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