Coffee has been linked to the word “development” since the early days of the post-colonial era, and with increased popularity in our search for a sustainable coffee industry. So why do the majority of smallholder farmers fuelling this sector persist in poverty?
We sat down with Nora Burkey, founder of The Chain Collaborative (TCC), an NGO working on grassroots, community-led development in coffee-producing regions, to better understand where we as a global community often have been going wrong.
The conventional approach
When the majority of sustainability projects have been designed around the opinions of the Global North, we should start asking ourselves “Who is this development for?”
Nora came across this dilemma early on in her career while working on microfinance programmes with women in Nicaraguan cooperatives, and identified a common gap:
“That programme was designed by a non-profit foreign entity in some way in collaboration with local cooperatives, but not defined by [the women] that were going to receive the loans. There [exists] a gap in the coffee industry — there is a difference between investing in projects designed by a company or non-profit, and projects designed by beneficiaries themselves.”
So Nora started a non-profit to directly address this, and engage other industry actors in doing the same. TCC was born to change the narrative of “the Global North knows best” and prove that it is possible to build more equitable and sustainable communities with beneficiaries at the helm of their own initiatives.
But the industry is focusing now more than ever on forming a connection with farmers. This must mean that we’re moving away from this conventional top-down approach…right?
Well, it might actually be one of the ways that the sector falls short in effectively creating an impact.
“There is this false assumption [in the coffee industry] that simply communicating with farmers means you are working on community led development. There is a distinction between development which is supposed to benefit the community and community-led development which is led by the community itself.”
So even though we are seeing a movement toward waiting to drive local empowerment across the industry, what are we then missing in this shift to ensure it is meaningful?
Coffee and politics
Context. We commonly romanticize the “local community”, underestimating the effects of inequalities and power dynamics within, while also isolating this theoretical local group from larger political and economic structures. How do we address this? For Nora, finding an answer has been a major learning experience throughout her years working with coffee-producing communities. Her solution: value alignment.
“We try to have an open conversation to understand how our partners [who are local leaders] engage their community in decision making and what their relationship with the community is. It comes down to value alignment. Just working with someone in another part of the world doesn’t mean you have a community-led approach or are not reproducing the same power dynamics or driving empowerment. I can be working with a producer in El Salvador, but maybe this producer behaves in a colonial mentality toward others. Assuming that is not possible takes agency away from producers. Our approach then is to look for people with the same values, who have the same definition of community-led development that we do.”
Beyond power dynamics, humanizing “the local” involves understanding the intersectionalities at play — which groups face more barriers and exclusion than others, and how do we break those barriers down?
Well-intentioned technical approaches can only get us so far if we don’t understand the full story. Nora gives an example of one underestimated factor in technical solutions — gender inequality:
“I’m working on a project currently that will train farmers to use a tool to measure and reward them for the carbon capture in their soil…Often farms are male-owned, but what if women are responsible for the activities that actually improve carbon capture such as pruning and residue management? If we don’t consider the gender aspect to this, what we may see happening is payment and training being directed to men for carbon capture they are not responsible for.”
Another overlooked component of intersectionality is language, which can reduce the accessibility of conversations in our sector and stunt shared learning, especially in growing movements such as conversations surrounding colonialism in coffee.
“I am worried that this sort of activism around colonialism that we are seeing today in the coffee sector, while important, is way too US focused and English-speaking focused… I think conversations around diversity and inclusion look very different for example to our partners in Uganda and Ecuador, and they need to have equal opportunity to share their perspective. ”
Who decides what sustainability tastes like?
Biases when it comes to language can also seep into conversations about our palette. In the buyer-driven value chain of the specialty coffee industry, actors in the Global North often determine what is seen as valuable in terms of taste and therefore quality.
Nora reflects on her learnings from the (Un)Learning Club, a series she supported the management of that works to deconstruct colonialism in coffee amongst white coffee professionals in the US:
“[Namisha Parthasarathy, a Indian coffee professional]… led a talk on the flavour wheel and how it’s quite colonial in its approach. Thinking about this from an Indian perspective, she noted that a lot of the flavours that are described as “bad” are actually coveted flavours in the Indian palette.”
This really prompts us to think about how we’ve been taught to allocate value in taste profiles, and how we choose to approach this going forward. In a time where we’re seeing a boost in specialty coffee consumption in producing regions, the issue of devaluing the tastes of different groups and the way they consume coffee should be especially critical.
These preferences also have a direct effect on farmer livelihoods. With the specialty coffee industry led by the preferences of buyers and consumers outside of the countries where coffee is produced, farmer livelihoods become dependent on the priorities dictated by these consuming countries. If we are looking to make a positive impact on farmers’ lives, we can’t overlook the effect of these preferences on their businesses, and whether they align with their vision for development.
These social biases, like taste and who knows best, often directly lead into even more economic inequalities, showing up through ownership of both the quality conversation and productive resources for coffee held by the Global North, with limited access to credit for local communities to take ownership of moving the sector forward.
So where do we start?
We’re seeing that there are quite a lot of complexities here that often go overlooked. So how do businesses start effectively working toward more inclusion, and what does it look like? Nora suggests understanding your own capabilities and strengths:
“Businesses should focus on the diversity and anti-colonial mindset that they are able to cultivate. Set up their boundaries, because it’s impossible to solve all the problems. You should have a diverse business in whatever way is possible… not just looking at sourcing but for example at the company internally. “
Development can be easy to critique but tends to fall short in its execution. As we’re seeing from this conversation, a missing factor that is common to traditional and modern approaches is who is included in these conversations. If development is to be described as human-centered, it should seem obvious that those affected should be the ones to lead this discourse.
To take a step in the right direction, it starts by inviting more perspectives to the table. In our global coffee community, we have the opportunity to experience incredible diversity — it’s up to us to start by listening.
TCC provides a number of avenues to become educated on these issues. Check out their fellowship options here, and visit their website to learn more about TCC’s projects and how you can be involved!
