| Costa Rica offers an excellent case study due to its historically distinctive democracy, nationalist tradition, and unique economic development, all aspects historically intertwined with coffee production in this country. This study examines the current situation of coffee producers and the coffee industry, both of which operate under the guidelines of the global commodity chain (GCC), a global trading mechanism that creates power and income disparities among the different actors involved. Fair trade has emerged as an alternative to the GCC with the potential to offer social, economic, and environmental benefits to coffee producers and their communities. This dissertation questions whether fair trade can offer an alternative model of development for coffee producers in Costa Rica in the era of globalization.; Cooperatives can be sites of progressive and social empowerment and the fair trade movement, sharing many of these goals, alternatively markets their products. Drawing upon primary and secondary data, including field research and interviews, this research project examines the nine cooperative members of the consortium COOCAFE from two different angles: first, as cooperatives that offer benefits for its members; second, as fair trade cooperatives that offer fair trade advantages not available to any other coffee cooperative in Costa Rica outside the consortium. A wide spectrum of cooperative and fair trade cooperative attributes and services are examined. The study, moving beyond this initial set of criteria, further examines two issues: environmental sustainability and gender.; Ecological issues that derive from coffee production, such as deforestation, water and soil pollution, and loss of biodiversity are examined to determine if the cooperatives do indeed maintain sustainability while producing coffee, following fair trade criteria. Also, this dissertation addresses the absence of women in the literature of agriculture and development, and examines the role/s that women involved in the cooperatives have in the production of fair trade coffee and the extent to which fair trade benefits women in particular.; The study concludes that fair trade, as an alternative trading mechanism, has the potential to counterbalance the detrimental outcomes produced by neoliberal free market policies by deconstructing the notion of development and re-designing global trade systems, making small producers more relevant in the global commodity market. |
