Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain (review)

The current culture of contemporary coffee consumption in the United States, aptly symbolized by Starbuck's status as one of "the world's most recognized brands," may be partly responsible for the spate of recent scholarship on coffee. Or perhaps it reflects interest in the sociological meaning and implications of movements for ethical consumption, among which campaigns for fair trade coffee are the most prominent. Whatever the reason, this body of work is greatly enriched by the publication of John Talbot's thoughtful book about this much-studied commodity.

Grounds for Agreement is driven by a clear set of theoretical questions about how to understand and analyze the mechanisms through which patterned inequality is reproduced in the world economy and to what extent these mechanisms change over time. For Talbot, coffee represents a broader category of "tropical commodities" which, because of their ecology, necessarily flow from the global South to the global North, making them particularly interesting for students of development (as well as prime targets for activists). Arrighi's systemic cycles of accumulation, Polanyi's double movements and Friedmann and McMichael's food regimes all inform an analysis firmly rooted in the world-systems tradition, but Talbot's primary engagement is with the commodity chains approach, first articulated by Hopkins and Wallerstein and elaborated as the global commodity chain (GCC) framework by Gary Gereffi and others. Talbot analyzes the political economy of the coffee commodity chain to show how its governance structure – the rules, regulations and relations of power that determine how activities and profits are organized and divided among different actors along the chain – changed over the course of the past 60 years, mostly to the detriment of the approximately 20 million people whose livelihood depends on coffee.

In the third through fifth chapters, Talbot recounts the rise and demise of the International Coffee Agreements (ICAs), which regulated the coffee trade for the better part of three decades. The coalescence of several factors resulted in the breakdown of the regime during the 1980s, including an oversupply problem that was partly rooted in the way the ICAs had allocated quota among growing countries, but also reflected the increased crop yields generated by "technification" programs, particularly in Latin America. The end of the Cold War gave the consuming countries, which had always seen the ICAs as disguised aid to the coffee-growing countries, less geopolitical reason to support them, and a reorganization of policymaking within the U.S. government that transferred jurisdiction over coffee policy from the State Department to the office of the United States Trade Representative further weakened support for the ICAs in the world's largest coffee consuming country. Meanwhile solidarity among growing countries gave way to a sense of competition among the coffee states, as many sought to increase exports under the aegis of structural adjustment programs.

The rest of the book analyzes events after the end of the last ICA in 1989. A methodologically innovative seventh chapter introduces a needed level of rigor into commodity chain analysis by quantifying the distribution of profit along the chain and showing how much of the consumer's "coffee dollar" returns to the exporting country. This analysis, which makes excellent use of data that is admittedly (if regrettably) much less available for most other products, vividly demonstrates what is at stake in the often abstract discussion of chain governance. The upshot is that since the demise of the ICAs, the profitability of multinational coffee roasters increased significantly, in large part because wholesale prices have remained relatively stable despite a dramatic and sustained drop in the world market price of green coffee beans. This decline is having a profoundly negative impact on many coffee-producing communities however, with growers earning an average of about 41 cents per year for each coffee tree they tend.

Is "sustainable coffee" the solution? Talbot poses this question near the end of the book, when he traces the rise of...