University College London

Graduate Student, Anthropology

Thesis Title: Global Markets, Local Engagments: Producing Certified Coffee in Oaxaca, Mexico

Supervisors: Nanneke Redclift
Barrie Sharpe

About

My thesis investigates production-side engagements with Fair Trade and Organic certification schemes in Oaxaca, Mexico.  Setting out to better understand how certification ‘works’ in producer communities and how norms and standards are negotiated, I endeavour to keep coffee producing households, their concerns, and their perspectives at the centre of a wider exploration of commodity certification schemes, the elaboration of global standards, and ‘global’ economic processes and markets. 
At the heart of the thesis is a case study of the small, producer organization ‘La Sociedad’ (pseudonym) which organizes the production of coffee within seven small pueblos in the Sierra Sur/Costa Region of Oaxaca, including the pueblo of ‘Cerro Zacate’, where the majority of my fieldwork was conducted.  Participation in ‘alternative’ markets to ensure producer livelihoods is one of the productive innovations that many producers from the pueblo have chosen.  This choice has not, as the thesis considers, been straightforward in its implications, and the intersections it forges between households, the organization and the wider community are continuously debated and reassessed.
By focusing on various households’ experiences with certified coffee production, my thesis examines the complexity of producer engagements both with modern, commodity provisioning structures and with ‘ideas’ that have global reach.  However, keeping ‘global’ processes as a context for ‘local’ occurrences, the study departs from much of the literature on certification schemes and alternative markets in that it seeks to move the starting point from the ‘global’ to the everyday experience of being a certified coffee producing household - in particular, focusing on the creation of 'home' and centrality of 'home' to production practices.  This ‘local-centric’ approach, firmly situated in (but critical of) anthropological approaches to ‘peasants’ and neo-Marxist critiques of capitalist expansion in Latin America, deconstructs the notion of a ‘commodity chain’ or a ‘network’ that stretches from North to South.  Rather, it shows how social relations within the local, regional and state contexts remain the primary reference points for producers in understanding new markets and ideas about producer-consumer links. 
Certification norms and alternative market structures elicit contradictory and varied reactions from producer households and generate new understandings of ‘the world’ and their place in it.  Indeed, compliance with ever increasing ‘standards’ for production and administration necessitated by ‘alternative’ production poses a set of problems whose solving necessitates transformations in power and political organisation in all spheres of social life.  For producers of coffee, ‘certification’ is less about a ‘global system’ and more about their relations with each other and the immediate world around them. 

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