New Food First Backgrounder: Agroecology Saves the Farm (Where Fair Trade Failed)

New Food First Backgrounder examines the factors that helped some Costa Rican smallholders survive the global coffee crisis. 

Download this press release.

OAKLAND, Calif., December 11, 2014 – In July of 1989, the International Coffee Agreement (ICA)—an agreement between coffee producing and consuming countries that kept prices stable—collapsed.  With coffee providing a livelihood to over 100 million farmers worldwide, the coffee crisis became one of the biggest development disasters of the neoliberal era. Costa Rica was the Latin American country hardest hit by the crisis.

In the face of falling coffee prices and rising costs of production, many farmers abandoned coffee or migrated out of their rural regions. Between 1999 and 2009, the number of coffee producers in Costa Rica fell by 35 percent. In many places, land formerly used for coffee was converted to pasture, a land-use that damaged the soil so severely that it made future agriculture extremely difficult, if not impossible.

And yet, some Costa Rican farmers were able to stay on the land and maintain their farms in coffee production. In this new Backgrounder published by Oakland-based Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, agrarian scholar Nicholas Babin asks, why did some farmers abandon coffee production while others did not? How important were higher prices from access to Fair Trade markets? And what was the effect of agroecological practices in supporting small farmer persistence?

This Backgrounder argues that Fair Trade premiums did little to foster small farmer resilience. Rather, the adoption of agroecology played a significant role.

Based on Babin’s several years of field research in Agua Buena, Costa Rica, this Backgrounder argues that, in this region, Fair Trade premiums did little to foster small farmer resilience. Rather, the adoption of agroecology—supported by the state—played a significant role in helping farmers to keep their land in coffee production.

The implications of this research are far-reaching, demonstrating that markets alone—even Fair Trade markets—were not able to save small farms. The definitive factors in this case were low-external-input farming practices that reduced production costs and state support for conversion to agroecological farming.

Click here to read this Food First Backgrounder online and download it for free.

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