was then able to create a set
of approved regulations that fit the definition and could function as a checklist that could be
verified. That year, the NOP accredited its first batch of certifying agents armed with clipboards,
pens, and the capacity to designate a production site as organic. For some producers, this meant
that an agent empowered by the federal state would certify their operation as organic; or, mediate
the relationship between producers and consumers with a label that signified. With the organic
sector growing annually, retailers and large-scale producers sought a larger share. In practice,
this meant proliferating agencies backed by state power that could certify more farms and
movement towards more lax organic requirements. There were quickly more than 100 certifiers
armed with organic standards that focused on inputs, not processes.
74
According to the NOP,
“Organic Production” is defined as “A production system that is managed in accordance with the
[Organic Foods Production] Act and regulations in this part to respond to site-specific conditions
by integrating cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources,
promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity.”
75
The use of the term “production” is a
73
Francis and Francis, Black Gold and Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma.
74
United States Department of Agriculture, “National Organic Program” and Guthman, Agrarian Dreams.
75
“Code of Federal Regulations,” accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-
idx?c=ecfr&sid=3f34f4c22f9aa8e6d9864cc2683cea02&tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title07/7cfr205_main_02.tpl .
141
brilliant move for its ability to mislead and reveal simultaneously. It is misleading because it
connotes a process-oriented understanding of agriculture: food is made through material
relationships. It is revealing because the axes on which organic production turn are toxic
pesticides/fertilizers, antibiotics, synthetic hormones, genetic engineering, sewage sludge,
irradiation, and preservatives (OTA 2012).
76
A shift from conventional or traditional production
to organic simply meant replacing inputs, not altering agricultural processes. An organic farm
could appear where a conventional farm once stood by ordering different fertilizer, ceasing the
use of hormones and genetic engineering, and being more careful about waste disposal. Land
use, sustainable farming, regionally appropriate cultivation, and biodiversity were lobbied out of
the definition. In other words, industrial agriculture could become industrial organic agriculture
through a three-year conversion program. In 2006, the first eligible reporting year after the
inaugural three-year program, organic food sales grew by 21% over the previous year (OTA
2009). This marked the first time since the initial NOP definition in 2002 that the market grew by
at least 20%.
77
Annual reports published by Fair Trade USA track the growing presence and influence of
large retailers in the certified market. In 2002, Starbucks became the largest buyer of fair trade
coffee. On the eve of nationwide protests at U.S. Starbucks locations, the company agreed to
begin purchasing certified coffee. However, the act was more symbolic than material for two key
reasons. First, although Starbucks is ubiquitous it does not sell much certified coffee. Unless
consumers seek it out they will not find it. Second, it may seem like there are coffee shops and
espresso houses on every corner, but the fact is that most coffee is consumed in people’s homes.
According to John Talbot, coffee is overwhelmingly purchased by the pound and in grocery
76
Organic Trade Association, “Definition of Organic: Quick Overview,” last modified April 1, 2013,
http://www.ota.com/definition/quickoverview.html.
77
It grew by 14% and 16% in 2004 and 2005 (OTA 2009).
142
stores. For certified coffee to make a difference in a neoliberal capitalist market economy bulk
sales would need to increase dramatically.
78
And they did. The rise in certified coffee sales in
2005 and 2006 was produced in part by Whole Foods, Costco Wholesale, Sam’s Club, Target,
Giant, and Wal-Mart becoming not just buyers of Fair Trade USA certified coffee, but sponsors
and supporters with their contributions climbing annually.
79
The entry of large retailers into these
certified markets had—and continues to have—profound effects on certification processes.
With their increased presence in the certified market, large retailers were able to become
significant actors in shaping the process, purpose and reach of certification. The process of
certification is costly. Meeting fair trade standards or converting from conventional to organic
production requires changes in material and social infrastructure: new fertilizers; new pesticides
and fungicides; new irrigation methods; new composting, recycling, and waste management
systems; and—where necessary—remodeled living and eating quarters, more common areas, and
safer equipment for permanent workers. There are also initial and annual inspections to pay for.
Airfare, meals, and paperwork—all of these are the growers’ responsibility.
80
Combined with the
reduced yield typical for farms in transition, rising startup costs are steadily favoring larger
production sites able to absorb them.
81
Initially, when both fair trade and organic certification
began as partnerships between not for profit non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and small
farmers they had a slight advantage. Once these small farmers did the work of establishing a fair
trade market and the NOP standards were established in 2002, for-profit NGOs, for-profit
78
Talbot, Grounds for Agreement.
79
This information comes from Fair Trade USA’s Annual Reports from 2002-2009. Dunkin’ Donuts and
McDonald’s—in partnership with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters—have also sold and endorsed coffee
intermittently. Beginning in 2004, Starbucks began selling their certified coffee in bulk through Costco. In the 2008
report, Starbucks and Whole Foods each received full-page features outlining their commitment to and involvement
in Fair Trade USA’s goals. In 2006, USAID began donating as well. The significance of this agency’s involvement
will become more apparent in Chapter 2.
80
Jaffee, Brewing Justice and Guthman, Agrarian Dreams.
81
Chapter 3, “Production at Twilight: Life in a Farm,” more fully addresses these issues.
143
certifying agencies, and large retailers began undoing and capturing this advantage by bringing
their capital and material resources to certification, changing not only the process but the
purpose.
Originally imagined as a way to re-embed social ties and de-commodify relationships
between producers and consumers, changes in the certification process have turned it into a
mechanism for reproducing capitalist market relationships with a patina of politics. The more
direct relationships that were beginning to take shape through certification are once again
becoming elongated. That is, the bureaucratic distance between producers and consumers has
grown as certification agencies and labels have multiplied since Fair Trade USA began in 1999.
That year Fair Trade USA, organic, and Rainforest Alliance labels on certified food commodities
became the most prominent—USDA Organic in 2002.
82
The ensuing years have seen the
exponential proliferation of labels in the U.S. A few non-profit labels include Bird-Friendly
Coffee overseen by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (late 1999), Best Aquaculture
Practices by the Global Aquaculture Alliance (2002), Certified Naturally Grown (2002), Non-
GMO Verified by the Non-GMO Project (2007), and American Grassfed by the American
Grassfed Association (2010). For-profit labels include Fair for Life (2006) administered by the
IMO Group and Fair Labor Practices and Community Benefits (2007) by Scientific Certification
Systems. The permutations of distance between producers and consumers when these labels are
combined with the more than one hundred agencies, non-profit and for-profit, capable of
granting use of the USDA Organic label are myriad. Not only did labels begin reproducing the
very relationships they originally sought to undermine, they opened the door for large chain
retailers to complete this process.
82
Rainforest Alliance was founded in 1986 and is geared towards environmental sustainability. Coffee was
the first food commodity it certified in 1999. It has become a certification process that requires owners to address
social infrastructure, but at its beginnings focused more on the environment.
144
As large chain retailers increased their role in the certification process they also
mobilized their infrastructural capacities to take advantage of a buying public being trained to
look for labels and depend on them for information on labor and agricultural practices. At the
turn of the 21
st
century, Fair Trade USA as well as California Certified Organic Farmers (1973),
Oregon Tilth (1982), Vermont Organic Certified (1985), and Food Alliance (1997) were the
main labels. Certified products were not available in many retail outlets because not many
growers met or wanted to meet the requirements. This resulted in less bureaucratic and physical
distance between producers and consumers as sales were more regionalized and tended to occur
in alternative retail sites such as local stores, farmers markets, and cooperatives. Fair Trade
USA’s aggressive pursuit of “mainstreaming with integrity” to prove to large retailers that “U.S.
businesses do not have to sacrifice profitability in order to be responsible” coupled with the
USDA Organic label created conditions for retailers with large-scale capacities to enter,
dominate, and repurpose certified goods.
83
And they did. Using the fact of ever appearing labels
and three-year organic conversion process, large scale and national retailers repurposed their
already existing infrastructure of contracts, supply chains, delivery systems, and shelf-space for
their own certified private brand products (Table 3).
Retailer Certified Private Brand
Food Lion Natural Organic
Kroger (Ralph’s/Food 4 Less) Simple Truth
Safeway/Vons/Pavillions O Organics
Stop n’ Shop/Giant Nature’s Promise
83
Fair Trade USA, Annual Report 2005, 12, 31
145
SuperValu (Albertson’s/Shoppers) Wild Harvest
Target Archer Farms
Wal-Mart Marketside Organic
Wegman’s Wegman’s Organics
Whole Foods 365 Everyday Value
Table 3. Retailers and their corresponding certified private brand products.
Self-labeling is recent development that is further moving certification into the realm of
neoliberal capitalist fictitious commodity. Large retailers and companies are creating labels and
paying for outside agencies to certify the practices behind the labels. Essentially, they are using
the ideas and meanings of labeling and certification established by Fair Trade USA and USDA
Organic to funnel consumers to their products. In rolling out their own labels, large retailers and
companies are completing the slow but steady detachment of the social relationships and more
just interdependence certification sought to reestablish in market exchanges. From Starbucks’
Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices to Whole Foods’ Whole Trade these new labels
are doing the financial work for large retailers and companies that derivatives do for banks. That
is, they are deriving profits from a process—certification—that was tied to a social and material
practice—creating more intimate relationships between producers and consumers in an attempt
to make more just interdependence across a commodity chain—but is now packaged, bought,
and sold by the companies certification was meant to regulate from the outside.
84
The
introduction and expansion in new labels and certification agencies in conjunction with coffee
84
Though not perfectly analogous, the similarities between the convoluted derivatives peddled by banks
and the convoluted self-labeling and certification practices now being sold by large companies is remarkable. Most
notably, they create surplus value by conjuring it into existence with a mere reference to a physical entity or material
process that is familiar, such as land or certification. In the same way that there is supposed to be an actual asset
underlying a financial contract there is supposed to be a process and purpose backing a label. It is getting more and
more difficult to find the materiality behind labels. However, it is still there—workers, land, agricultural practices,
and social infrastructure. Chapter 3 focuses on the life on a farm in this context.
146
prices on the New York market have emboldened large retailers—Starbucks, Costco, and Whole
Foods—that have gained influence in the structure of certification and a record of fighting
organization and/or regulation to claim the time for a guaranteed price floor is past.
85
They are
pushing to eliminate the market-generated regulation that filled the void left by the demise of
state market regulation in 1989. This means that in less than a quarter century, coffee is going
from one crisis to another (Table 4).
Table 4: Coffee Crisis Cycle, 1989-2011
Phase Period Sector Developments
Crisis 1989-2002 Collapse of the ICA; Infrastructure
for certification taking shape based
on previous colonial/trade
relationships.
Investment 1997-2002 FLO International, Fair Trade USA,
and USDA Organic labels debut.
Overinvestment 2002-2010 Proliferation of labels and
certification agencies, intensifying
presence of large retailers and
companies in certification structure,
and increasing reach of neoliberal
capitalist market to production sites.
Crisis ? New York C Market price for coffee
has not fallen below fair trade price
since 2008, certified goods reaching
saturation slow growth, large
retailers pushing to end price floor
regulation.
The overinvestment made visible on the retail side of coffee—and other commodities—by
multiplying labels, certification agencies, and brands is not possible without changes in and on
the terrain of production and supply. In short, it cannot occur without the use and extension of
colonial reach long established.
85
Taylor Clark, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture (New York, NY:
Little, Brown and Company, 2007) and Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee.
147
3. The Material Terrain: Reproducing and Extending the Reach of Colonial Power
It is difficult to overstate the importance of 2005 for certified goods. To review, this
marked the first year producers who began the conventional to organic conversion process in in
light if the 2002 USDA Organic standards could sell their goods as organic. By focusing on
inputs over process and subcontracting certification to various agencies, these standards
facilitated the entrance of large retailers into the organic market. 2005 was also the year Fair
Trade USA officially signaled the same shift from a focus on working with small and medium
farmers to laying the groundwork for large retailers to enter and eventually dominate the fair
trade market. It did so by reanimating a fruit ripe for a colonial “afterlife,” the banana.
86
Fair Trade USA’s annual reports include updates on how the various sectors of certified
goods are fairing in the neoliberal capitalist marketplace. Coffee, tea, cocoa, and coffee were the
main products until bananas and other tropical fruit—such as mangoes—were introduced in
2004. U.S. sales were very high during the first year, roughly 8.37 million pounds, but the next
year they dropped to 7.2 million pounds.
87
The reason was not lack of demand, but lack of
supply due to the inability of small farmers to get their goods to market quickly enough and
existing contracts between U.S. supermarkets and transnational fruit companies. According to
the report,
Demand for Fair Trade Certifies bananas continues to be very strong on the West
Coast, but it remains very difficult for small farmers—who lack the integrated
shipping capacities of large banana companies, and depend on independent
shippers—to get their produce to West Coast ports. In 2005, transit time on
independent shipping lines to the West Coast by nearly 23 days, and delays in the
port of Los Angeles took another 7 days off the shelf life of the fruit. Container
after container of Fair Trade bananas thus arrived in the U.S. too ripe for retailers
to accept.
88
86
Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells.
87
Fair Trade USA, Annual Report 2005, 24.
88
Ibid.
148
At this juncture, Fair Trade USA’s reveals its true purpose as a certifying agency. The report
could have explained without going too deep into the histories of América Central that the
transportation infrastructure is not readily available for small farmers because large plantation
owners used state resources to build infrastructure to suit their needs. It could have explained that
the history of United Fruit, Standard Fruit, and bananas in the Central and Southern Américas, is
the reason infrastructure leads to the Caribbean and Atlantic. Fair Trade USA could have
explained that U.S. influence in the Américas created the Panama Canal and limited the amount
and size of ports along the Pacific—making the canal and an extra seven days of transit time
routine for travel to the U.S. west coast. It could have done none of this and still formally
supported small farmers and independent shippers over “growing the fair trade market” in the
U.S. Instead, citing the inability of small growers to “meet demand” and the long-term contracts
many supermarkets have with Chiquita (United Fruit), Dole (Standard Fruit), and Del Monte it
contends,
[I]f we seek to open the U.S. market to Fair Trade fruit on any significant scale, in
order to serve the neediest members of the global banana supply chain, we simply
have to engage with the major banana companies. We believe this engagement
will make it possible to capture the expressed demand of several supermarket
chains that are currently locked into long-term supply contracts. Moreover, this
strategy will allow us to better serve small farmers by allowing smallholder
cooperatives access to shipping and distribution infrastructure of the major banana
companies. Finally, by working with the major companies—and the company-
owned and independent plantation that supply them with fruit—we seek to extend
Fair Trade’s unparalleled standards of economic benefit and empowerment to
tend of thousands of plantation farm workers throughout Latin America who are
currently among the most disadvantaged members of the industry.
89
Using “trickle down” imagery, Fair Trade USA set the foundation—with large retailers and
companies in tow—for a move to a certification process that unabashedly favored the neoliberal
capitalist market and its needs over small farmers and their needs. Rather than work with small
89
Ibid., 26.
149
farmers on alternative ways of bypassing large retailers and companies, Fair Trade USA started
steering them towards the colonial infrastructure of United Fruit and Standard Fruit. The
movement to certify plantations began closing any possibility of an aperture to another kind of
interdependence, a different distribution of power, throughout the Américas certification may
have initially created.
Between 2006 and 2011, Fair Trade USA continued to push its broader plantation
certification agenda. It persistently presented FLO with reasons for certifying coffee plantations,
for applying standards that were already in place for tea, flowers, and—as of 2008—bananas.
The two main reasons were the same as they were for bananas: increase the product supply and
make use of the infrastructure large retailers and companies have in place. FLO repeatedly
rejected the suggestion claiming that small coffee farmers were more than capable to get their
product no worse for the wear. Unlike tea, flowers, and bananas, until it is roasted coffee can
keep fresh in its green state for quite some time. FLO also argued that the working conditions are
necessarily different; that is, managed and hired wage earners have historically been the norm for
tea, flowers, and bananas, not so for coffee. FLO was willing to certify plantations for products
that traditionally required a large labor force.
90
Coffee, it argues, does not. The ongoing tension
between Fair Trade USA and FLO finally reached an impasse in fall 2011.
News of the break-up arrived via press release. On 15 September, Fair Trade USA and
FLO released a joint statement:
Fairtrade International (FLO) and Fair Trade USA share a belief in the importance
of empowering producers and workers around the world to improve their lives
through better terms of trade. However, as we look to the future, we realize that
we have different perspectives on how to best achieve this common mission.
90
FLO’s argument that because globally traded tea, flowers, and bananas have traditionally been grown on
large estates it is okay to certify them is also problematic in that it reifies the plantation as a legitimate social,
economic, and material form. FLO could press to disaggregate plantations into smaller landholdings regardless of
product but does not.
150
As a consequence, Fair Trade USA has decided to resign its membership from
Fairtrade International (FLO) effective December 31, 2011.
91
Four days later, Fair Trade USA announced an initiative called “Fair Trade for All” with the
purpose of bringing fair trade to millions of more farmers. In practice, the split and “Fair Trade
for All” had two immediate ramifications. First, it meant that starting 1 January 2012 FLO would
no longer endorse the Fair Trade USA label. Second, Fair Trade USA would need to find another
certification system willing to work with all plantations since FLO-CERT does not.
92
A few days
later, another press release was issued:
Fair Trade USA, the leading nonprofit certifier of Fair Trade products in the
United States, and Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), a globally respected,
independent third-party certification company, announced details of their new
strategic partnership today.
As part of a new innovation strategy, Fair Trade USA plans to pilot and introduce
updated standards that will extend the benefits of Fair Trade to millions more
farmers and workers; provide U.S. businesses with more sustainable supply
options; and empower consumers to make every purchase through selection and
availability of Fair Trade Certified™ products. The organization’s goal is to
double the impact of Fair Trade by 2015. In support of this ambitious goal, has
been engaged to conduct audits and certify new producer groups that now will be
able to join the Fair Trade movement.
93
This meant that Fair Trade USA would now be working with the same for-profit certification
agency that services Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. label.
Fair Trade USA’s decision to split with FLO and intentionally seek out larger producers
has drawn both ire and praise. The Fair World Project, World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO),
91
Fair Trade USA, “Fair Trade USA Resigns Fairtrade International (FLO) Membership,” September 15,
2011, accessed August 28, 2012, http://www.fairtradeusa.org/press-room/press_release/fair-trade-usa-resigns-
fairtrade-international-flo-membership.
92
FLO-CERT is the certification agency wholly owned by FLO that audits retailers and companies using
the fairtrade label.
93
Fair Trade USA, “Fair Trade USA and SCS Announce Joint Partnership to Offer High-Quality, Cost
Effective Fair Trade Certification,” September 27, 2011, accessed August 28, 2012,
http://www.fairtradeusa.org/press-room/press_release/fair-trade-usa-and-scs-announce-joint-partnership-offer-high-
quality-cost-e.
151
and United Students for Fair Trade are a few of the larger international and national groups who
believe that a movement they helped build has been stolen. In the words of Rink Dickinson,
president of leading fair trade importer Equal Exchange, “It’s a betrayal. They’ve lost their
integrity.”
94
Erik Nicholson, national vice president of the United Farm Workers union applauds
the move. According to Nicholson not allowing plantations to gain certification is detrimental to
plantation workers, “My concern with the traditionalists is that their position is one of exclusion.
They offer no hope or alternative to farm workers.”
95
The apparent complexity of the situation
disappears if you scale out and understand the problem not as should farmers be part of a co-op,
or should workers on plantations be able to receive the benefits of certified coffee, but as trying
to solve the problem of capitalism with capitalism. Fair Trade USA’s goal in its Fair Trade for
All initiative straightforwardly states what it want to do, without irony or reflexivity: bring the
market to millions of more farmers through fair trade. Stated differently, it is bringing the
neoliberal capitalist market to farmers who were outside it. And it is here that we have to stop to
acknowledge the imaginative capacity of neoliberal capitalism. It is also where those of us trying
to make the world we want because it is the one we need must think more creatively. Or, in the
words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, living in the hell that is capitalism saving us from capitalism
must ignite our political imaginations.
96
* * * * *
Through certification and labels, roasters and retailers effectively commodify politics.
That is, labels make political action something you pick up at the grocery store along with bread
94
William Neuman, “A Question of Fairness,” New York Times, November 23, 2011, accessed August 28,
2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/business/as-fair-trade-movement-grows-a-dispute-over-its-
direction.html?_r=2.
95
Marc Gunther, “A Schism Over Fair Trade,” May 13, 2012, accessed August 24, 2012,
http://www.marcgunther.com/a-schism-over-fair-trade/.
96
Gilmore, Big Things.
152
and butter: that “putting a monetary value on ethical proclivities is even thinkable, as if ‘doing
good’ is one more thing to be bought and sold” (Guthman 2007, 473). We must recognize that
certification not only managed crises of overproduction, surplus labor and land, and market
saturation; not only did it extend the reach of colonial power as expressed through neoliberal
capitalism; it also manufactures consent to the fallacy that capitalism can solve the problems of
capitalism, or that colonial power will undo itself, with schools and clinics on plantations. It
manufactures consent to the Marxist freedom of wage labor in the face of absurd juxtaposition of
schools and clinics on plantations by re-centering the neoliberal capitalist marketplace as the
legitimate location for measuring change: fair trade sales, money going to growers, access to
market. Fair trade, not TJ’s, fills the role of wolf in sheep’s clothing. In the struggle to undo
colonial power we must realize that no revolution will be commercialized.
153
Chapter 3
Production at Twilight: The Life of a Coffee Farm in Nicaragua
Figure 25. Entrance to La Hammonia and Selva Negra. Photo by author.
The entrance to the farm is non-descript. Except that it is not. Off to the right on the
Careterra Panamericana just north of Matagalpa, it is marked by a tank. The story of how the
tank got there is part of a thread that is woven into many other stories. At its most skeletal, the
plot diagram looks like this:
La Guerra de Matagalpa
Carlos Fonseca
FSLN is
Reunited
1972 Earthquake
Guerrilla, strikes on Managua,
Estelí, Masaya, and León
FSLN takes congress hostage and release
them in exchange for political prisoners
and ransom money.
Editor of opposition anti-Somoza
La Prensa assassinated.
154
As simplistic as the diagram is, that, in brief is how the tank got to the entrance of La Hammonia.
Sitting outside the entrance to a coffee farm in Matagalpa the tank is metonymic, a symbol that
bends time and space and points to the political, social, and economic history between Nicaragua
and the U.S.. La Guerra de Matagalpa is part of a broader story between these two countries in
which coffee and the Matagalpa-Jinotega region play significant roles.
This chapter focuses on the life of a medium-sized coffee farm. Reaching altitudes of
over 3000 feet, the cooler and shaded hillsides of Matagalpa provide ideal conditions for
growing high-grade Arabica coffee.
1
Figure 26. Map of Nicaragua
1
During the same time period, small to medium farms and large plantations were also established in
Carazo, on the Southern Pacific part of the country. The difference in elevation between Matagalpa and Carazo are
what set the two regions apart. For more information on the farmers of Carazo, see Julie Charlip’s Cultivating
Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880-1930.
155
La Hammonia traces its beginnings to the late 1880s, when the region established itself as the
producer of high-quality coffee in Nicaragua. The farm has been under its current owners since
1975 in the middle of the Green Revolution. Over the past thirty-five years, La Hammonia has
slowly transitioned from conventional to organic production. Since 1996, the farm has been Rain
Forest Alliance certified, and certified organic since 2004. Interviews with the owner,
administration, and workers along with analysis of accounting books and participant-observation
are used to construct the history of a coffee farm in Nicaragua’s coffee region in the afterlife of
the Green Revolution to analyze the effects of GR technology, international coffee trade, and
certification on a place and the people who make it. Matagalpa is not only home to the country’s
high quality coffee, the region has also been central to Nicaraguan resistance to U.S. imperialism
and colonial power. In short, focusing on a farm in Matagalpa is a way to see the social and
material effects of colonial power in the Américas through the prism of coffee. This chapter
begins with a schematic history of the Nicaragua-U.S. relations with a focus on Matagalpa,
continues with a study of La Hammonia moving from conventional to organic production under
its current owner, and ends in 2010 with the owner and administration planning in an uncertain
future. In understanding the roles of Matagalpa and coffee in the history between Nicaragua and
the U.S. how the tank got to the entrance to the farm becomes clearer.
A Long Walk for a Cafécito: Matagalpa and Coffee in Nicaragua-U.S. Relations
Forty minutes north of La Hammonia on the carretera Panamericana lies the entrance to
the town of San Rafael del Norte. In 1927, a young man fresh off his time working in the
company towns of Tampico and Cerro Azul for South Pennsylvania Oil Company and Huasteca
Oil began coming to the town to issue communiqués to the rest of the Américas about the
156
growing liberation struggle in Nicaragua.
2
Augusto César Sandino used the town as his
communications hub for domestic and international messages. It was in San Rafael del Norte that
Sandino granted his only interview to a U.S. reporter, Carleton Beals who wrote for The Nation.
3
The young woman who telegraphed Sandino’s communications was named Blanca Araúz.
4
The
two quickly married on 18 May. It was from here that Sandino announced the plans the Ejército
Defensor de la Soberanía Nacional de Nicaragua (Guardian Army of Nicaraguan National
Sovereignty) had to liberate the country from U.S. influence that recently militarized the
oppressive internal regime.
5
U.S. Occupation: Unintended Side Effect of Nationalizing Nicaragua
In May of 1927, the U.S. founded the Guardia Nacional in Nicaragua in the aftermath of
the Constitutionalist War between liberal insurgents and the conservative ruling class. The
Guardia was assembled with the sole purpose of overseeing the upcoming 1928 elections and
ensure that democracy, regardless of how narrowly it is created and defined, prevailed. The
Constitutionalist War was the latest and bloodiest of feuds between the Granada conservative
oligarchs and León liberals. Dating back to the struggle for power after Nicaragua withdrew
from the República Federal de Centroamérica (Federal Republic of Central America) in 1838,
the conservative merchants of Granada and the agricultural liberals of León constantly fought
each other using rural peasant workers for their armies.
6
For much of the 1840s, the two cities
2
South Pennsylvania Oil is now known as Pennzoil, short for “Penn’s Oil.” It was one of the first oil
companies that formed John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. It began after oil was discovered in Bradford,
Pennsylvania. Pennzoil History, Pennzoil, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.pennzoil.com/history/.
3
Karl Bermann, Sandino Without Frontiers: Selected Writings of Augusto César Sandino on
Internationalism, Pan-Americanism, and Social Questions/With Essays by Carlos Fonseca and Sergio Ramirez
(Hampton, VA: Compita Publishing, 1988), 35.
4
Ibid., 30.
5
Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperia Rule (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 234.
6
Bermann, Sandino Without Frontiers, 14-15.
157
ignored each other and claimed theirs’ the capital of Nicaragua. Towards the end of the decade
events 3500 miles away would momentarily make them allies.
The reach of a growing U.S. empire and the discovery of gold near San Francisco,
California stretched down into the América Central. The twin desires of moving goods across
the continent and finding gold accelerated and intensified the search for a quicker connection
across and between the two coasts. Overland travel between the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards
was dangerous, with death—from illness, starvation, fellow travelers—a constant threat. In 1849,
Cornelius Vanderbilt secured an agreement from the Nicaraguan government to operate a
transport company across the country over what would become a canal route.
7
In the winter of
1851, Vanderbilt boarded the Prometheus in New York bound for Greytown. Located on
Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, the small port would soon serve as the point of entry for
Vanderbilt’s Access Transit Company (ATC). The ATC served two purposes. First, it created a
quicker, safer passage to California for would-be forty-niners as it simultaneously expanded
Vanderbilt’s transport empire. It also did survey work for the planned Nicaragua Canal. The
canal would provide a faster way to move people and goods to and from the U.S. coasts until the
transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. With the ATC and Nicaragua Canal project
underway, the U.S. began getting heavily involved in the country.
8
During the 1950s,
infrastructural entanglements yielded to political entanglements and violence.
The growing and consolidating power of the Granada conservatives signaled by the ATC
and its connections to the U.S. brought an unforeseen response from the León liberals. Unwilling
to recognize the administration of the Granada-based Don Fruto Chamorro, the two cities entered
7
Ibid., 17. See also, Stiles, The First Tycoon for information on how Vanderbilt amassed a fortune by
connecting producers and consumers, in many ways by making markets, along the Atlantic seaboard, first over
water—steamboats—then over land—railroad. In this context, his move to América Central becomes a next logical
step to grow his infrastructural empire.
8
Stiles, The First Tycoon.
158
into the first of many violent confrontations. In a move to gain the upper-hand in the conflict and
control over the ATC, the León political elites contracted Byron Cole to lead a group of U.S.
mercenaries into Nicaragua to take Granada. Cole in turn recruited a private army led by one of
the most famous filibusters, William Walker.
9
Three of Vanderbilt’s associates, Joseph L.
White—a partner in the ATC, Cornelius T. Garrison—the head ATC agent in San Francisco, and
Charles Morgan—and an old ally from Vanderbilt’s days in New York, conspired to take over
the line and supplied to arms to Walker’s forces to bring their plan to fruition.
10
In 1855, Walker
landed in Nicaragua and took over Granada. León’s initial celebration quickly turned to ire when
Walker began to execute leaders from both factions and subsequently name himself president in
July 1856. He immediately declared English the official language and reintroduced slavery. The
U.S. recognized Walker’s government and extended diplomatic relations.
11
His third order of
business galvanized all possible opponents and set his demise in motion.
In February 1856, Walker annulled Vanderbilt’s concession for the ATC across
Nicaragua and handed it over Garrison and Morgan. In order to regain the concession in
Nicaragua, Vanderbilt leveraged conservative and liberal desires to expunge Walker, Central
American desire to remove all filibusters across the region, and longstanding British designs on a
canal.
12
Backed by Vanderbilt and Britain, the united forces of América Central expelled Walker
in 1857, after he was defeated in Rivas fifty kilometers south of Granada. He returned to the
9
For more on the filibuster who raided Mexico and the Central Américas see Robert E. May, Manifest
Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2002).
10
Bermann, Sandino Without Frontiers, 16.
11
Ibid., 17.
12
Ibid.
159
New York under U.S. protection and used it as a base for several more expeditions into América
Central. He was captured by the British and killed by Hondurans in Trujillo, Honduras.
13
* * * * *
The story goes like this. Two friends from Germany travelled to New York on their way
to San Francisco to make their fortune in gold. They purchased tickets on Vanderbilt’s ATC line
through Nicaragua. When they arrived in Managua word came down form San Francisco that it
was over. The rush ended. The two friends decided to look for gold in the mining towns of
northern Nicaragua. On one of their adventures they happened by Matagalpa and decided to stay.
They married into local coffee families and began working the coffee plantations of Matagalpa
and Jinotega. The two friends took to the work and the Nicaraguan political elite took to the
young Germans to the point of offering residency and land to migrants from Germany, France,
and Sweden in order to industrialize the region for export.
“Oh si. Llegaron muchos en ese tiempo. Hay communidades cerca de puros cheles. Bien
claritos, con pelo rubio y ojos claros.”
14
That is the story of how Vanderbilt brought Germans and coffee to Matagalpa.
* * * * *
In the years following Walker’s execution, the conservatives and liberals signed a truce
that brought peace and conservative leadership for nearly thirty years. During the 1880s, coffee
production became more ensconced in Carazo along the Pacific and in Matagalpa-Jinotega. This
decade marked the first export boom in the Américas, where non-industrializing countries were
13
Bermann, Sandino Without Frontiers, 17; May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 58; Stiles, The Last
Tycoon, 327.
14
Interview by author with Don Chaco, worker at Selva Negra restaurant, 28 May 2008. “Oh yes. Many
came during that time. There are commnunities close by of many cheles (light-skinned people). Very fair skinned,
with light eyes.”
160
incorporated into an ever-growing capitalist system of trade as producers of raw materials.
15
Due
to their position in agriculture, León’s political elite saw an opportunity to take control of the
country’s leadership. In 1893, the dictatorship of liberal General José Santos Zelaya began and
lasted until 1909 when U.S. supported Adolfo Díaz took office. The creation of the Díaz
government sparked a war three years later.
In 1912, Díaz’s former Minister of War, General Luis Mena rebelled against the
government. The conservative joined forces with the liberal General Benjamín Zeledón in an
attempt to take the Nicaraguan state. The two men convened a National Assembly in Masaya, a
city south of Managua where they replaced Díaz with a pro-Mena conservative, called for new
elections, and renationalized the country’s steamships and railroads. Díaz responded by asking
for U.S. Marines to invade the country—which they did on 3 August. This marked the second
time, Walker being the first, U.S. forces invaded Nicaragua. In September, the U.S. launched an
all out assault on the rebel forces. The war ended by the end of the month. It was the bloodiest
war since the one waged against Walker in 1855 and would not be surpassed until the Revolution
of 1978-79.
16
After the war, one hundred U.S. troops stayed behind to “keep peace.”
In 1916, U.S. Dollar Diplomacy extended to Nicaragua in the form of the Bryan-
Chamorro Treaty. Vanderbilt never succeeded in building a canal across Nicaragua and the U.S.
began operating the Panama Canal in 1915. However, U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings
Bryan and the Nicaraguan representative to Washington Emiliano Chamorro signed this treaty on
16 June and gave the U.S. the rights to build a canal across the country. The text of the
agreement reads, “The Government of Nicaragua grants in perpetuity to the Government of the
United States, forever free from all taxation or other public charge, the exclusive proprietary
15
See, Topik and Wells, The Second Conquest of Latin America.
16
Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 100-117.
161
rights necessary and convenient for the construction, operation and maintenance of an
interoceanic canal.” In exchange for these exclusive rights, the U.S. gave Nicaragua $3 million.
17
From the time of William Walker to the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty and through the founding of the
Guardia Nacional in 1927, the U.S. repeatedly exercised colonial power through appropriation
and violence to control the political, economic, and civic spheres of life in Nicaragua. It is in this
context that Sandino began his assault on U.S., what he alternatively called the “Colossus of the
North” and “Yankee octopus.”
18
* * * * *
Between 1927 and 1933, Sandino used the coffee areas of Jinotega, the Segovias, and
Matagalpa as bases for his attacks on U.S. backed Guardia Nacional outposts in in the country.
His demands were simple: he wanted the resignation of President Díaz, U.S. troops out of the
country, new elections conducted by Latin American officials, and the repeal of the Bryan-
Chamorro Treaty.
19
Heavily influenced by his experiences in revolutionary Mexico and with
local indigenous ethnicity, Sandino fought against U.S. influence and for “Indo-Hispanic”
control of local political control and governance.
20
For Sandino, taking control of local and
national state power and controlling local resources was a matter of indohispanismo as much as
it was about anything else.
21
Backed by an army of 300, Sandino evaded and provoked the
Marines and Guardia Nacional until 1933. That year, the troops left the country upon the
17
The Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History, edited by
Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113-14.
18
Bermann, Sandino Without Frontiers, 50, 53.
19
See, Sergio Ramirez, Sandino: Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot, 1921-1934, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990); and Gregorio Selser, Sandino: General of the Free, (New York, NY: Monthly Review
Press, 1982).
20
Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 256.
21
As Gobat notes, the strong ethnic and racial response from Sandino—as well as from conservative and
liberal nationalists in Nicaragua—against U.S. occupation had as much to do with racism from the “blonde beasts”
as it did with local indigenous identity formation. Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 257. This focus on race
and ethnicity in Sandino’s political formation and action is under examined. Unfortunately, it is beyond the purview
of this chapter but is a topic to be further studied in the future.
162
election of Juan Bautista Sacasa. However, Sandino continued to oppose the Guardia Nacional
and question the constitutionality of the U.S.-formed institution. On 21 February 1934, Sandino
and the president reached an agreement: “Sacasa promised to reform the Guardia within the next
six months in exchange for Sandino’s acceptance of a presidential delegate to oversee his
troops.”
22
This angered the head of the Guardia, General Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who saw the
agreement as confirmation of Sandino’s claim that there were three powers in Nicaragua: “the
power of the president of the Republic, that of the Guardia Nacional, and [his].”
23
That very
evening, Somoza and several other Guardia officers executed Sandino and four of his generals
on their way out of the Presidential Palace. The next day, Guardia troops attacked Sandino’s
cooperative in the Segovias and killed over 300 men, women, and children. In two days Somoza
erased Sandino from political and social life in Nicaragua. Or so he thought.
* * * * *
Figure 27. Bust of Carlos Fonseca at his home in Matagalpa. Photo by author.
Carlos Fonseca Amador was born two blocks east of Parque Rubén Darío in the southern
part of Matagalpa. Like Sandino, Fonseca was the bastard son of a large coffee estate owner and
22
Ibid., 264.
23
Ibid.
163
one of his servants. “The Amador family of Matagalpa had been prominent coffee growers,
merchants, and politicians since the nineteenth century.”
24
Like Sandino, Fonseca wanted a free
Nicaragua out from under U.S. influence. Sandino died at the hands of Somoza, it was the
Somoza dynasty Fonseca sought to undo through any means necessary. In 1961, Fonseca helped
found the Frente de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Front-FLN). He also immediately
asked to add Sandinista to the name—but that did not stick until 1963.
25
After years of struggling
and a temporary split, the FSLN really gained momentum in 1972.
The 1972 earthquake left Managua in piles of rubble. Even today, over forty years later,
if you visit the neighborhood around the National Theatre you will find abandoned
reconstruction efforts in the forms of half-walls, empty building foundations, and lots overrun
with weeds and vegetation. The Frente used the crisis created by the earthquake and the
subsequent theft of international aid by the Somoza regime to reinvigorate its organizing efforts.
For the next few years the FSLN ranks grew with campesinos who were suffering from the
effects of imported and subsidized U.S. grains as well as with the urban poor who were without
jobs. Fonseca took to the mountains outside his childhood city, much like Sandino. He was
ultimately killed in November 1976, ambushed by the Guardia Nacional. But the FSLN and the
revolution moved forward. Two years later, in 1978, a spontaneous student revolt erupted in
Matagalpa against the Guardia Nacional—and its tank—that sparked a series of uprisings in
Masaya, Chinandega, Diriamba, León, Jinotepe, and Estelí. The uprising in Matagalpa, home to
Fonseca, bastard child of a coffee grower who patterned his armed struggle after that of Sandino,
bastard child of a coffee grower, marked the beginning of the end of the Somoza dynasty.
The Life of La Hammonia
24
Matilde Zimmerman, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000), 15.
25
Ibid., 73.
164
A Beginning
“I just sort of bought it on a whim. We visited friends in Matagalpa and we looked at small farms
I always wanted to have a farm. While Eddy was busy I put an offer and it was accepted. So, then
on the way back to Managua and had to explain to him, ‘By the way, I bought a coffee farm.’”
Doña Mausi
The 1972 earthquake left Managua in piles of rubble. Even today, over forty years later,
if you visit the neighborhood around the National Theatre you will find abandoned
reconstruction efforts in the forms of half-walls, empty building foundations, and lots overrun
with weeds and vegetation. La Hammonia was also born there, amidst destruction. Although
much of the city’s architectural infrastructure was destroyed, several buildings only sustained
cosmetic damage. The buildings that remained all shared one key characteristic: each was framed
by orange steel pillars, the trademark of Kühl engineering. When it came time to rebuild after the
earthquake, business picked up at the Kühl engineering and construction firm. The increased
revenue from rebuilding parts of Managua provided the capital to purchase La Hammonia.
* * * * *
Doña Mausi Hayn was born in Managua in the mid-1940s. Her parents, first-generation
German-Nicaraguans, met in Germany during university and moved back to Nicaragua after
World War II. They left the country after the war devastated the economy. They returned to
Nicaragua, which was their home while both of their parents worked coffee in Matagalpa. Otto
Kühl, Doña Mausi’s great-grandfather, and his close friend married a pair of sisters and thereby
married into Matagalpa coffee. They took to the coffee industry and it was after them that the
Nicaraguan state—fragmented as it was—began offering visas and land to migrants from the
Germany, France, Switzerland, and the U.S. in order to grow the coffee industry. Although
coffee was her family’s business since the 1880s, Doña Mausi originally went another direction.
165
Doña Mausi is the middle of three daughters. Her older sister died while she was still
young. Her younger sister excelled in school, she finished third in the country the year she
graduated high school. Doña Mausi freely admits that she is not as bright as her younger sister,
but that she did just fine. She married her husband, Don Eddy Kühl, a short time after
graduating. It turns out that she inherited her father’s interest in and aptitude for engineering.
Intermittently and in between the birth of her four daughters she kept trying to complete her
degree.
26
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, she and Don Eddy opened an engineering and
construction company in Managua. He was licensed by this time. She was not. Regardless, their
business started growing as she continued her studies. Then the earthquake hit and their orange
steel pillars brought them more clients and began shifting their future towards Matagalpa.
In 1975, the Kühl-Hayn family visited friends in Matagalpa. Even though they were not
involved in the coffee business earlier in their lives, the family maintained close friendships and
ties to the coffee growing region. On this particular trip they visited a few farms for the first
time.
We thought, we had some extra money, maybe we should do something with it.
Eddy looked at farms with me just to get me to stop talking about it. At first, we
thought it could just be like a hobby, or someplace we could visit every once in a
while. When we visited La Hammonia, I loved it. I just sort of bought it on a
whim. We visited friends in Matagalpa and we looked at small farms. I always
wanted to have a farm. While Eddy was busy I put an offer and it was accepted.
So, then on the way back to Managua and had to explain to him, ‘By the way, I
bought a coffee farm.’
27
26
In an interview with Doña Mausi on 5 August 2010 I asked her, “What makes you happy?” She replied,
“I really enjoy construction. Building. I am a frustrated architect. I never got to finish my career. I love to build. I
love to do things permanently. I don’t like those paramientras. No. We will wait until we can do it all the way or we
are not going to do it. Anyway, I really love construction.”
27
Interview by author, 22 July 2010.
166
When asked why she wanted to by a coffee farm she answered, “It’s our family business. And
it’s [Matagalpa] where we are from.”
28
La Hammonia, originally founded by Hans Boesch in
1890, had new owners.
Between 1975 and 1979, Doña Mausi had little to no involvement with the farm. During
this time the farm was truly a pet project. Don Eddy was busy with the engineering and
construction firm, Doña Mausi moved to Costa Rica to continue her piecemeal march towards an
engineering degree. The total size of the estate is 900 manzanas: 300 hundred are untouched, 300
used for farm and hotel services and workers’ homes, and the last 300 are used for coffee.
29
Production was done as it was done everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s, using Green Revolution
agricultural technologies. La Hammonia used the same synthetic fertilizers and chemical
herbicides and pesticides being used in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and Brazil. While
Doña Mausi was studying in Costa Rica and Don Eddy was running the construction business,
they asked her cousin, Don Otto Kühl, to run the farm because they had no experience. At the
outset, the workforce consisted of forty workers, not many were needed to operate the farm due
to the mechanic nature of GR agriculture. According to Francisco “Chico” Kühl, Doña Mausi’s
nephew who is currently being groomed to become the farm’s chief administrator, “mirá, mi
Papá cuando empezo la finca, con 100 manzanas prodicía 60,000 latas. Ahorra, con 300
manzanas se produce 70,000. Pero cuando mi papa la tenía era quimico. Cien porciento. O sea,
ahí puedes ver la diferencia.”
30
The same year that the Doña Mausi bought the farm she and Don
Eddy began a construction project on part of their land.
28
Ibid.
29
A manzana is equivalent to approximately 1.7 acres.
30
Interview by author, 12 July 2010. “Look, my Dad, when he started the farm, he produced 60,000
containers with 100 manzanas. Now, with 300 manzanas, we produce 70,000 containers. But when my Dad ran it, it
was all chemical. One-hundred percent. That is how you can see the difference.” Chico is Don Otto’s son. He will
be taking over for his father in the next few years.
167
They built the first lodge next to one of the three lakes on the property. “Our original plan
was to build houses on part of the acreage and sell them.” Doña Mausi and Don Eddy hoped to
draw on their experience in construction in the capitol to get out of the loan they used to
purchase the farm and land they were building the houses on. According to her, “We did not
have enough money to pay off the land, so we hoped selling these houses would help us do so.
Then, we ended up borrowing more money to build the houses.”
31
When the houses were built,
friends kept on asking to rent them for weeks at a time. At that point, they decided to not to sell
the houses and instead rent them as cottages, build a couple of hostels, and run all of the
buildings as an eco-lodge. They called it Selva Negra in homage to the Black Forest in their
native Germany. A couple of years later, an Italian family asked to run a café on the property—it
eventually turned into what is now Selva Negra’s restaurant.
32
1979, the international coffee
market intervened and provided Doña Mausi and Don Eddy an opportunity to get pay own the
land and farm outright. As mentioned in chapter one, in 1975 a frost destroyed a large part of
Brazil’s coffee harvest and every other coffee producing country responded by planting more
coffee. In 1978, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Perú, and Nicaragua all had record harvests.
33
La Hammonia was part of this phenomenon. According to Doña Mausi, “There was a big coffee
frost in Brazil. This made the coffee prices go up from 1977-1979. With that money we were
able to get the cash for the farm. We purchased it in full in 1979.”
34
Doña Mausi and Don Eddy
fully owned La Hammonia and Selva Negra. However, just as it seemed they could start turning
a profit from the farm and hotel, the Sandinista revolution changed everything.
The 1980s, A Sketch
31
Interview by author, 22 July 2010.
32
Doña Mausi could not recall
33
Johnson, “The International Coffee Agreement and the Production of Coffee in Guatemala” and
34
Interview by author, 22 July 2010.
168
On 19 July 1979, the Frente took Managua. After almost twenty years of struggling, of
fighting “tree by tree, house by house. With masks or handkerchiefs covering their faces,”
35
the
FSLN successfully ousted the Somoza regime. On that day, “The Somoza clan [went] into exile
as Augusto César Sandino [strolled] through Nicaragua beneath a rain of flowers. A half century
after they shot and killed him.”
36
The revolution brought wide-spread change. As the new
Sandinista state consolidated power and restructured order in the country, it declared itself
Guardian of the Youth in 1980. The prominent role of women like Claribel Alegría, Norma
Astorga, Mónica Baltodano, Gioconda Belli, Luisa Amanda Espinoza, Norma Elena Gadea,
Dora Maria Téllez, and—one of the earliest martyrs—Arlen Siu Bermúdez in the revolution was
too much for Doña Mausi to bear. She feared one of her daughters would be drafted.
37
Don Eddy
moved to Miami to look for work and eventually found employment as a civil engineer with the
city. Doña Mausi and their daughters soon followed.
38
35
Galeano, Memory of Fire, 247.
36
Ibid., 249.
37
Interview by author, 22 July 2010. Women were key figures in the FSLN. Arlen Siu was one of the early
casualties of the revolution. She as killed on 1 August 1975 in El Sauce, León. The portrait of her looking into the
camera with her hair coming down and covering the ride side of her face is iconic and a symbol for women’s
participation in the revolution. Arlen Siu’s personal history is particularly interesting and points to the importance of
northern Nicaragua as a revolutionary region as well as the transcontinental links among revolutionary movements.
She was born in Jinotega to a Nicaraguan mother and Chinese father who immigrated to Nicaragua in 1940, after
serving in the Communist Revolutionary Army. See Roshni Rustomi-Kearns with Rajini Srikanth and Leny
Mendoza Strobel, Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
1999). Over time, key women leaders became disillusioned with the FSLN and saw in the party another oppressor.
38
During our several interviews and times together, Doña Mausi was very careful not to betray any
political convictions or ties. On one occasion she said, “I have family on both sides. We all do.” That being said, it
seems that in the lead up to the revolution Don Eddy was involved in anti-Somoza activity. This does not necessarily
mean he was pro-FSLN.
169
For the entirety of the 1980s, the Hayn-Kühl family lived in the U.S., in Miami then
Houston. In both cities Don Eddy found intermittent work as a civil engineer while Doña Mausi
stayed at home with their daughters. While in the U.S., they eventually became residents and
citizens, but not because Doña Mausi wanted to. “If it was up to me, I would have never obtained
a residency in the U.S. Never gotten a citizenship. I did it because Eddy filled out the
paperwork.”
39
Even though Don Eddy was able to find employment, it was never consistent.
Coupled with Doña Mausi unpaid labor in their home meant that they were often scraping by.
Describing her time in the U.S.,
Let me tell you, honest Orlando, when we moved to the States I went to the
garbage to look for food because I didn’t have any food at home. And you know,
the supermarkets over there, if the can is dented they throw it away. And we used
to live on the other side of a parking lot from the supermarket and their was an
opening there [in the fence that separated their apartment from the parking lot].
And I went every morning to the back and I shopped first in the garbage of the
supermarket, and then I went inside and bought what I didn’t find. I went there
first because the bread was thrown away when all it was was expired, but it didn’t
have any mildew, or maybe it was puffed down or whatever. I didn’t feel myself
any lower for doing that. But I remember we didn’t have any money so we spent
our weekends in the park. Let’s go to the park! And we all went to the park in the
station wagon. And I would stuff the station wagon with stuffed animals I bought
for wholesale for $.25…and sell them to the people for $5. And with that money
we made it. We went shopping. The girls were allowed to buy anything that was
on sale. If it was not on sale they could not buy it. So yeah, we struggled.
40
One of the reasons they struggled so much in the U.S. was because back in Nicaragua, La
Hammonia was barely surviving. The farm they left debt free began operating in the red.
Don Otto operated the farm during the decade the FSLN implemented two key
campaigns that focused on the country’s rural populations and fought U.S. backed
counterrevolutionary forces. The first campaign was The National Literacy Crusade. El Frente
titled 1980 “The Year of Literacy.” Between March and August, the volunteers who went into
39
Interview by author, 5 August 2010.
40
Ibid.
170
the countryside reduced the national illiteracy rate from 50.3% to 12.9%.
41
The Sandinistas had
two main reasons for the crusade: “firstly, justice and moral obligation of the revolution towards
the population; and secondly, literacy was seen as a part of the preparation for the whole
population to manage the big task of national reconstruction.”
42
Women once again figured
prominently in the campaign, 60% of the brigadistas—volunteers—and 50% of the learners
were women.
43
Matagalpa, home to Fonseca and strong FSLN city, was used as an outpost for
the campaign. Murals that celebrated and celebrate the work of the brigadistas are still visible in
the city (Figure 28).
Figure 28. Mural in Matagalpa. Photo by author.
The second key program the Sandinistas deployed during the 1980s was an aggressive
agrarian reform agenda. The program was implemented in three stages. Between 1979-1981 state
farms were formed, agricultural loans and/or credit extended, and land redistributed to
collectively organized peasants. Stage two began when the agrarian reform law was passed in
1981 and marked the beginning of earnest redistribution of land for those farmers who organized
themselves into cooperatives. In the mid-1980s, as the Contra war raged, the kind and form of
41
Ulrike Hanemann, “Nicaragua’s Literacy Campaign,” paper prepared for Education for All Global
Monitoring Report 2006, Literacy for Life (Hamburg, Germany: UNESCO Institute for Education, 2005), 2.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid., 8.
171
land distributed notable increased.
44
Ultimately, while the Sandinista government had economic,
social, and political goals for their agrarian reform program it ended up losing the “the hearts and
minds of the peasantry,” the same campesinos who filled the ranks of the FSLN.
45
As the decade
wore on, many of these former FSLN loyalists joined the Contra paramilitary forces and also
formed a key demographic of the Unión Nacional Opositora (National Opposition Party—UNO)
that ushered the FSLN out of office, and Violeta Chamorro into the office of the president.
Several scholars have written about why and how this happened. Two overriding reasons
agrarian reform led to its own undoing as well as that of the FSLN were the emphasis on
collective agriculture and forced development modeled after industrializing countries. Although
some small rural farmers worked collectively, many did not and resented being forced to do so.
46
Part of the Ministerio de Desarollo Agropecuario y Reforma Agraria’s (Ministry of Agricultural
Development and Agrarian Reform—MIDINRA) work involved visiting medium to large farms
and taking them over for the state. MIDINRA visited La Hammonia in the name of the people to
redistribute the land. Except that it did not.
Doña Mausi has always respected the farm’s workers. From the moment she took
ownership, she started to change the culture of work on the farm as well as the relationship
between the workers and the administration. According to her, “When I first got here and stayed
at the farm they would never look at your face. They had a sense that if you are ignored on the
farm you can survive, like it was in the middle ages.”
47
Since then, she has worked real hard to
44
Laura J. Enríquez, Agrarian Reform and Class Consciousness in Nicaragua (Gainesville, FL: University
of Florida Press, 1997), 17.
45
Ibid., 31.
46
See Charlip, Culivating Coffee; Enríquez, Agrarian Reform and Class Consciousness in Nicaragua; and
Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination for more on how these two created resentment among campesinos.
47
Interview by author, 5 August 2010.
172
make the workers feel respected by the administration and valued for the contributions they
make to the farm. Regarding the change in work culture she said,
So I feel that that has disappeared. Totally. Because they look at my face and they
tell me no [laughs]. But, I think that is more or less it. They feel they are respected
as a human being. And I always say that the extension of my family is the
workers. I guess that they see that the next generation is the same. My nephew
comes and talks to the people who were his peers when he was here and they go
out and they don’t call him Don Cody. They call my daughter Vicky, or
sometimes Doña Nene, but usually Vicky. So I guess they feel that there is that
respect. And I call also the workers who are older here by Don, like Don Goyo for
instance. I don’t call him just Goyo, because I feel like I am putting him down and
he deserves that respect.
48
She started turning the culture over right when she bought the farm. Chico tells a story that
illustrates the change in work culture accomplished at La Hammonia by comparing it to that of a
neighboring farm.
Te pongo el ejemplo. Nosotros vamos a visitor muchas fincas verdad. Porque
nosotros vamos y vemos lo que ellos hacen…si ellos tienen una technología que
no tenemos, nostros la copiamos. Y si no nos sirve la eliminamos. Pero, nosotros
visitamos muchas fincas. Un dia fuimos a visitor una finca donde vimos un señor
que andaba una gran pistolota asi. Y el mandador [de La Hammonia] me dice,
“Chico, vení. Mirá, ese es el mandador. ¿No lo conoces?” “No,” le digo. Y el me
dice, “Como que no lo conoces. Mira, anda una gran pistol. Si tiene una pistola
es para defenderse de unos de los trabajadores que le quieren hacer daño.” Y
mirá, aquí en la finca como me mantengo con todos. Yo no necesito andar con
eso. Eso es uno de los ejemplos que te pongo que aquí no vas a ver que la vida de
un mandador anda en riesgo.
49
Doña Mausi also began listening to the workers and using their ideas on the farm, undoing the
idea that the administration makes all decisions on how to run and improve it. “No, I like to hear
48
Ibid. When I asked her why she runs the farm the way she does she said, “I don’t know. You know, you
are not taking anything with you when you die. At least live happy. And this makes us all happy. It hurts a lot when
people see you, especially among the workers, and they think you have a lot of money. If they would only see the
numbers they would realize it’s not like that. I mean it’s not that we struggle. I don’t know how to answer that.”
49
Interview by author, 27 July 2010. “Let me give you an example. We go and visit a lot of farms, right.
We go and see what they do, if they have a technology we don’t have we take it and copy it. If it is useless to us, we
stop using it. One day we went to visit a farm where there was a guy with a big gun, this big. The foreman [from La
Hammonia] talk to me, “Hey Chico, come here. Look, that’s the foreman. Can’t you tell?” I say “ No.” He says to
me, “How do you not know who he is? Look, he has a huge gun. If he has a gun it is to protect himself from workers
who want to hurt him.” You see how I am here with everyone. I don’t need to carry a gun. That’s one example I can
give you that you are not going to see any of the foremen at risk here.”
173
opinions and usually I am telling them, ‘What do you think?’ It’s very simple. I am not the
holder of the truth. If they [workers] know anything better I would like for them to tell me also.
I’m not infallible. And like that we all share an opinion and we make things better.”
50
She also,
allowed the workers to grow food on the plots next to their houses. This collective and
supportive work culture started by Doña Mausi was carried over by Don Otto when he ran La
Hammonia in her absence.
Don Otto maintained the same work environment started by Doña Mausi, which
contributed to the farm not being seized by the state. When MINIDRA arrived to audit the farm
and prepare it for redistribution the workers stood behind Don Otto. Chico tells what happened
when they came to La Hammonia.
Lastima que no entrevistaste a mi Papa. El manejo la finca desda 79 hasta el 90.
Bueno, hasta ahorrita. A el, en los años de los 80 le quisieron quitar la finca. El
Frente. Con eso de la apropriación de tierra. Pero los mismos trabajadores lo
defendieron. ¿Por qué? Porque el era un buen administrador. El dejaba que la
gente sembrara, el daba buen pago, el daba buena comida. O sea, las
condiciones eran buenas.
51
However, Don Otto did not leave anything to chance. Doña Mausi and Don Eddy were
struggling in the U.S., so there was not enough money to hire the same amount of workers or to
work the farm as they had in the boom years that closed out the 1970s. In addition, the
international coffee market collapsed in 1980, dramatically lowering the price of coffee.
52
Don
Otto operated the farm at a loss for the last years of the decade, partly due to these economic
conditions, partly to avoid the Frente. As Doña Mausi tells it, “They were confiscating farms at
50
Interview by author, 5 August 2010.
51
Interview by author, 27 July 2010. “It’s a shame that you weren’t able to interview my Dad. He ran the
farm from 1979 to 1990. Well, until now. In the 1980s they wanted to take the farm away from him. The Frente.
During all that about land appropriation. But the workers defended him. Why? Because he was a good administrator.
He let the workers plant food, he paid well, he served good food. In other words, there were good working
conditions.” During the three different times I was able to visit La Hammonia I was never able to interview Don
Otto. We always missed each other.
52
International Coffee Association, “History.”
174
that time everywhere. They didn’t want to put the farm to nice. So they needed it to look like not
the friendliest of farms.” The strategic messiness worked, the Frente left the farm alone.
Although the farm was able to avoid state seizure, it was unable to avoid the U.S. backed
counter-revolutionary war.
The same Jinotega-Matagalpa region that served as a key base to Sandino and the FSLN
saw steady violence in the last half of the decade. In 1984, Nicaragua held its first democratic
elections and put Daniel Ortega, a member of the FSLN into the president’s office. Several
Western European parliaments and governments as well as the U.S.-based Latin American
Studies Association deemed the elections legitimate and competitive.
53
Dennis Volman of
Christian Science Monitor reported that the elections in Nicaragua were in fact fairer than those
in heavily U.S. influenced El Salvador earlier in 1984.
54
In spite of this, President Ronald
Reagan refused diplomatic relations with the Ortega administration. In May 1985, the Reagan
administration began an embargo of Nicaragua, which was subsequently followed by an
intensification of violence by U.S.-backed contra paramilitary forces intent on “destroying the
Sandinista power structure.”
55
In addition to killing and disappearing FSLN members, the
contras also targeted infrastructure: roads, electrical plants, and ports. At the close of the decade,
the economic effect of the embargo and infrastructural chaos could be quantified at $9 billion in
damage. As a country that relied on an export-oriented economy, Nicaragua was devastated. The
inflation rate reached 33,602% in 1988 before coming down to 1,690%.
56
Politically and
socially, the war against the contras left the FSLN without a base. As stated earlier, many
campesinos who originally supported the revolution turned against it as agrarian reform forced
53
Walker, Living in the Shadow of the Eagle, 53.
54
Dennis Volman, “Nicaragua Vote Seen as Better Than Salvador’s,” Christian Science Monitor,
November 5, 1984, http://www.csmonitor.com/1984/1105/110543.html.
55
Walker, Living in the Shadow of the Eagle, 54.
56
Ibid.
175
many of them into a agricultural model they were not accustomed to or in favor of. The contras
recruited these disillusioned agricultural workers to fill their forces. By 1990, the entire death toll
for the war against the contras was 30,865: 21,900 contras, 4,860 FSLN troops, and 4,105
civilians. In addition to these deaths, the war left 20,064 wounded.
57
Many of the deaths and
much of the destruction were the result of land mines. One of the workers at the restaurant at
Selva Negra told me, “Oh si, aqui paso mucho guerra. Durante los años 70 y 80, se oían
automaticas a todo tiempo. De vez en cuando todavia encuentran una [mina] en el monte, o
alguien se lastima. Pero no como antes, ya desarmaron muchas.”
58
After all this, the FSLN
could no longer maintain state power. With the threat of forced military conscription moving out
of the picture, Doña Mausi decided it was time to come home in 1989. In 1990, the UNO
coalition successfully placed Doña Violeta Chamorro in the presidential office.
A New Beginning
“The certification, we didn’t really look for it, it came to us.”
At the start of the 1990s, La Hammonia was a disaster. Doña Mausi and her family
returned to Nicaragua and with their family construction business no longer a viable option, they
focused all their energy on the farm. In the aftermath of the Sandinista agrarian reform program
and the social, economic, and political damage brought on by the contra war La Hammonia was
in poor physical, social, and economic shape. As Doña Mausi stated, “This was a mess. We
owed money everywhere. The farm was terrible. We used it as a motel part of it. My nephews
used it as a disco. People came to smoke pot. It was awful.” She added,
57
Ibid., 56. The total dead accounted for .9% of Nicaragua’s population, this takes into account the fact that
some of the contras were also Nicaraguan. Walker wrote, “An equivalent loss for the United States would be 2.25
million or over thirty-eight times U.S. death toll in the entire Vietnam War” (56).
58
Interview by author, 28 May 2008. “Oh yeah, a lot of war has happened here. During the 70s and 80s
you’d here semi-automatics all the time. Every once in a while they still find one [a landmine] in the mountains or
somebody gets hurts. But not like before, they have disarmed many of them.”
176
It required a lot of work. The farm owed money and we needed to figure out a
way to get out of all that debt. It [the farm] was not necessarily abandoned; it was
just that it had been neglected. Whatever they were working on, they couldn’t
finish it. They didn’t have enough people so they could not work the whole farm
as it was before. They did not have enough people or money to pay for all those
expenses.
59
At the top of her to do list was getting out of debt. However, in order to get out of debt she had to
borrow money at the rate of $.80 on the dollar against her future harvests. The loan was used to
improve the physical conditions of the farm. The first few years the prices were not too bad, but
they dropped steadily until 1994. This was the local effect of an international coffee market that
fell until it spiked in once again in 1994 due to another frost in Brazil.
60
Figure 29. Net profit in cordobas for La Hammonia, 1990-1994.
However, in 1993 a representative of Royal Coffee then based in Emeryville, California visited
the farm and was impressed with the way the farm operated as well as with the environmental
efforts of the farm. This visit began putting the farm on a different developmental trajectory.
59
Interview by author, 5 August 2010.
60
See Chapter 2, Figures 6 and 7. The increase in price was not reflected until 1996.
1646.24
82558.44
-3601.56
-20085.11
-69514.17
-80000
-60000
-40000
-20000
0
20000
40000
60000
80000
100000
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994
Net Profit in Cordobas: 1990-1994
Net
Pro(it
in
Cordobas
177
One of the first projects Doña Mausi undertook when she returned was to begin
composting all the trash produced on the farm to reduce the environmental impact of the farm.
Coffee production can be notoriously harmful to the physical landscape around a farm. The
drinking water of the country’s coffee centers—Jinotega and Matagalpa—are constantly
contaminated by production runoff originating from the farms just north of both departamentos
(departments).
61
Determined to reduce waste, Doña Mausi began aggressively composting the
waste produced by the farm and hotel in 1989. The compost was then used to fertilize the plants,
which slightly reduced expenditures and actually started the move towards organic production.
In addition to reducing waste through composting, La Hammonia constructed a system that
cleaned contaminated water from coffee production using ash from work on the farm and ground
up eggshell from that used at the Selva Negra Hotel restaurant and in the farm’s kitchen. A large
concrete and ceramic bio-digester tank significantly reduces the acidity levels of the used water
to the point of becoming reusable for irrigation on the farm while at the same time producing
methane gas that is used in the community kitchen.
62
Doña Mausi also began reducing the use of
herbicides and increasing the amount of manual labor because the former are so detrimental to
the environment. It was efforts like these that led to a direct trading relationship with Royal
Coffee.
63
Another partnership that began during the early 1990s was with Allegro Coffee based
in Boulder, Colorado that continues to this day. It was also during this time that La Hammonia
61
“The Nicaraguan Environment…A Legacy of Destruction”, Envío, accessed April 2, 2013,
http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/2756.
62
Mausi Kühl-Hayn, Guía para Visitantes en Selva Negra/Selva Negra Visitor’s Tour Guide (Matagalpa,
Nicaragua: Selva Negra, 2006), 28-29. The actual process through which pH balance is achieved and methane gas
produced is complicated but available in the Tour Guide.
63
I have not been able to get a hold of Doña Mausi to confirm that this relationship no longer exists. The
Royal Coffee website, www.royalcoffee.com, no longer lists Selva Negra on its coffee lists.
178
began selling coffee produced on the farm under the Selva Negra label.
64
After La Hammonia
began composting its trash and recycling as much water as possible, Doña Mausi kept turning the
farm into a more sustainable enterprise before certification was even a consideration. In 1996,
she began a new project.
In order to reduce the use of chemical pesticides, Doña Mausi began developing
homemade traps for common coffee pests. Broca is the most common pest, it is a small insect
that burrows into a plant and kills it from the inside out. The administration of La Hammonia is
keen on learning from other coffee producers who are creating more innovative and sustainable
practices and often visit farms to see what others are doing. Don Goyo, head agronomist and one
time head of reducing pest infestations spoke about the importance of sharing knowledge and
technology between farms,
A nosotros nos gusta compartir la experiencia y relaciones sociales entre
personas. El intercambio de informacion es tan importante, compartir
informacion es importante. Por eso Doña Mausi tiene la costumbre de sacarnos a
diferented lados. Y eso es tan importante porque uno se enriquece con
experiencias que hay en otros lados. Necesita ir a conocer.
65
Chico also talked about the importance of learning from other farms, “Nosotros vamos a visitor
muchas fincas verdad. Porque nosotros vamos y vemos lo que ellos hacen…si ellos tienen una
technología que no tenemos, nostros la copiamos.”
66
Doña Mausi put it more bluntly, “We are
big copy-caters. So we have learned from others, mind you sometimes we go without the owners
permission because he doesn’t want us to steal from him, but most of the time people don’t mind
64
Allegro Coffee is sold exclusively at Whole Foods. You can find Selva Negra coffee in the Organic
Breakfast Blend and Organic Early Bird Blend. Organic Coffee, Allegro Coffee, accessed September 19, 2013,
http://www.allegrocoffee.com/coffee/coffee-products/organic-coffees#breakfast-blend.
65
Interview by author, 28 May 2008. “We enjoy sharing our experiences and creating social relationships
with others. The exchange of information is so important, sharing information is so important. That is why Doña
Mausi regularly takes us to visit other places. This is important because one enriches oneself with experiences in
other places. One must go and experience.”
66
Interview by author, 27 July 2010. “We go and visit a lot of farms, right. We go and see what they do, if
they have a technology we don’t have we take it and copy it.”
179
sharing the knowledge.”
67
One of the ideas they borrowed—or stole—was creating broca traps
out of old plastic soda bottles. The way the traps work is by cutting out a part of the soda bottle
at the top, filling the bottom fourth of the bottle with liquid bait, tying a string around the mouth
of the bottle, painting parts of it red, and hanging it from a plant branch. The broca is drawn to
the bottle by the color and smell, falls into the liquid, and drowns. Over the past seventeen years,
the workers have been tinkering with the design of the trap and composition of the bait. They
believe that it is working better than ever. The following year, Doña Mausi reluctantly allowed
La Hammonia to become certified for the first time. As she puts it, certification went to them.
Figure 30. Net profit in cordobas for La Hammonia, 1996-2009. There is a missing plot point for 2006 as the year-
end report was missing.
68
The Paths to Certification
One third of the estate, three hundred manzanas always remained untouched. It was
always something that separated La Hammonia from neighboring farms. The plants on these
manzanas provide food the workers can harvest. The trees provide shade for the coffee as well as
67
Interview by author, 5 August 2010.
68
The steep price drop in 2001 reflects the international coffee market crash felt by producers around the
world. See Chapter 2, Figure 6. The increase in profits after 2004 also reflects the international coffee market’s rise,
especially in the organic sector. See Chapter 2, Figure 16.
-100,000.00
0.00
100,000.00
200,000.00
300,000.00
400,000.00
500,000.00
600,000.00
700,000.00
800,000.00
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Net Profit in Cordobas
Net Profit in Cordobas
180
resting places for various kinds of wildlife. In 1997, Doña Mausi was approached by a man with
Rainforest Alliance who visited La Hammonia while staying at Selva Negra.
I forget his name. When he was here he said, “Mausi, this is a perfect farm to be
certified by the organization we are in, it is called Rainforest Alliance.” I said,
“Well, as long as it doesn’t cost me.” That’s always my concern. He said, “No.
Just be certified.” I said, “Okay.” He did the inspection himself and certified us. A
couple of years later they sent Selva Natura to do the inspection. That was it.
They did the inspection and sent us the certificate or something. Time passed,
they never came back. In 2000, we were listed as certified by Rainforest.
69
It is important to note here that Doña Mausi did not seek out a certification program and adjust
the farm’s agricultural practices to meet the demands of the label. Rather she was already doing
what Rainforest Alliance asked other farms to do in order to be certified. In the case of La
Hammonia, the Rainforest label coopted the farm’s practices, imbued the label with meaning,
and made a commodity out of nothing. The Rainforest Alliance label positioned the New York
based organization as arbiter of sustainability and legitimate speaker on behalf of La
Hammonia—and other agricultural producers throughout the world. In other words, it created its
own existence by speaking for and over producers. It is vital to understand that even though
Doña Mausi implemented sustainable practices in advance of certification, she would not have
been able to demand the price premiums she could through the Rainforest label.
In 2003, Heddy, Doña Mausi’s daughter, opened coffee import and roasting business in
Atlanta. In the process of setting up the business, Heddy noticed that Selva Negra coffee was no
longer listed as certified by Rainforest Alliance on the company website. Upon inquiring as to
why they found out that it was because they never paid for the audit. Doña Mausi explains what
happened next.
69
Ibid. For more information on Rainforest Alliance and its role in beginning the certification frenzy that
followed see Chapter 2, note 36.
181
So now payment comes about and I said I don’t want it, I don’t need it. But she
wanted it [Heddy], she needed it because it is easier to sell and this, that, and the
other. And, Allegro said it was good for them as well...so then we had to pay for
the certificate, and then we had to pay for the auditing, and it’s over $5000 a year.
And then Pete Rogers said, “Why don’t you certify yourself organic, I’m going to
pay for it.” I said, “Perfect. You pay for it, I’ll do it.” A guy came, did the
auditing, but Pete never paid. So the guy comes to me to collect and I say, “I
cannot afford to pay because I do not have the money.” That one was a lot less, it
was like $3000. But I wasn’t planning on doing it, and also the other guy
committed to paying, he said he was going to do it. So he [the auditor] says,
“Well, nobody paid me.” So the next year I decided to get the certificate and sell
it as organic if I could. Allegro said, we will give you $2 a pound if it’s organic.
Now, Pete kept on buying it for the same price, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted
him to pay the same as Allegro, they were paying $2.20 and he was still paying
$1.55 for that. So I said, “Hey, I’m sorry, but I cannot continue selling it to you.
Anyway, that is how we started up with the organic. Because it was supposed to
be for free, and it ended up not being free. So now we are paying for two
certificates and we have a lot of people coming saying, “this is a great certificate
and our certificate is the best, you are going to love it,” but I don’t have money to
pay for all this, so no. No thank you.
70
Figure 31. La Hammonia. Photo by author.
Social Impact of Certification
Ever since 2003, Doña Mausi has had a turbulent relationship with certification. As
Figure 5 shows, there are economic advantages to certification. The most immediate impact on
the farm was the need to hire a larger permanent workforce. There are four major jobs on the
farm divided among four cuadrillos—work crews: folear (soy based herbicide), chapotear
70
Ibid. Pete Rogers is with JBR Gourmet, owners of Rogers Family Coffee Company. Pete began buying
Selva Negra coffee in 1995 and has purchased steadily ever since. Although Pete never paid for the organic
certification, the Rogers Family Coffee Company did contribute grants to La Hammonia that helped it rebuild its
kitchen.
182
(weeding and pruning), abonar (fertilize), and quemar monte (pesticide). In addition to these
four cuadrillos there is a lab crew that develops MM—micro-organisms—to help the composting
process move along faster, the bait for the homemade traps, turns the compost and cattle manure
bins that form the basis of the organic fertilizer produced on the farm, and miscellaneous jobs.
71
Each of the tasks is physically demanding: foleando requires one to carry and pull a hose in and
out of the rows of coffee plants, up and down the plantillos—coffee lots; abonando means
starting each morning with a fifty pound sack of fertilizer, carrying it up and down the steep
hillsides emptying it two ounces at a time on each plant; and quemando means carrying a twenty-
five pound backpack full of pesticide and operating it with a pump attached to the pack. One of
the cuadrillos is composed of all women. It is charged with abonando and chapoteando.
72
Each
71
During my time at La Hammonia I participated in all of the farm work except chapotear. That was for
my safety since the weeding and pruning is done using a machete.
72
I worked with this cuadrillo for three days. I tried to speak with the women in a group setting to ask them
about their experiences on the farm. We scheduled a time to meet on two separate occasions. They cancelled both
times. I do not want to chalk this up to gender, but at the same time I am not sure what else it could be. When Doña
Mausi first took control of the farm from Don Otto in 1990 she met some resistance for being a woman. She tells a
great story that illustrates the difficulty she often faces as a woman in charge:
Oh yeah, I had a lot of funny things. I have you an anecdote. We used to have a foreman, Don
Daniel, he retired, worked retired, then he got really sick. He kept on falling down a lot real sick
and then he felt embarrassed and said, okay I’m going to go home. He was the foreman for many
years here. I told him I wanted plants planted on the side of the road. Those are the amapolas I
think that are big trees. And I went there and the worker who was putting them up was putting
them to separate and I wanted them closer. So I said, “Hey, I don’t want those to be so separate, I
want them closer.” He said, “Don Daniel told me to put them at dos barras.” “Yeah, but una barra
es mas que suficiente.” I was on my way out and I see that he continued working, but he kept on
putting them separate the way he was doing it before. And I told him, “I told you to put them
close.” “Yeahm but Don Daniel told me to put them like this.” And I go, “Yes, but I am on top of
Don Daniel. And I am the one who asked for this work. And I want them closer.” So he just
looked at me again and said, “Don Daniel me dijo que las pusiera asi.” And I said, “Don Daniel,
okay.” So I left. Payday comes and I don’t pay him. So he comes by and says, “Where’s my
money?” “Ah, pideselo a Don Daniel.” So Don Daniel comes with him and says, “Doña Mausi, he
says that you don’t want to pay him.” I said, “No, I don’t want to pay him. I asked him to do
something. I understand that you are his foreman. But if I come and I tell him, “That’s not how I
want it, and I want it differently and he insists on doing it like that he can inquire with you, and
you can come and talk to me and tell me and I don’t think it should be done like that or whatever.
But if I am asking for it to be done like that, I want it like that. You can come and prove me wrong.
But I asked him three times and he didn’t pay attention. So you pay him.” And he said, “I don’t
have any money to pay him.” And I said, “Okay then, if I give an order I want it done.” And I
have a few anecdotes like that because people didn’t want to do it...Women don’t know anything
here. That is the tradition, las mujeres no saben. Every once in a while I have that problem. So
once I remember one of the workers saying, “I’m not going to do it like that because I don’t know
183
of the jobs is also labor intensive in that they all require a large workforce. When Doña Mausi
began shifting to organic production the permanent work crew began growing quickly. As of
2010, there were approximately 250 permanent workers—all of which required a place to live.
The profits created by the certified coffee have yielded significant social improvements
on the farm. Without question, the improved homes for the permanent workers are the most
significant. Doña Mausi tries to remodel at least one home every year. The workers definitely
notice. Don Francisco worked as a capataz, supervisor, when I first visited La Hammonia in
2008. He started as seasonal worker and lived in one of the dorms. When he became a permanent
worker he was given a house. I spoke with him in the living room.
Ellos me asignaron una casita por alla. Y despues, decidieron reconstruir estas
casas y me trasladaron a esta. Y aquí estamos bien. Por lo menos aqui las
viviendas son bien comodas. Tienen sus cocinitas, cuarto, y luz. Su agua. Si pues,
aqui estamos comodos en esta casita. Ahorrita no hay luz [son como las dos de la
tarde], pero ellos lo hechan como a eso de las seis. Y la verdad es que yo me
siento comodo aqui en la finca.
73
Don Goyo was born on the farm. He has worked for three different owners and shared this about
the conditions under Doña Mausi,
Doña Mausi a hecho cambios de viviendas, a mejorado viviendas. Bueno, un
cambio que la gente que vive aqui [experiencia] como si fuera uno algo de Doña
Mausi [como familia], pero somos trabajadores. Entonces, son cambios muy
grande que hemos visto pues. Si estuviera Doña Le Claire, quien era la dueña de
aqui—Doña Mausi te puede comentar—pienso que no tuvieramos estas logras.
what Don Eddy is going to say.” So I took Don Eddy, “Tell him, if I give an order he has to do it.”
And then Don Eddy comes down and he says, “You know what, you better pay attention because
she tells me also what to do.” And then was just looking, not too happy with the answer. But it has
cost me a lot. I have spent many years, many years of frustration simply because I am a woman.
And I still do have it.
73
Interview by author, 26 May 2008. “They assigned me to a house over there. Then, they decided to
remodel these houses and they gave me this one. And we are good here. At least here the houses are real
comfortable. They have bedroom, a kitchen, electricity. Water. So yes, we are real comfortable here in this house.
There is no power right now [it is about two in the afternoon], but they turn it on around six. And truth is, I feel real
comfortable here on the farm.”
184
Una señora que bueno, pudo pensar en sus intereses pero no en los intereses
sociales de los trabajadores. Doña Mausi se preocupa por todos.
74
In addition to better living conditions, the workers have had access to education and
medical services. La Hammonia has a school and clinic on-site. Several of the workers have
learned to read at the school by taking classes in the evening. Don Francisco and Don Goyo both
received their high school certificates through the school. In addition to opportunities on the farm
everyone is encouraged to extend their agricultural practice by taking courses at nearby institutes
on the weekends. Once again, Don Francisco and Don Goyo as well as another capataz, Don
Enrique have taken advantage of Doña Mausi’s offer to support anyone who wants to take
classes.
75
Don Mario is the farm’s medic. His clinic is located next to the school. Workers have
free access to regular checkups and medical treatment for injuries that occur on the job. Women
workers have access to subsidized birth control, and both women and men have free access to
contraception. Vaccinations and treatment for illnesses are available at reduced costs, and always
as close to free as possible.
76
Yet herein lies a problem with certification when it is considered on
a larger scale. Locally, it appears to be extremely beneficial for the workers because it is.
74
Interview by author, 20 July 2010. “Doña Mausi has made a lot of changes to the houses, improving
living conditions. This is a change that the people who live here [experience] as if they were something [as in
family] to Doña Mausi, but we are workers. Therefore, these are big changes we are seeing. If Doña Le Claire was
still here—she was the owner before Doña Mausi, she can tell you about her—I don’t think we’d see these
improvements. She was a a woman who had her own interests in mind at all times, but not the social conditions of
the workers. Doña Mausi cares about everyone.” Doña Mausi also uses the profits to lend money to some of the
workers who want to purchase land, or a home, or repair a home. During one of our conversation she told me about
how she is always willing to lend from the farm’s profits. “I think that the workers feel comfortable. They come here
with problems, mostly monetary problems, they want to buy a house, or they want to fix their house and they want
to borrow money to buy materials. I mean this year [2010] I have over 70,000 cordobas on borrowed money for
houses and land for the workers. That’s a lot. For us here, that’s a lot of money. You have a lot of workers here who
have bought a piece of land or a house. It’s like a loan in the U.S. But you know what, I don’t charge any interest.
And they know I don’t charge any interest. I lose money with every money I lend simply because their is a money
devaluation that happens every year. Plus, the interest I have to pay because I have to borrow money somewhere
else to be able to compensate for the rest of my year because I don’t make it.”
75
Interviews by author, 26 May 2008 and 20 July 2010.
76
Don Mario told me how the person who was employed as the medic before him sold birth control,
vaccines, over the counter pain relievers, and other basic supplies like bandages to the workers above cost and
pocketed the difference. He told me a story about how one of the women workers approached him when he first
arrived to pay off a balance she had accrued. He looked at her confused and told her she had no balance, that there is
no charge for a checkup. Interview by author, 29 July 2010.
185
Globally, it re-centers industrialized and financialized countries as the movers of history while
maintaining the hegemony of financialized capitalism—present in the international coffee market
in the form of certification—and making it appear more benign by hiding behind a school and
clinic.
Another positive social side effect for the workers is access to substantial food during
meal times and additional food around the farm and on small parcels next to their homes.
Speaking about the difference in nutrition on the farm, Don Enrique commented,
Hay unas diferencias entre una finca y otra finca. En cuanto la comida, tambien
hay diferencia porque a pesar de todo, dan un poquito mejor a las doce. En otra
finca no te regalan ni un huevo. Otras fincas te tiran los frijolitos y el arroz todo
la semana pero no se acuerdan de darle un huevo a la persona, y aqui se da eso.
Antes era mejor, ahorra casi no. Yo me acuerdo que casi siempre dieron carne.
Ahorra casi no dan, pero siempre dan algo a las doce.
77
Workers are also able to harvest food from any of the plants on the grounds that are not set aside
specifically for the hotel. On every occasion that I worked with a cuadrillo or the lab crew the
workers gathered food on the job.
78
Bananas, guavas, soy, and other fruit grow all over the farm
and provide sustenance between meals. The houses the workers live in have small parcels on
which they can grow food—and many do. Several barter or sell their goods to each other.
Although sustainable and organic production has improved the social infrastructure on the farm
and benefited the workers, many question the move away from conventional production.
Recently, Doña Mausi and Chico have also begun to question the switch to organic production.
Reflections on Certified Production
77
Interview by author, 29 July 2010. “There are differences from one farm to another. Regarding food there
are also differences because in spite of everything they always give us a bigger meal at lunch. At other farms they
don’t even give you an egg. Other farms will give you rice and beans but won’t consider giving you even an egg.
Here you at least get that. Before it was better, now not as much. I remember that they almost always gave us meat.
Now they rarely give it to us, but they always give us a bigger meal at lunch.”
78
Although this did make me think about the literature on how workers on other farms acquired illnesses
communicatively by eating on the job.
186
All the workers at La Hammonia are concerned about the reduced yields that accompany
organic production. As I mentioned in chapter two, switching from conventional to organic
growing methods shocks the plant and dramatically decreases the amount it yields. Chico
described the difficulty some neighbors had when they tried to make the switch.
Al fin de los 90s vino el boom de café organico. Ubo personas que se pasaron
directamente de químico a producir organicamente. Ahorra, ellos bajaron la
produccion de treinta, cuarenta quintales [por manzana] a cuatro. Entonces no
pudieron recuperar su dinero y tuvieron que dejar perder el café. Por los
costos.
79
The noticeable drop in coffee caught the attention of several capatazes, including Don Enrique.
La finca es organica y tiene café convencional. Cuando nosotros hablamos del
punto de vista nosotros vemos que la finca organica no te produce igual. Hay un
cambio. Se ve que no te produce igual porque no es los mismo aplicar el químico
que aplicar el organico. Ese [chemical] si le llega a la planta, pero si nosotros le
aplicamos un poco de mierda de baca o otra cosa, eso no. Son minimas las
cantidades que absorba lo que es la tierra, las raíces pues. Por eso una planta si
vos la mantenes organica no te va producir igual. Ahorrita aquí hay una finca
por el lado…Emilia. Esa finca la estaba trabajando organico. Y cuando vieron
que no producieron sembraron el café de nuevo y le aplicaron químico. Esa finca
va producir de nuevo. Entonces, esos son los cambios que se ve en una finca
organica y una finca convencional. No es lo mismo producir con un fertilizante
que producir con organico.
80
When asked how he would grow if he had a coffee farm, Don Enrique answered without
hesitation that he would do so conventionally. It is easier, quicker, and yields more. For most
producers, quantity is prioritized over quality and that is the environment most workers in the
region are accustomed to. Workers do not see the connection between higher prices for higher
79
Interview by author, 12 July 2010. “At the end of the 1990s the organic coffee boom came. There were
people who moved directly from chemical to organic production. Now, they reduced in production from thirty, forty
quintales [per manzana] to four. Therefore they were unable to recuperate their money and had to leave the coffee
to rot. Due to costs.
80
Interview by author, 29 July 2010. “The farm is organic but has conventional coffee also. When one talks
from our point of view we can see that an organic farm does not produce the same. There is a change. One can
notice that it does not yield the same because applying chemicals and applying organic material is not the same. The
chemicals go straight to the root, but if we put some cow shit or something else it does not work the same. The
amount absorbed by the land, by the roots is minimal. That is why if you maintain organic plants, they will not
produce the same. Right now there is another farm close by…Emilia. That farm was producing organically. When
they saw that it was not producing the same, they replanted everything and applied chemicals. That farm is going to
produce again. Those are the big differences you can see between an organic and conventional farm. It is not the
same to produce with a fertilizer [chemical] and organically.”
187
quality crops and better working and living conditions. Neither do they see the connection
between lower prices for lower quality crops and poor working and living conditions.
Regardless, the workers are not the only ones who are concerned for the future of the farm. For
Doña Mausi, the decreasing yields are the most recent reason to question whether she will
continue certifying the farm.
Increased surveillance, proliferating certification programs, and decreasing yields are the
reasons Doña Mausi is at a crossroads about whether or not she will renew her certifications.
What began as a way to help her daughter’s business and get a small premium has become
increasingly maddening. At first, Doña Mausi used the external auditors to her advantage, using
their impending visits to get workers to do tasks they might not otherwise.
At the beginning I used to like it when they came because they used to make the
workers’ lives miserable. Because they were afraid of them. We used to tell Goyo,
“Goyo, esa silla esta mal puesta. Rainforest no la va aceptar.” “Hijole, okay.” So
he would move it not because I’m telling him I don’t like the chair there, but
because Rainforest is going to say something. So they were afraid of Rainforest
and I loved it, because everything that I didn’t like, “Ay, va venir Rainforest y me
va decir algo por eso.” It was my uy-yuy-yuy. “Uy-yuy-yuy te van a decir algo.”
Because they would be afraid them. They still are. Don Goyo is already shaking.
81
However, the reach of colonial power as exercised and extended through certification agencies is
becoming too much for Doña Mausi to ignore. According to her, it would be one thing if
Rainforest Alliance or BioLatina—the agency that certifies the farm as organic—would be clear
about the requirements and changes needed at each audit. However, they never are.
When Rainforest Alliance comes, they certify as a whole, not as a coffee farm. So
they look at the roaster. What does the roaster have to do with the coffee itself? It
is part of the farm so it must be included. On the roaster we use methane, but we
also use diesel. So, it had a diesel drum on the back. Okay, perfect. On one
inspection they said, this drum should not be on the floor. So we tell Armando,
this diesel drum cannot be on the floor. He said, “Oh that’s good, we can left it up
and then lay it down.” Because then it’s easier for him to get the diesel out from
there....Next inspection. “That diesel drum doesn’t have a fence?” Okay, we put
81
Interview by author, 5 August 2010.
188
up a fence. Next inspection. “No sign?” Fourth inspection. A roof. And we still
have not had one that has come and said, “Now you are okay.” Because on
another one they wanted a ditch around it that will contain the 55 gallon drum
because they put it up and at least 55 gallons have to fit on the floor. We still
haven’t received an okay for that. But why do they come and give you all these
requirements. It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating never getting a straight answer.
82
Rainforest Alliance keeps on moving the target Doña Mausi must meet. In so doing, it is ensures
a steady flow of income from the auditing process and its own existence. It also exercises control
over La Hammonia’s agricultural practices and physical landscape.
The proliferation of labels on the certification landscape is further complicating Doña
Mausi’s thoughts on whether or not to continue certifying. Mentioned in chapter two, there are
more and more labels appearing every year—and the prospect is disillusioning Doña Mausi.
Oh yeah, you have them calling like the banks with a new credit card everywhere,
that’s exactly what it is. They call you on the phone and they say, “You know,
you should have this one. Because our’s is this and that. And it is now the one that
is in demand because Europe does not accept BioLatina. They say [Europe] that
they are not complying with regulations, so you need this one.” And it’s
ridiculous. I tell them, “No. I’m sorry. I don’t care. They don’t like it, I don’t care,
I don’t sell to Europe.” It gives me a headache. It gives me a headache knowing
that they are going to come [the auditors]. In the beginning I used to go with them
to all the inspections. Now I don’t go anymore because I get an ulcer.
83
The same processes of financializing and financialized capitalism that are producing myriad
securities and insurance options is producing a vast array of certifications—pieces of paper that
extract value from labor and pass it along to a certifying agency. Doña Mausi believes that
certification started as a good idea. However, “they’ve become commercials. All they want is
money, money, money.”
84
As of 2010, Doña Mausi planned on maintaining organic certification
through 2013 as per her contract with Allegro Coffee. After this year, she is not sure. She is
looking to the future and other ways to remain viable. This is not to say that she is going to
change the way she operates the farm. She will continue running the farm the same way, just
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
189
without the certification. Whether she re-certifies or not she will reduce organic production on
the farm from 100 manzanas to closer to 80. The main reason being that the farm simply does
not make enough fertilizer for the 100 currently in production. It is a small move, but one that
will significantly reduce organic costs.
The Future of La Hammonia
Chico Kühl is getting ready to take over for his father. According to Doña Mausi he
deserves the position. He studied at great agricultural schools, has put in time on the farm, and he
has been patient. Chico Kühl also has some ideas for how to ensure the farm remains solvent into
the foreseeable future. They begin with increasing the profile of organic Selva Negra coffee.
Yo espero que en el futuro Doña Mausi pueda hacer eso...de vender la marca de
café Selva Negra como café especial. Porque yo te digo, mira muchas fincas de
San Juan de Rio Coco, son cooperativas y ellos tienen como tres sellos y por cada
sello le pagan un incluso. Puede ser de diez a quince dolares todo sobre la bolsa
de Nueva York. Entonces porque no vender el café aqui con eso, y por cada sello
te pagan eso. Lo que voz no ganas en produccion lo ganas en precio...Y al vez
uno, estas haciendo mejor manejo de los recursos de la finca; dos, reducir la
contaminacion; tercero, mejorar las condiciones de los trabajadores y tener un
buen mercado; cuarto, reducir la aplicacion de plagicidias, reducir riezgo de
salud de los trabajadores.
85
Recent developments in specialty coffee are moving away from certification—sustainable,
organic, and/or fair trade—and towards direct trade and regional specialization. In the same way
that wine is recognized for where it comes from, specialty coffee growers are trying to reproduce
regional specialization. Nicaragua is late to all of this. Antigua in Guatemala, Tarrazú in Costa
Rica, and San Marcos in Honduras have already established reputations in the coffee market.
Regarding this shift Chico stated, “Eso seria bueno porque le traeria como un status especial al
85
Interview by author, 12 July 2010. “I hope that in the future Doña Mausi does that, sell the Selva Negra
brand as a specialty brand. I mean look, many farms in San Juan de Rio Coco are cooperatives and they have like
three grades of seals and each seal commands a different price. It could be ten or fifteen dollars above the exchange
in New York. So why not do that here? What you don’t earn in production you make up in price. And at the same
time: first, you are being a better steward of the farm’s resources; second, you are reducing contamination; third, you
are improving the workers’ conditions; and fourth, you are reducing the use of pesticides and reducing the health
risks of workers.”
190
café.”
86
A family business through and through, Doña Mausi is also looking to her daughters to
help keep La Hammonia viable.
In 2003, Heddy, Doña Mausi’s third daughter, opened JavaVino Coffee and Wine House
in Atlanta. Located in the city’s Poncey Heights neighborhood, JavaVino serves Selva Negra
coffee as its house coffee. When it first opened, the store served beans roasted the same way Don
Pablo does at the La Hammonia roaster. Over the years, Heddy and her husband Steve have
developed their own blends and roasts using Selva Negra beans. Their Derty Nekkid coffees are
sold in-house as well as at local Whole Foods stores as part of their regional sales program.
87
In
addition to selling Selva Negra roasted coffee in-store and using Selva Negra beans as the base
for their own blends, Heddy and Steve also serve as distributors for the farm’s coffee in the
Southeast U.S. In a bold reversal, as co-owner with her daughter and son-in-law Doña Mausi is
trying to integrate forward, from the farm to retail end. She is trying to integrate up a coffee
commodity chain.
88
Family efforts to help the business do not stop there. In fact, they extend
back to Matagalpa.
Doña Mausi is also looking to the hotel to help sustain La Hammonia in the event that the
farm’s profit margins continue to shrink. For several years in the early 21
st
century, La
Hammonia subsidized Selva Negra. However, the relationship may soon be switched. Karen, the
second daughter, is planning to move down from New York and overhaul the hotel. She has an
advanced degree in Hospitality and Hotel Services and is hoping to turn Selva Negra into a
destination eco-lodge. In other words, Doña Mausi is trying to diversify to avoid tying the farm’s
86
Ibid. “That would be good because it would bring a special status to the coffee.”
87
Interview with Heddy Kühl by author, 29 May 2011.
88
This is quite the opposite of large retailers who consolidate through backwards integration, by slowly
acquiring production sites. See chapter two on private labels and the role they play in the contemporary certification
landscape.
191
future solely to the international coffee market and/or certification programs. According to Doña
Mausi, the goal is not to accrue wealth but to be happy:
See we are not big money people. We aren’t like, ‘Let’s make a million dollars!
Yeah!’ For what? You know, you are not taking anything with you when you die.
At least live happy. And this makes us all happy. It hurts a lot when people see
you, especially among the workers, and they think you have a lot of money. If
they would only see the numbers they would realize it’s not like that.
89
Having seen the numbers, it is safe to say that it is not like that. But, as Doña Mausi also admits,
neither are they poor. But she knows, and the workers know, that without diversification of
revenue sources the farm is one bad harvest away from once again being in financial trouble on
the precipice of default.
* * * * *
This is the life of a farm producing in the twilight of certification beholden to colonial
power expressed through a financialized capitalism that extends the reach of the logic of
coloniality. More than a century after U.S. colonial power expressed through appropriation of
land and violence brought first a transit system and then coffee to Nicaragua, colonial power
expressed through financializing capitalism confines and bears down on La Hammonia to limit
its possibilities of being. In spite of this, it is remarkable to find glimpses of what living
otherwise could look like: democratized and common knowledge, educational opportunities,
health care, usury-free loans that amount to the redistribution of financial resources, and eating
from what is at hand. The important issue to remember of places like La Hammonia that are
simultaneously utopic and dystopic, alternatively communal and private, just and unjust, is that
in the current moment of financializing capitalism they can only be stops along the way towards
more utopic and communal and just places we make by undoing the places capitalism makes—
89
Interview by author, 5 August 2010.
192
La Hammonia included. If we do not, if we continue to inhabit a slightly more comfortable place
structured by colonial power, we cannot be free.
193
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Serrano, Orlando R.
(author)
Core Title
Colonial brews: café and power in the Américas
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
American Studies and Ethnicity
Publication Date
05/08/2014
Defense Date
05/08/2014
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
anticolonial,critical geography,ethnography,food studies,Globalization,Latin American studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,political economy,transnationalism
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Pulido, Laura (
committee chair
), Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (
committee member
), Gomez-Barris, Macarena (
committee member
), Terriquez, Veronica (
committee member
)
Creator Email
orlandorserrano@gmail.com,oserrano@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-412762
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UC11295771
Identifier
etd-SerranoOrl-2505.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-412762 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-SerranoOrl-2505.pdf
Dmrecord
412762
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Serrano, Orlando R.
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
anticolonial
critical geography
ethnography
food studies
Latin American studies
political economy
transnationalism