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Quality Revolutions, Solidarity Networks, And Sustainability Innovations: Following Fair Trade Coffee From Nicaragua To California, Christopher M. Bacon
Quality Revolutions, Solidarity Networks, And Sustainability Innovations: Following Fair Trade Coffee From Nicaragua To California, Christopher M. Bacon
Environmental Studies and Sciences
Nicaraguan smallholder cooperative leaders working in partnership with a California-based small-scale roasting company pioneered an alternative approach to confronting the post-1999 coffee crisis. They built coffee tasting laboratories and integrated grassroots organizing efforts to create a national smallholder cooperative association that dramatically improved the quality, consistency, and prices from of the coffee they exported. Cooperative leaders used this development project to gain a more significant share of political economic power in a domestic coffee industry historically dominated by colonial powers, and corporate and domestic elites. This alliance between the artisanal small-scale roasting companies and cooperative leaders also proved that smallholders …