Solidarity Interrupted: Coffee, Cooperatives, and Certification Conflicts in Mexico and Nicaragua

Abstract

Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican coffee-producing cooperatives to understand the effects of certification regimes that undergird many ethical commodity networks today. The essay uses a labor-centric conception of solidarity to demonstrate that the pressures and demands created by certifications intended to generate more just outcomes can also strain existing solidarities that bind cooperatives together.

Key Words:

• Cooperatives
• Ethical Commodity Networks
• Fair Trade
• Mesoamerica
• Solidarity

Notes

1 For examples of research on farmer and worker solidarity in ethical commodity networks, see Besky (2014), Bacon (2013), Sen (2017), Lyon (2010), Mutersbaugh (2002a), Naylor (2018), and Wilson (2013).

2 These organizations in Latin America are known by their acronyms UCIRI (Unión de Comunidades Indígenas de la Región del Istmo), CEPCO (Coordinadora Estatal de Productores de Café de Oaxaca), PRODECOOP (Promotora de Desarrollo Cooperativo de Las Segovias), and CECOCAFEN (La Central de Cooperativas Cafetaleras del Norte).

3 Villagers engage in frequent, local-level litigation in order to establish and arbitrate the norms that govern social practice (Nader 1990), and they employ the usos y costumbres management structure that features the use of cargos (administrative positions) and tequios (a corvée labor tax) to organize village and household production (Mutersbaugh 2002). By codifying and policing local norms, this litigiousness keeps disputes local and minimizes incidents of intervention by extralocal authorities and in so doing protects each village’s political autonomy.

4 As Rus (1994) points out, this village autonomy has been further secured since the Nicaraguan Revolution by means of clientalist relationships in which peasant communities exchange their vota verde (peasant vote) in return for access to state-managed resources and political autonomy.

5 To be clear, we do not intend to suggest that solidarity relations are primordial or romantic but rather that they are crucial to the reproduction of trust in local-level organizations.