Trading in Crisis: Coffee, Ecological Rift, and Ecologically Unequal Exchange

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 06. Agriculture

Abstract

Belying its ubiquity, the humble coffee bean is one of the most important commodities in the world. It is debatably the second most traded commodity after petroleum and its production has significant environmental impacts. In this paper, I focus on the spread of “technified” coffee production during the 1970s and 80s and its social and ecological impacts. Technified coffee is the application of industrial agricultural models to coffee production, which had until the 1970s resisted the logic of full-fledged industrial agriculture. I argue that technification during the 1970s and 80s intensified exploitative trade relationships between coffee consumers in the global North and producers in the global South by perpetuating coffee as a mechanism of ecologically unequal exchange. I then use the concept of “ecological rift” developed by Foster, Clark, and York (2010) to explain this shift, arguing that coffee production demonstrates a fruitful conceptual link between the theories of ecologically unequal exchange and ecological rift. Each highlights the convergence between the social and the ecological in complementary ways.

Author

• Alexander J. Myers, University of Kansas