Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Maya Farmers (review)

This study by a knowledgeable student and ardent advocate of alternative development paths for indigenous groups in southern Mexico presents a unique window on the profound contradictions between the standards of North American positivistic scholarship and politically committed social involvement by those same academics. Martinez-Torres offers a first-hand account of the emergence of coffee producer cooperatives in indigenous communities in Chiapas. Her field work, spanning more than five-years including the beginning of the Zapatista uprising in 1994, traces the consolidation of local organizations, the flourishing of ecologically sound production technologies, and the opening of fair trade marketing channels that created opportunities for the participants to assume direct control of their production systems, strengthening their communities and improving the quality of their lives.

The analysis applies the twin concepts of natural and social capital to show that communities engaged in the cultivation and marketing of organic coffee are more likely to advance than communities using traditional or modern productive systems. To do so, she traces the formation of some of the groups that emerged following the closure of the official Mexican coffee organization and the International Coffee Agreement. Concluding on an optimistic note, she suggesting that those communities adopting this new approach, involving state of the art technologies and collaboration with international marketing organizations committed to promoting solidarity strategies with consumers in the richer countries, are likely to prosper more than those choosing the more "orthodox" route involving intensive applications of agrochemicals and bank financing.

Even while heartily recommending the book for readers interested in alternative strategies for community organization and survival, I lament the uncritical use of concepts like natural and social capital employed by the international development community to mystify and disembowel the complex political and cultural processes that account for the successful emergence of strong peasant and indigenous organizations still struggling for their survival. By placing these concepts at the center of her work, the author has unwittingly reified the underlying social mechanisms. In this book the author emphasizes the way in which social capital led to a redistribution of benefits to and the assumption of political power by some of the indigenous participants, but she does not discuss the way in which class divisions and power relations within the communities and the regions get played out; similarly, natural capital might be synthesized as a quantification of objects rather than as an ecosystem that has many intrinsic non-economic values. Martinez' story centers on the productive potential of organic production that could only be adopted by close-knit communities that emerge from shared ethnic and cultural backgrounds and common struggles against the economic and political oppression in Mexico. But her explanation does not focus on the intense struggles that occasioned great suffering and cost many lives in the communities.

As is evident from the Acknowledgements and the dedicatory tributes to her local collaborators and to the Korean peasant leader whose self-immolation left a deep mark on many of us who were in Cancun in 2003, Martinez-Torres was deeply committed to the social and political struggles in this region even before she began graduate studies. This book reflects the seriousness with which she assimilated the wealth of theoretical and applied materials from her courses. She focuses on the productive outcomes of alternative strategies, quantifying the results and searching for statistically significant social and geographic relationships to understand the dynamics of the coffee sector in Chiapas. She worked with leading scholars, many of whom share her political commitments in a search for more effective pathways to social and material betterment while protecting their ecosystems.

This book offers a treasure trove of material that will inform future generations of students about the benefits and difficulties of organic cultivation. But these readers should have been warned about the profound corruption that tragically continues to oppress coffee producers, the World Bank's role in creating a glut on world markets (and...