ABSTRACT
“Great coffee is this amazing miracle . . . its warm deliciousness in the morning transforms even the most rough-edged of us into intelligent, sparkling, upstanding men and women.” This quote, from Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee, illustrates the love affair people all over the world have with coffee. As we enjoy our morning cup of coffee, few of us think beyond the wonderful aroma of fresh coffee and the transformation that is about to take place in our mind and body as the caffeine kicks in. Few of us reflect on the fact that embedded in that delicious cup of coffee is a fascinating tale of global trade that starts on a farm somewhere in the tropics, travels across the ocean and ends up in our kitchen or neighborhood coffee shop. What happens in between is an amazing story of ingenuity, exploitation and resistance of both humans and nature and the interactions among them. In their book The Coffee Paradox, Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte examine the trajectory from the bean to the cup, tracing the coffee value chain once the bean leaves the farm. 1 They ponder how we ended up in the paradoxical situation in which there is on the one hand usually a low stock of coffee and on the other hand usually low prices paid to farmers who produce it. They cast their analysis as a particularly interesting example of a more general world pattern.
