NEGOTIATING FAIRNESS: A FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF FAIR TRADE AND
ORGANIC COFFEE PRODUCTION IN MINAS GERAIS, BRAZIL
By
Rebecca Mari Meuninck

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Anthropology–Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
NEGOTIATING FAIRNESS: A FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF FAIR TRADE AND
ORGANIC COFFEE PRODUCTION IN MINAS GERAIS, BRAZIL
By
Rebecca Mari Meuninck
This dissertation uses a feminist political ecology approach to explore the “fairness” of
Fair Trade certification. I do this by examining the gendered social, economic, and
environmental impacts of Fair Trade at COOPFAM, a Fair Trade and organic certified coffee
cooperative in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Fair Trade is a third-party certification system that attempts
to address social and economic inequalities facing small-scale coffee farmers, through floor
prices and social development premiums. In return, it requires equitable labor practices,
adherence to environmental standards, and freedom of association and democratic decisionmaking within cooperatives. Fair Trade has grown over the past two decades, due to the
liberalization of global coffee markets, and an evolution of consumers’ desires which favor more
socially and environmentally just coffees. In light of this growth, it is critical to ask, how “fair” is
Fair Trade, is it equally fair for all farmers, and how do farmers perceive “fairness”?
I use multi-sited ethnographic techniques to explore the “fairness” of Fair Trade; I
followed the “thing” (coffee), and “the discourse” (the negotiation of fairness) along
COOPFAM’s international supply chain (Marcus 1995). I conducted interviews with and
participant observation among Brazilian Fair Trade farmers and cooperative administrators, as
well as foreign coffee buyers, Fair Trade activists, and certifiers. I then analyze the power
dynamics in the Fair Trade system at the local level in homes, at the meso level at the
cooperative, and at the macro level with their international partners.

I argue that Fair Trade is advantageous for COOPFAM and her farmers, because of the
assets they leveraged to overcome the common barriers that have stymied other cooperatives and
farmers from obtaining Fair Trade and organic certification. Through Fair Trade, COOPFAM
farmers enjoy access to international markets and networks of actors in the supply chain that
connect the cooperative with social and economic programs. Moreover, Fair Trade provides an
economic safety net for the farmers and the cooperative to experiment with novel production
practices, technologies, and emerging certification systems. However, through an examination of
COOPFAM’s experimentation with new certification systems, the challenges of applying global
standards to coffee production surface. Standards, first created to meet the needs of farmers in
one locale and the desires of consumers in foreign lands, do not always translate well to other
cultures and modes of production. Farmers and cooperatives negotiate these standards with
buyers and certifiers, but they are on unequal footing.
By examining Fair Trade through a gendered lens, we can see that the system is fairer for
some farmers than it is for others. Poorer farmers, those who live far away from the cooperative,
unmarried women, and widows are not as well served by the cooperative and may struggle to
produce enough high-quality coffee to support their families. My exploration of farmers’
livelihood strategies shows that Fair Trade coffee production alone is not sufficient to sustain
farming families. Rather, COOPFAM’s success and the sustainability of Fair Trade as a
production system are reliant on farming families’ diversity of livelihood strategies and continual
innovation to improve coffee quality.

Copyright by
REBECCA MARI MEUNINCK
2017

This dissertation is dedicated to extraordinary farming families of COOPFAM
who welcomed me into their homes, shared with me their love of the land,
and demonstrated their dedication to their craft

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am immensely grateful for the guidance and support I received from my dissertation
committee. My advisor, Laurie Medina, always challenged me to dig deeper into my analysis,
and supported my return to work after completing my fieldwork. Anne Ferguson has mentored
me academically and professionally for many years through my work with her at the Center for
Gender in Global Context. You have both been with me since the beginning and I am so thankful
for that. To Lucero Radonic and Paulette Stenzel, thank you for your willingness to jump into
this process toward the end and see this dissertation come to fruition. Respectively, you have
pushed me to improve my feminist analysis and better situate my research within the literature
on Fair Trade. My dissertation also bares the intellectual marks of former committee members,
no longer at Michigan State University, William Derman, Antoinette WinklerPrins, and Daniel
Jaffee, who all helped me shape my research objectives before I began my fieldwork.
My dissertation was made possible by generous funding from many sources, including:
U.S. Dept. of Education Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships; a Tinker Field Research
Grant; a MSU International Studies and Programs Pre-dissertation Research Grant; Gender,
Justice, and Environmental Change Dissertation Fellowship; Cal Rapson UAW Fellowships; and
a U.S. Dept. of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award.
There would be no dissertation without the support and collaboration of my friends at
COOPFAM. You shared your stories about farming and Fair Trade with me and I hope I can do
justice by them. I am eternally grateful for your partnership and I look forward to continuing to
work with you to make the Fair Trade system fairer for farming families like yours.
I received a tremendous amount of help in completing this dissertation. Ana Lúcia
Oliviera did an excellent job in transcribing my interviews, while Jeremy Caves helped me

vi

traverse the muddy and often treacherous roads from coffee farm to coffee farm. Rafaella
Aquino and Ernesto Serenini, and Lucrecia, Bruno, and Joyce Souza welcomed me into Poço
Fundo and made it my home. Adrianne Daggett created a beautiful map of the cities across Sul
de Minas where COOPFAM farmers live. The writing of this dissertation was fueled by the
baristas at Mighty Good and RoosRoast who served me countless cups of Fair Trade coffee.
My friends and colleagues have fostered an intellectually stimulating and supportive
environment for me. I am especially grateful for my graduate school writing group partners
including Anna Jefferson, Rowenn Kalman, Tazin Karim, Fredy Rodriquez-Mejia, and Heather
Yocum. My colleagues at the Ecology Center have supported my dissertation work and provided
me the time and space to finish. You are an extraordinary group of activists. Special recognition
is due for my best friends Alexis Blizman and Hillary Greenwood for a tremendous amount of
emotional support, working alongside me, and providing so many lovely distractions.
To the children in my life, Sierra Caves and Roman Wing, it is a joy and a privilege to
help raise both of you. Sierra you came with us to Brazil and became, quite possibly, the most
popular little girl in Poço Fundo. You are so fearless! Roman, your curiosity and love for
languages and other cultures makes me think that you might just be the next Ph.D. in this family.
And of course, there is Diesel, thank you for all of the walks!
To my partner and muse, Colin Wing, you have always believed that I would finish this
journey, even when I had doubts. Without your support, laughter, and encouragement this would
not have been possible. Finally, my parents, Jill and Jim Meuninck, you truly believe that I can
do anything in the world. Your confidence in me is humbling. You taught me how to be a citizen
of the world and a scholar of humanity. Thank you for teaching me to love and appreciate other
cultures, other languages, and the natural world.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... xi
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... xii
Chapter One: Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1
I. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1
II. Research Questions and Approach ................................................................................. 8
A. Research Questions ............................................................................................ 8
B. Approaches ....................................................................................................... 10
Feminist Political Ecology ........................................................................ 11
Multi-sited Ethnographic Research........................................................... 13
III. Synopsis of the Dissertation Chapters ........................................................................ 14
IV. Contributions to the Literature.................................................................................... 16
Chapter Two: History of the Fair Trade System, Standards and Supply Chain ........................... 19
I. The Fair Trade and Specialty Coffee Supply Chain ...................................................... 19
A. Organic Certification and Café Femenino Certification ................................. 24
II. Fair Trade as a Transnational Social Movement .......................................................... 26
A. History of Fair Trade ....................................................................................... 28
Coffee Crisis and the Growth of Fair Trade ............................................ 29
B. Fair Trade Standards and Principles ................................................................ 30
C. Limitations of Fair Trade as an Economic Social Movement ......................... 33
Fair Trade Market Growth, Standardization, and Institutionalization ...... 34
Corporate Participation in Fair Trade ...................................................... 35
COOPFAM and Corporations .................................................................. 37
Producer Knowledge of Fair Trade Principles ........................................ 38
Certifying Coffee Plantations and the Split Between Fair Trade USA
and FLO ................................................................................................... 39
III Environmental Impacts of Fair Trade
.................................................................. 41
IV. Making Feminist Sense of Fair Trade ....................................................................... 44
A. Gender and Ethical Trade Paradigms .............................................................. 47
B. Gender, Resource Allocation, and Empowerment .......................................... 48
Chapter Three: Setting and Methodology ..................................................................................... 50
I. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 50
II. Environmental History of Coffee Production in Brazil .............................................. 50
A. Coffee, Slaves, Sharecroppers, and Colonos .................................................. 51
São Paulo .................................................................................................. 51
Minas Gerais ............................................................................................. 53
B. Modernization of Agriculture .......................................................................... 54
C. Coffee Production and State Intervention ....................................................... 55
The Coffee Crisis and the Rise of Fair Trade Coffee ............................... 56
III. Description of Research Site ....................................................................................... 57

viii

A. Geography and Coffee Production in Sul de Minas, Minas Gerais ................. 57
B. Poço Fundo History and Geography ................................................................ 59
C. COOPFAM History ......................................................................................... 62
D. Snapshot of COOPFAM Family Farmers ....................................................... 65
E. Organizational Structure of COOPFAM ......................................................... 68
Nucleus ..................................................................................................... 68
Association ................................................................................................ 69
Cooperative ............................................................................................... 69
F. Organic and Fair Trade Coffee Production in Sul de Minas ........................... 69
IV. Methodology ............................................................................................................... 72
A. Methods ............................................................................................................ 72
Brazilian Research Sites .......................................................................... 73
US Research Sites .................................................................................... 75
Access to Fair Trade and Impacts on Farmers' Lives .............................. 75
Farmers’ Livelihood Strategies ................................................................. 76
Gender and Labor in Fair Trade and Organic Coffee Production ........... 76
Gender and Power in the Cooperative ..................................................... 77
Data Analysis ............................................................................................ 78
Chapter Four: Café que Bebe: Gender, Livelihoods, and Producing a Cup of Quality Coffee .... 79
I. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 79
II. Coffee Farmers’ Livelihood Strategies ....................................................................... 80
III. Bebida Boa: Labor, Technology and the Production of a Quality Cup of Coffee ...... 83
A. Environmental and Quality Standards and Labor ........................................... 83
B. Gender and Division Labor in Coffee Production and the Agricultural Cycle 85
Planting, Weeding, and Fertilizing .......................................................... 85
The Harvest ............................................................................................... 88
C. Sharecropping, Hiring Labor, and Family Labor Swaps ................................ 97
D. Technology....................................................................................................... 99
E. Technical Assistance .................................................................................... 101
F. Quality Grading and Coffee Cupping ............................................................ 103
Commitment to Environmental Principles ............................................. 106
Differences and Similarities Between the Standards ............................. 110
IV. Food Production, Local Markets, and other Livelihood Strategies ......................... 114
A. Daily Life ....................................................................................................... 115
B. Food Security and Selling Other Products ................................................... 118
C. Work in the Home .......................................................................................... 122
D. Working Outside the Home and Farm ........................................................... 123
V. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 124
Chapter Five: How "Fair" is Fair Trade? Accessing Fair Trade’s Social Impacts ..................... 125
I. Introduction: The Promise of Fair Trade ..................................................................... 125
II. Barriers to Accessing Fair Trade Certification .......................................................... 126
A. Capacity Barriers............................................................................................ 126
B. Democratic Decision Making ........................................................................ 127
C. Meeting the Standards .................................................................................... 127
ix

III. Access to Fair Trade ................................................................................................. 130
IV. Assets ........................................................................................................................ 131
A. History ............................................................................................................ 131
B. Education ........................................................................................................ 133
C. Capacity and Social Development ................................................................. 134
D. Training and Development............................................................................. 136
E. Engagement .................................................................................................... 138
Women’s Participation and Growing Tensions Within the Cooperative 140
Café Femenino Tensions......................................................................... 143
V. Benefits of Fair Trade and Organic Certification ...................................................... 152
A. Programs Financed through Fair Trade Premium .......................................... 153
B. Programs Available to Cooperatives Through Certification Organizations .. 155
C. Benefits Provided by Coffee Buyers .............................................................. 156
D. Programs Accessed due to Increased Capacity, Training, and Investment .. 162
Government............................................................................................. 162
Quality..................................................................................................... 163
VI. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 166
Chapter Six: The Price of Black Gold: Market Movements and What They Mean for Small
Farmers ....................................................................................................................................... 168
I. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 168
II. Economic impacts ..................................................................................................... 171
A. Fair Trade Minimum Price and Premium ...................................................... 173
B. Investing in Quality ........................................................................................ 176
C. Pre-financing .................................................................................................. 180
D. The C-Price of Coffee .................................................................................... 181
E. Growing Competition in the Brazilian Market ............................................... 183
Chapter Seven: Summary and Conclusion ................................................................................. 186
I. Summary and Conclusion ............................................................................................ 186
II. How To Make Fair Trade Fairer? ............................................................................. 198
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 201

x

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Coffee production tasks and gendered division of labor ............................................... 85
Table 2: List of primary defects in green coffee beans ............................................................... 103
Table 3: List of secondary defects in green coffee beans .......................................................... 104
Table 4: Types of food produced for family consumption ........................................................ 119
Table 5: Crops Sold Domestically and Internationally ............................................................... 120
Table 6: COOPFAM programs and funding sources .................................................................. 167
Table 7: Number of Fair Trade coffee producer organizations in Latin America ...................... 183

xi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Fair Trade supply chain variations for COOPFAM farmers ......................................... 21
Figure 2: COOPFAM coffee labeled as Fair Trade and organic ................................................. 31
Figure 3: Map of Meso Regions of Minas Gerais, Brazil ............................................................. 58
Figure 4: Map of cities in Sul de Minas, Minas Gerais with COOPFAM members .................... 66
Figure 5: Map of a COOPFAM family farm ................................................................................ 67
Figure 6: Aerial photo of a COOPFAM family farm ................................................................... 68
Figure 7: Dried coffee cherry hulls ............................................................................................... 87
Figure 8: Chicken manure for fertilizer ........................................................................................ 87
Figure 9: Dried coffee cherry hulls for fertilizer .......................................................................... 88
Figure 10: Vâmia Lúcia P. Silva selectively harvesting ripe coffee cherries ............................... 89
Figure 11: Leonardo Carvalho winnowing coffee cherries to remove leaves, rocks, and sticks .. 90
Figure 12: Marcelo de Paiva’s Gonçalves mother and sister-in-law helping him dry his coffee on
their terreiro .................................................................................................................................. 91
Figure 13: Coffee cherries drying in a row on Ozório José dos Santos’s terreiro ........................ 93
Figure 14: Nearly dry coffee cherries piled under a tarp to conserve heat overnight and protect
them from rain............................................................................................................................... 93
Figure 15: Derriçadeira de café, device used to harvest ripe coffee cherries .............................. 99
Figure 16: Soil samples labeled and ready to be shipped for analysis........................................ 102
Figure 17: Coffee cupping laboratory at COOPFAM................................................................. 105
Figure 18: The author tasting coffee in COOPFAM’s cupping laboratory ................................ 105

xii

Figure 19: Luis Adauto Oliviera spreading newly harvested coffee on his terreiro .................. 109
Figure 20: Ripe coffee cherries on the bush ............................................................................... 110
Figure 21: Honey and coffee for sale in Poço Fundo from Luis Carlos and Rosângela’s farm . 118
Figure 22: Pigs cared for by COOPFAM farmers for family consumption ............................... 121
Figure 23: Laying hens at COOPFAM farm............................................................................... 121
Figure 24: Religious festival out in the roça .............................................................................. 122	

xiii

Chapter One: Introduction

I. Introduction
It’s hot in Houston as I walk up to the George R. Brown Convention Center. I’m hit with
a blast of cool air as I enter the glass doors of the center. I’m here for the 2011 Specialty Coffee
Association of America (SCAA) convention. It’s the first time in a year and a half that I’ll get to
see anyone from Poço Fundo. The SCAA meeting sprawls out over a huge convention center,
where thousands of coffee buyers, roasters, importers, exporters, farmers, and every other
conceivable profession within the specialty coffee industry are attending lectures, peddling their
wares, and meeting to make business deals. But I’m there to see just two people, in particular,
Renato Pereira da Silva and Marcelo de Paiva Gonçalves. Renato and Marcelo both play
important roles in the story of Fair Trade in Poço Fundo. I met them both in 2009 when Renato
was the part-time agronomist working with the Cooperativa dos Agricultores Familiares de Poço
Fundo e Região (COOPFAM), and Marcelo was a young farmer and the internal organic auditor
for the cooperative. Both men had studied agronomy in Sul de Minas region of Minas Gerais,
Brazil and are passionate about Fair Trade and organic farming.
A year and a half has passed, and there have been some significant changes at
COOPFAM. Renato is no longer with COOPFAM but instead is working with another
cooperative just getting established in Fair Trade and organic production. Marcelo is the new
president of COOPFAM since the cooperative’s November 2009 election. The former president,
Luis Adauto Oliveira, has left the cooperative. At the SCAAs I will catch up on what has
transpired at the cooperative over the last eighteen months and learn even more about the
numerous actors that the cooperative works with in the Fair Trade system.

1

Fair Trade is a transnational advocacy network1 full of different actors with a myriad of
perceptions, ideals, motivations, and priorities concerning Fair Trade. In the case of COOPFAM,
many different actors play a role in shaping their transnational advocacy network. These include
students and Fair Trade activists from the United States and Europe, coffee buyers and roasters
from at least four continents, farming families, cooperative staff and administrators, certification
organizations and their auditors, non-governmental organizations (NGO), transnational
corporations, governmental ministries, banks, importers and exporters, and scholars from all over
the world.
Just walking around the SCAAs with Marcelo is a tour of this network. We meet with
coffee buyers and importers, both large and small. We sip Fair Trade wine with Fair Trade USA
staff, Ben Corey-Moran from Thanksgiving Coffee, and staff from Root Capital, a non-profit
social investment fund that helps to provide pre-financing to cooperatives like COOPFAM. Then
there’s the team from Café Femenino and the International Women’s Coffee Association with
their particular focus on empowering women coffee farmers. Finally, there is an ever-expanding
group of Brazilian Fair Trade cooperative presidents, which has grown over the course of my
involvement with COOPFAM. All of these groups and many more shape the meaning and
impact of Fair Trade for farming families in Poço Fundo, Minas Gerais.
Over the course of the three-day event, I accompanied Marcelo on many of his business
meetings acting as an English/Portuguese interpreter for him and his clients. One of those
meetings was with Dustin Johnson from Organic Products Trading Company (OPTCO) and
Connie Kolosvary from their sister organization Café Femenino. I had met Dustin and Connie
back in Poço Fundo in 2009 on their first ever visit to COOPFAM. Our conversation started off
1

I draw on Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) definition of Transnational Advocacy Networks as networks of activists, in
multiple countries that share certain principles or motivations to advocate together across borders.

2

with Dustin saying that OPTCO was interested in buying two shipping containers and possibly a
third of dual certified Fair Trade and organic coffee this year. Marcelo confirmed that they could
sell them up to three containers that year and they could write up the contract right away. Dustin
asked for Marcelo to let him know immediately if there were going to be any problems or delays
with the shipment since last year’s container arrived late. Marcelo apologized and said it was late
because their export certification had accidentally lapsed in 2010 after a full turnover of the
cooperative’s administration and staff. He assured Dustin that it was now taken care of and their
certification was all set until 2014.
At that point, our conversation turned to COOPFAM’s challenges in meeting the
production requirements of the Café Femenino program. Connie began to detail all of the
problems they encountered over the past year and a half. These included the cooperative not
properly separating the Café Femenino coffee from the other coffee; the premiums not reaching
the women promptly; the fact that the current women’s group at COOPFAM was not clearly
defined as a Café Femenino group; and numerous other communications problems between the
cooperative and Café Femenino. For Connie, the last straw was in late 2009 when the
cooperative sent two identical samples of coffee to OPTCO and Café Femenino. This confirmed
her suspicions that the coffee was not being separated and was not 100% produced by women
farmers at COOPFAM. Marcelo sheepishly apologized for all of the problems. He asked Connie
a few clarifying questions about the program, and admitted not knowing that much about it. He
said he would have to reach out and talk to the women farmers themselves to see if there was
interest in trying to participate again. Connie expressed her frustration that they had already gone
over all of this with the cooperative. I reminded her that the cooperative now was under an

3

entirely new set of administrators and that Marcelo, as the new president, was not aware of all of
the conversations that had occurred with his predecessor Adauto2.
Marcelo assured Connie and Dustin that the cooperative was very committed to women’s
development and empowerment. Connie asked if there were enough women in the cooperative
who might participate under their standards. Marcelo and I chatted a bit and thought that there
might be five or six women who already produced their own coffee, and would likely be
interested in the program and could produce about 100 sacks (60kg/sack) of coffee. In passing, I
mentioned that some of these women were unmarried or widowed and that the Café Femenino
premium would be especially helpful for them. Dustin confirmed that 100 sacks would be
enough to participate, while Connie commented that they would only have single women and
widows enrolled in the program. I chose not to translate her comment back to Marcelo. Instead, I
responded to Connie that there were, in fact, a few married women at COOPFAM who produced
small lots of coffee on their own. I stressed that this was a tough job for any one person to
accomplish in the Brazilian context given the tremendous amount of work done both on the farm
and the drying patios to produce high quality, dual certified coffee. The rather tense conversation
ended on an amicable note with Marcelo confirming that he would reach out to the women in the
cooperative to gauge interest in participating in the program again. Connie suggested that they
could put together a list of the Café Femenino standards in photo form to share with the women
to explain the program. Marcelo thanked Connie and Dustin for their time and a second chance
to work with them through the Café Femenino program.
Marcelo’s interaction with the representatives from Café Femenino is a snapshot of some
of the power dynamics at play in the global Fair Trade coffee supply chain. Farmeradministrators like Marcelo have to negotiate the terms of their cooperatives’ contracts with
2

Luis Adauto Oliviera was the president of COOPFAM from 2002-2009.

4

coffee buyers on uneven grounds. That is, the buyers and certifiers in the Fair Trade supply chain
set the standards that the farmers and cooperatives must meet. Through these interactions, the
different actors in the supply chain negotiate the “fairness” of the Fair Trade system.
Certifications, like the Café Femenino program introduced above, can provide farmers and
cooperative with new opportunities but those opportunities do not always fit well with the
culture, production practices, and life ways of coffee farmers in Brazil.
When I was in Brazil in 2009, I visited Marcelo and his family to learn more about their
farm and their commitment to Fair Trade principles. The Gonçalves’s family and their farm are
typical at COOPFAM. Marcelo is unmarried, so he continues to live with his parents. Marcelo's
father, Messias, explained that his family had been farming coffee for four generations. Messias's
great grandfather used to work on a large local fazenda (plantation), where he eventually saved
up enough money to buy the land. As one generation replaced the other, the parcels of land
passed down from father to son became smaller and smaller, resulting in the small land holdings
he and his sons have today. Messias explained that his father's side of the family was Portuguese
and his mother's side had French and possibly African heritage.
Marcelo has three brothers and a sister. Like many families at COOPFAM, some of the
Gonçalves siblings produce coffee, and some have pursued careers outside of agricultural
production. Marcelo's two brothers who are also coffee farmers, Marcílio and Marco, are both
married and each has two children. Their two other siblings both lived and worked abroad in
Ireland, and then moved back to other parts of Brazil. During my time in the field, I would come
to know many families within COOPFAM specifically and in the city of Poço Fundo generally
who had relatives migrate to other countries or regions of Brazil for work.

5

Regarding their coffee production, the Gonçalves brothers own slightly smaller than
average amount of land under coffee production at COOPFAM. Each of the three coffee-farming
brothers works 2.4 hectares of coffee. According COOPFAM's 2011 production database, the
average amount of land in coffee production is 3.4 hectares, and the average size of all land
holdings is eight hectares. The small size of farms at COOPFAM is in stark contrast to some of
the largest coffee plantations in the world, owned by Ipanema Coffees, just a thirty-minute drive
north of Poço Fundo.
The Gonçalves family's commitment to sustainability and producing high-quality coffee
is exemplary of farmers at COOPFAM. To produce high-quality coffee in large quantities, the
Gonçalves's invest a tremendous amount of labor adding organic inputs into the soil and
meticulously caring for their coffee plants and cherries throughout the production process.
Marcelo took us around his farm showing us mamona or castor bean plants that he uses as a
green fertilizer to fix nitrogen in the soil. He showed us a colony of ants who nurture a white
fungus that helps to break down organic material for the coffee plants to provide many of the
forty-six nutrients and micronutrients the plants need to thrive.
Eventually, we came across Marcílio and his wife Flavia harvesting coffee together in
their coffee field. Flavia’s brother joined the couple. He swaps labor with his in laws during the
harvest, a labor practice on which many farmers at COOPFAM rely. The trio was using a device
called a derriçadeira de café that has little vibrating fingers that knock ripe coffee cherries off
the branches to fall onto the tarp spread below each row of coffee bushes. That day they
harvested fifteen sacks of cherries, which will yield approximately two 60 kg sacks of green
coffee beans. They will continue to harvest for about four months then will spend seven months
applying fertilizer, removing weeds and caring for the coffee plants. During the harvest, all seven

6

of the Gonçalves’s work 12-hour days, six days a week out in the coffee fields and on the
terreiros or coffee drying patios. They explained that they do not have the luxury to take month
long vacations like people do in the city. They hire no outside workers and only rely on the labor
swap with Flavia’s brother.
COOPFAM and its farmer-members were pioneers regarding Fair Trade certification in
Brazil. They were the first Fair Trade certified cooperative in Brazil, the first to produce dual
organic and Fair Trade certified coffee, and the first Brazilian Fair Trade cooperative to become
a licensed Fair Trade exporter. That pioneering spirit continues today through their
experimentation with emerging certification systems and production practices. These factors
made COOPFAM an ideal place to study how farmers and cooperatives leverage Fair Trade to
improve their livelihoods. Fair Trade has provided the farmers at COOPFAM with a structure
within which to experiment with new production paradigms that may bring in additional
financial or social benefits for the farmers. In many ways, the Fair Trade system is working well
for farmers at COOPFAM, something that is not necessarily common in the literature on Fair
Trade production. This success and the farmers and cooperative's experimentation with new
systems made it an ideal cooperative to study the continual negotiation of Fair Trade and other
certification systems standards and practices. The lives of the farmers at COOPFAM are very
different from many of the actors along the Fair Trade supply and value chains. As a result, their
perceptions of the fairness of the Fair Trade differ as well. Farmers at COOPFAM literally
negotiate the terms of their coffee contracts and figuratively negotiate the terms of their
relationships and the meaning of fairness with Fair Trade supply chain actors like certifiers and

7

coffee buyers. These negotiations are a frictional space3 where farmers, buyers, certifiers and
others try to reach a consensus where all parties can live with the terms, even if they are not the
best possible scenarios for each party. For Marcelo and his family, Fair Trade provides a
mechanism for them to produce coffee in a sustainable way that aligns with their values of
environmental stewardship, gives them market access, and additional income for their coffee
production.

II. Research Questions and Approach
I draw my research questions from an examination of the rhetoric about the aims of the
Fair Trade paradigm and the challenges and tensions cited by Fair Trade activists and scholars
studying the impact of Fair Trade certification and production. I put these bodies of literature and
advocacy into conversation with initial pre-dissertation research at COOPFAM, which indicated
that farmers at this cooperative had a more favorable view of Fair Trade and its benefits than
cited elsewhere.

A. Research Questions
In this dissertation, I address, how “fair” farmers at COOPFAM think Fair Trade is.
Fairness is arguably a subjective measure by which to judge a system. For this dissertation, a fair
system is one that has measurable positive social, economic, or environmental benefits.
Regardless of gender, race, age, marital status, or ability, these impacts should be equitably
shared. These benefits must also outweigh potential negative aspects of the system such as
additional labor burdens to meet the standards. It also allows for constructive discourse and
3

The concept of “friction” here refers to Tsing’s (2005) approach to exploring global connection and the contested
construction of universal concepts, by exploring “friction,” or “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative
qualities of interconnection across difference” (4).

8

democratic change of the systems by all actors in it. Finally, the actors engaged in the system
must perceive it as fair.
It is important to explore how "fair" Fair Trade is because of its continued market growth,
and the primacy of Fair Trade certified coffee in the minds of consumers, as well as the
expansion of Fair Trade certification to new commodities and products. Fair Trade
International's 2015-16 annual report highlights some of the financial impacts of Fair Trade
including 7.3 billion Euros of total global sales of Fair Trade certified products, produced by
approximately 1.6 million farmers and workers (FLO 2016). Coffee continues to be the most
well know Fair Trade certified product, and sales of Fair Trade coffee grew by eighteen percent
in 2015. Moreover, dual Fair Trade and organic certifications continue to be the dominant
paradigm for fifty-nine percent of Fair Trade coffee farmers worldwide (FLO 2016). It is likely
that Fair Trade and similar certification systems will continue to be critical market access and
price stabilization tools for many farmers if conventional global trade systems continue to
eschew regulation, price fixing, and production quotas. These factors illustrate the continuing
importance of systems such as Fair Trade to examine their impacts on certified producers.
The following research questions inform my analysis of how “fair” farmers at
COOPFAM think Fair Trade is. What economic, social and environmental impacts of Fair Trade
do farmers at COOPFAM identify? How are conceptions of “fairness” constructed and contested
by both men and women at the home, farm, and cooperative levels? What changes, if any, would
they like to see to make Fair Trade more equitable? What are the gendered social and economic
impacts of Fair Trade coffee production at the household, farm, and cooperative levels? How
well do the gender-based principles of Fair Trade organizations translate to the social reality of
coffee farmers? Do women and men exert differential control over resources and labor

9

arrangements, and has control over labor and resources changed since the cooperative became
Fair Trade-certified? And finally, might potentially different gendered impacts of Fair Trade
differentially affect men and women’s discourses of “fairness” and perceptions of Fair Trade?
To examine the “fairness” of Fair Trade, I used a feminist political ecology approach to
study the power dynamics at play at the local, national, and international levels in the Fair Trade
and organic coffee systems. Drawing on feminist political ecology, I assume that gendered
difference likely exists regarding farmers’ perceptions of Fair Trade and their access to the
benefits offered through the production of Fair Trade coffee. I explore whether concepts of
“fairness,” and perceptions of Fair Trade differ between women and men farmers and if farmers
try to reach a consensus about the meaning of fairness within homes or at the cooperative level.
I examine the degree to which, farmers’ discourses of fairness and Fair Trade differ from those
expressed by Fair Trade activists, certification organizations, and the roasters and corporations
that purchase Fair Trade coffee. I explore these questions to see if divergent meanings of
“fairness” provide the necessary flexibility to keep the Fair Trade system together and enable it
to function in different geographic and social contexts.

B. Approaches
To address these research questions I draw on two approaches, feminist political ecology
and multi-sited ethnography, that lend themselves well to studying international systems such as
Fair Trade. By combining feminist political ecology with a multi-sited ethnographic approach, I
was able to study Fair Trade as a transnational environmental and social movement. While
political ecology focuses on how international institutions affect local environmental change, it is
not often the case that these institutions are themselves an object of study. By incorporating

10

multi-sited research among US-based activists, coffee buyers, and certification organizations, I
garnered a more holistic perspective on the influences these groups have on farmers’ lives and
the Fair Trade system.

Feminist Political Ecology
Feminist political ecology offers a theoretical framework to address questions about the
historical, economic, environmental, and political factors that led to the need for institutions such
as Fair Trade. In Chapter Three of this dissertation, I examine the history of coffee production in
Brazil, and the evolution of how labor was deployed to produce coffee. I put this into context
with an exploration of state interventions in the Brazilian and global coffee markets, and the
political, economic, and environmental events that led up to the most recent coffee crisis in the
early 2000s. A time when the market price for coffee plummeted, and coffee producers
increasingly sought out alternative markets, such as Fair Trade, for their coffee. Furthermore, I
explore the local historical context, which led to the formation of COOPFAM, the farmers’
pursuit of third-party certification, and their commitment to sustainable agricultural practices.
This study also addresses the gendered social, economic and environmental impacts of
Fair Trade at the home, farm, and cooperative levels. Feminist political ecologists have
demonstrated that men and women are differentially affected by environmental change, and
environmental degradation more negatively affects women than men (Jackson 1993; Rocheleau,
Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996; Schroder 1999). Given these assumptions, I examine
farming families livelihood strategies, participation in democratic structures, and division of
labor on the farms through a gendered lens. Feminist political ecology scholarship highlights the
importance of scale at a more intimate level, such as the home (Christie 2008); and the

11

interconnections of intimate scales to others like national or international scales (Elmhirst 2011;
Nightingale 2011; Truelove 2011). I pay close attention to livelihoods at an intimate level by
exploring women’s work in producing food, caring for family, and community and how this
work relates to the international Fair Trade system.
Political ecologists define the ’environment' in varying ways, from describing a particular
biophysical space or phenomenon or element to describing humans interactions with and
management of the plants, animals, and geological features they live in and around (Paulson,
Gezon, Watts 2004; Peluso and Watts 2001; Robbins 2004). Building on the assumption that the
biophysical environment matters, I explored farmers’ management of the ecosystems in and
around their farms. Furthermore, I looked at how the environmental exigencies of Fair Trade and
organic coffee production were understood and ultimately met by farming families.
Moreover, the feminist political ecology approach led me to look at how power dynamics
at the local, national, and international level affects the lives of both men and women coffee
farmers. For example, at the international level how do global market forces such as commodity
prices, or currency values affect the amount of money that farming families earn for their coffee.
At the national level, how has the entry of newly Fair Trade certified cooperatives impacted the
market for established Fair Trade cooperatives’ coffee, and how have large corporations like
Walmart’s entry into Fair Trade expanded and changed both the market for and production of
Fair Trade coffee in Brazil. At the local level, farmers’ positions within the cooperative hierarchy
and their gender affect their access to cooperative decision-making mechanisms. At the family
level, a coffee buyer’s attention to gender equity may bring up tensions between men and women
about farming practices or how they make household decisions. I use a feminist political ecology

12

approach to investigate the multiple levels of power at play within farmers’ homes, the
cooperatives, and Fair Trade certification organizations.

Multi-sited Ethnographic Research
A multi-sited ethnographic approach provides useful techniques to study globalization
through ethnography. Marcus (1995) focuses on multi-sited research, and states, “multi-sited
research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in
which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit,
posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the
ethnography” (105). He provides several techniques to construct a multi-sited ethnography. I use
two of these tactics for my dissertation research: “follow the thing” and “follow the metaphor”
(Marcus 1995). I first “follow the thing” – Brazilian Fair Trade coffee — from Fair Trade
certified farms and cooperatives in Minas Gerais, Brazil to various US-based coffee buyers
including importers, roasters, and retailers. In addition to “following” the coffee, I “follow the
metaphor” by following discourses of the fairness of Fair Trade from activist groups to national
coalitions and conferences of Fair Trade activists and actors in the specialty coffee supply chain.
I also “follow” the discourse of Fair Trade between scholarly conversations on the tensions and
challenges in the Fair Trade system to contentious discourses between small-scale coffee
roasting companies, Fair Trade activists, Fair Trade certification organizations, corporations
entering the Fair Trade system, and farmers. By “following” the coffee and the discourses of Fair
Trade, I have constructed a multi-sited ethnography of Fair Trade to explore the gendered
discourses of “fairness” and impacts of Fair Trade on Brazilian farmers and cooperatives, and
US Fair Trade activists, businesses, and certification organizations.

13

III. Synopsis of the Dissertation Chapters
This dissertation studies the “fairness” Fair Trade by examining the power dynamics at
play at the local, national, and international levels in the Fair Trade and organic coffee systems
and their resultant impacts on small-scale coffee farmers at COOPFAM. It is organized as
follows: In Chapter Two, I explore the Fair Trade supply and value chains and the literature
regarding the tensions between various actors within these networks. I also explore the literature
on the gendered and environmental impacts of Fair Trade.
In Chapter Three, I take the reader to the coffee lands of Brazil to examine the history of
coffee production there. I then summarize the evolution of state-sponsored production paradigms
starting with slavery in the late eighteenth century, then the move to the colonato system and
sharecropping after slavery’s abolition, and finally the move to wage labor and increasing
smallholder production in the 1960s. From the national level, we move down to an agroenvironmental history of Poço Fundo where COOPFAM is located. In this chapter, I show the
set of historical, environmental, and social factors that set COOPFAM up for successful
participation in the Fair Trade system.
We stay on the farm in Poço Fundo for Chapter Four. This chapter lays out the multiple
livelihood strategies farming families engage in to sustain themselves and their families at the
cooperative. This chapter also delves into the gendered division of labor for these Fair Trade
farmers and takes a critical look at the additional work necessary to produce coffee that meets
Fair Trade and organic coffee quality and sustainability criteria. In this chapter, I lay out the
tremendous amount of labor that is necessary to produce a cup of high quality, dual-certified
coffee and how farming families at COOPFAM have set up a gendered division of labor to
ensure their coffee meets the quality and environmental exigencies of the export market.

14

Chapter Five moves from the farm and home up to the cooperative itself. I explore how
COOPFAM accessed Fair Trade certification by using various assets to overcome certain
barriers to entering the system. These barriers are discussed extensively in the academic
literature on Fair Trade. The chapter details many of the benefits that farmers have been able to
access either as a direct result of Fair Trade participation or as a consequence of the increased
access to networks opened up by Fair Trade and organic systems. In this chapter, I explore how
farmers use the stability and market access provided by Fair Trade to experiment with different
production practices, employ technological innovations, and explore niche certification to
improve their coffee production continually.
In Chapter Six, I focus on economic factors, including global economic factors that
impact how much money the farmers earn for their coffee. This chapter takes a global
perspective to examine how transnational factors such as commodity prices, currency values, and
a changing international Fair Trade system impact the price that farmers earn for their coffee.
This chapter shows that the price that farmers bring home for their Fair Trade certified coffee is
still very linked to global market forces. While Fair Trade provides a floor price under which the
price of coffee cannot fall, the system does not create a price ceiling. Given the right
circumstances, farmers like those at COOPFAM can earn far more for their coffee than the base
price offered through Fair Trade.
There are several other sub-themes in this dissertation, including gender and the
environment. Gender comes up in Chapter Four regarding looking at the gendered division of
labor on farms. Gender also comes up when I discuss participation in the cooperative and the
need for farmers' participation to access and maintain Fair Trade certification. Gendered tensions
are also considered in Chapter Five when I discuss the Café Femenino program and the tensions

15

that arise between Café Femenino, the cooperative and the women's group. The environment is a
major part of Chapter Three when I discuss the ecological and agricultural history of Brazilian
coffee production generally and in the municipality of Poço Fundo specifically. The environment
also is a fundamental factor in Chapter Five because of the various environmental standards that
farmers have to meet to obtain and maintain Fair Trade and organic certification.

IV. Contributions to the Literature
This dissertation contributes to the growing body of literature on Fair Trade and other
third-party certification systems in several ways. First, it offers an in-depth look at a cooperative
and farmers who are largely happy with what participation in the Fair Trade system has offered
them. Much of the literature on Fair Trade is highly critical of the impacts the system can have
on farmers and workers. While I too take a critical analysis of Fair Trade by exploring power
dynamics in the system via a feminist political ecology approach, I also endeavor to highlight the
aspects of Fair Trade that benefit the farmers, or the farmers put to work for their benefit. This
case study at COOPFAM shows that Fair Trade can work well for some farmers in some places
and under certain circumstances. I explore those specific conditions that make Fair Trade
successful at COOPFAM. This dissertation also contributes an exploration of the economic
impacts of Fair Trade at a time when the commodity market for coffee reached historic highs.
This is a very different context to explore Fair Trade’s impacts than some of the early literature
on Fair Trade that examined its effects during or right after the coffee crisis in the early 2000s.
As such, this dissertation shows that the global economic system is still a strong factor in what
price Fair Trade coffee farmers earn for their coffee. This study also offers an in-depth analysis
of the labor needed to produce relatively large quantities or relatively high-quality coffee and the

16

higher quality premiums farmers can earn on top of the Fair Trade base price. I highlight the
professionalization of coffee production and the farmers’ pride in their production of a quality
product that meets their religious values of environmental stewardship.
This dissertation shows that Fair Trade can be more beneficial for some farmers in some
places, and less so for others. At COOPFAM their success in the Fair Trade system is based on a
whole suite of factors including cultural, historical and economic factors. Those farmers, who are
the most vulnerable, including single or widowed women, poorer farmers or those with less land,
are less able to leverage all of the benefits offered to married farmers, or those who have more
economic resources to invest in their coffee production and more land to cultivate larger
quantities of coffee.
Perhaps one of the most interesting contributions to the literature is the discussion of how
Fair Trade farmers and COOPFAM the cooperative have been able to leverage the safety net that
Fair Trade provides to experiment with new production practices, technological innovations, and
emerging niche certifications. By doing this they simultaneously earn more money for their
coffee and hone the professionalization of their coffee production.
Regarding emerging certifications or labels for coffee production, COOPFAM’s
experience with the Café Femenino program — described at length in Chapter Five — provides
a case study of the challenges inherent in applying global standards in different cultural contexts.
Café Femenino is a program that aims to empower women and valorize their work in coffee
production. However, its strict standards could jeopardize farming families ability to produce
high quality, dual-certified organic and Fair Trade coffee at COOPFAM because of the gendered
division of labor that farmers employ to meet production demands. The Café Femenino example

17

shows that a set of standards that may work well in one cultural context, may not translate well
to another culture with different labor paradigms, and methods of coffee production.

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Chapter Two: History of the Fair Trade System, Standards and Supply Chain

I. The Fair Trade and Specialty Coffee Supply Chain
In order to examine the “fairness” of Fair Trade, it is first critical to understand the
relationships between different actors in the Fair Trade supply and value chains. A supply chain
is a network of businesses and other organizations that are involved in bringing a product, in this
case, coffee, from producer to consumer. A value chain includes the parts of the supply chain
that are specifically focused on adding value, economic, moral or otherwise, to a product. This
value can be added by any number of actors along the supply chain, from the producers investing
in measures to improve quality to the retailers investing in packaging and marketing materials to
draw consumer desire for the product. In this chapter, I will discuss the different actors in
COOPFAM’s supply and value chains. Then I will move to explore the literature on the Fair
Trade as a social movement, including its history and an examination of the tensions between
different supply and value chain actors in the system. I will end with an exploration of the
literature on the environmental impacts of Fair Trade and feminist perspectives on Fair Trade
and other ethical trading systems.
As discussed in Chapter One, the SCAA Event brings together many of the actors in the
specialty coffee supply chain generally and the organic and Fair Trade coffee chains specifically.
For farmers and cooperative administrators like Marcelo, the few days he spends at the SCAAs
each year offer up opportunities to attend lectures on coffee market trends, to visit booths of
businesses selling products to improve coffee quality, and to taste coffee produced by farmers
from across the world to compare it to his own. Over the course of the three-day event, Marcelo
came into contact with many different actors in the Fair Trade and specialty coffee supply

19

chains. One of the most important aspects of the SCAA event is the networking farmers do with
various supply chain and value chain actors. Marcelo networked with established business
partners and new potential buyers for their coffee, as well as certifiers who keep him apprised of
changes to Fair Trade standards or new opportunities, and NGOs that provide services to small
farmers like pre-financing or technical assistance with quality production. While many of these
actors come and visit the cooperative from time to time, this yearly convention is a golden
opportunity to get business done.
Marcelo can wear a lot of hats for the cooperative at this event because of his position
and experience in the cooperative. COOPFAM was and remains the only Fair Trade coffee
cooperative in Brazil that is both a cooperative and a certified exporter of Fair Trade coffee. The
fact that the cooperative can export their coffee directly, and other cooperatives’ coffee for that
matter, allows them to shorten the Fair Trade supply chain for their farmers by one link. Like
most Fair Trade cooperative presidents, Marcelo meets directly with coffee buyers. These coffee
buyers fall into a number of different categories including, large corporations such as Green
Mountain Coffee Roasters, coffee importers such as Organic Products Trading Company or
Royal Coffee, and artesian coffee roasters including Thanksgiving Coffee or Casa Brazil. In the
case of the smaller roasters, they deal with COOPFAM directly to taste and select the coffee they
want, but they then have to work through importers in their home countries to bring the Brazilian
coffee into the country. In effect, the precise supply chain differs for each type of coffee buyer.
For example, in the most direct trading scenario, the chain begins with the farmers, then
cooperative/exporter (in COOPFAM’s case), then on to a buyer who is also an importer and
roaster, and finally to the end consumer. However, many times this chain will include additional
links since many roasters are not importers themselves, or they may sell to another business like

20

a restaurant, store, or institution before the coffee reaches the end consumer. At times, this
variability in the Fair Trade coffee supply chain makes it look similar to the conventional coffee
supply chain in terms of complexity and number of actors involved.

Figure 1: Fair Trade supply chain variations for COOPFAM farmers.
Image created by the author.

Organizations that provide pre-financing for coffee farmers are a critical link in
COOPFAM’s Fair Trade coffee value chain. At the SCAAs Marcelo and I chatted with staff
from Root Capital, an NGO devoted to providing loans to small-scale farmers for rural
development efforts. Making capital available to pre-finance coffee production is a fundamental
tenet of Fair Trade. Some coffee buyers can provide pre-financing directly to cooperatives, while
others partner with organizations like Root Capital to do so.
Several other key sets of organizations in the specialty coffee value chain are the
certifying bodies and their partner NGOs. This constellation of groups works with coffee
cooperatives to support technical assistance and educational programs for staff and farmers.
They do this often by leveraging partnerships with socially conscious coffee companies to
provide additional resources to the cooperatives and farmers. These programs are geared toward
21

improving the quality of the coffee or the social and environmental conditions involved in coffee
production. In this way, they are a key player in the value chain of specialty coffee production. In
addition to assisting the farmers and cooperatives, some of these organizations serve as the
bodies that set the standards for certifications such as Fair Trade and even conduct the audits of
the certified cooperatives and farms.
The three most important Fair Trade-specific organizations for COOPFAM are Fair
Trade USA (formerly TransFair USA) and Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International
(FLO), and FLOCERT.4 These organizations are all non-governmental entities. Unlike some
organic certifications, no governmental bodies regulate Fair Trade certification. FLO was created
in 1997 when various Fair Trade movements across North America and Europe came together to
form a unifying body to harmonize Fair Trade standards and certify production. FLO also
provided services to producers and in 2003 FLOCERT was created to separate the standard
setting arm of Fair Trade from the certification arm, which verifies that producers meet standards
through independent audits. FLOCERT is charged with maintaining the credibility of Fair Trade
through this independent verification process across the entire Fair Trade supply chain
(FLOCERT 2016a).
After the separation of FLOCERT from FLO, FLO focused primarily on building up the
set of benefits offered to smallholders and workers as a result of their participation in the Fair
Trade system. FLO offers programs to improve the quality of Fair Trade products, improve the
business capacity of Fair Trade cooperatives, and to address environmental and social issues
including adapting to climate change and addressing gender equity.
4

There are additional Fair Trade organizations and certifications available including Fair For Life, the World Fair
Trade Organization, and the Small Producers Symbol. These organizations and certifications were beyond the scope
of this dissertation given the fact that COOPFAM members do not participate in these alternative Fair Trade
systems. For the purposes of this dissertation, discussion of the Fair Trade system refers to actions taken by and
standards set by FLO, FLOCERT, and Fair Trade USA.

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Fair Trade USA is a third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the United States.
Much like FLO, Fair Trade USA provides a Fair Trade trademark, or label, for products that
meet their standards. The organization also works with farmers and cooperatives to support
social development programs, improve the quality of Fair Trade products, and to grow the Fair
Trade market through education and marketing. Some of the programs offered at COOPFAM by
Fair Trade USA are detailed in Chapter Five.
Not all actors in the Fair Trade supply and value chains are regularly present at the
SCAAs. These include Fair Trade activists, direct consumers of Fair Trade coffee, and
governmental bodies that support small-scale farmers and alternative agriculture (discussed in
Chapter Five). Activists, however, come into contact with COOPFAM farmers when they visit
the cooperative to learn more about Fair Trade coffee production and its impacts first hand. In
fact, it was a Fair Trade student activist who provided me with my introduction to COOPFAM
through contacts in the US-based Fair Trade student advocacy networks. Activists like these,
take the experiences they have in the field and share them with their peers. They have often
worked as allies for Fair Trade producers by advocating for changes in the Fair Trade system that
farmers identified as needed, such as higher floor prices5 and producer representation on Fair
Trade decision-making bodies.
Farmers at COOPFAM interact with this supply chain in various ways and have points of
contact with many, but not all of the actors in it. As illustrated by the example of meetings that
transpire at events like the SCAAs, those farmers that also act as administrators for the
cooperative have the most access to supply chain partners. However, back in Brazil farmers
receive visitors from small and large coffee roasters, importers, auditors from Fair Trade and
5

Floor prices are the minimum price per pound of coffee that Fair Trade certified cooperatives receive from coffee
buyers. Over the course of this study, the fair trade floor price for Arabica Naturals went from $1.20/lb. to $1.35/lb.
in 2011. Moreover, the organic differential was increased from 20 cents/lb. to 30 cents/lb. in 2011.

23

organic certification organizations. They also interact with representatives from Fair Trade
organizations that come to launch programs that offer technical assistance, or to meet with
farmers to gather stories about Fair Trade’s impact to share with their customers. This rich
interaction with various supply chain partners is not common for conventional coffee farmers in
neighboring cooperatives. In much of the literature on Fair Trade coffee production the role of
“coyotes” or middlemen who buy coffee from farmers and then sell it to exporters is discussed
(Cycon 2008; Doane 2010; Jaffee 2007; Raynolds 2002). However, the small-scale conventional
farmers I encountered in Brazil were often a part of one or more cooperatives. In Brazil, farmers
can join more than one cooperative. These farmers will sell their coffee to whichever cooperative
offers them the best price or other benefits. One benefit that some farmers at COOPFAM cited
for joining more than one cooperative is that they can get paid on the spot for coffee sold through
a conventional cooperative, whereas they might have to wait for payment until COOPFAM sells
their coffee in the Fair Trade market.

A. Organic Certification and Café Femenino Certification
Some farmers at COOPFAM are certified under other third and second party certification
systems. Two of those that are explored in this dissertation are organic certification and Café
Femenino. The farmers at COOPFAM must negotiate the complex supply chains of Fair Trade,
as described above and adhere to additional standards laid out under organic and Café Femenino
certification.
Organic certification is a system that emerged, much like Fair Trade did, out of social and
environmental movements. Organic agriculture is defined as “ …a production system that
sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity

24

and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects (IFOAM
2017).” Organic certification, like Fair Trade, has a number of environmental standards.
Difference between the environmental standards of organic certification and Fair Trade
certification are further discussed in Chapter Four.
Today, there are numerous organic certifications that are run by and regulated by various
governmental bodies. COOPFAM farmers hold a number of different organic certifications,
including: Associação de Agricultura Orgânica (AAO) for the Brazilian market, US Department
of Agriculture (USDA) for the United States, European Union Agricultural Standard (EUROPA)
for the European market, and Japanese Agricultural Standard (JAS) for markets in Asia.
Café Femenino, on the other hand, is a second party certification system that was created
by the founders and owners of Organic Products Trading Company (OPTCO), Gayleen and
Garth Smith. They developed the program to address gender inequities facing women farmers in
the coffee lands.
The program was developed with women coffee farmers at one cooperative in Peru to
help these women market and sell their own coffee separately from the men in the cooperative.
The women in Peru requested this program because they were producing their own coffee but
their husbands took it to the cooperative to sell and then controlled the money earned for the
coffee. The women wanted their own certification program so they could control their own
production and revenue. The Café Femenino program “certifies” and sells 100% women-grown,
dual-certified organic and Fair Trade coffee. They now work with women in cooperatives from
eight different countries (OPTCO 2017).
Café Femenino sees their work as a social mission, not just another certification program
or label. The social mission and resultant second party certification systems, is built on the

25

premise that many women inside the cultures of Central and South America “… are responsible
for the majority of the coffee production, the entire household, the family garden, livestock and
the children” (ibid 2017). However, at the same time these women do not have the power to
make economic decisions for themselves or their children (ibid 2017). Café Femenino claims to
have created an economic system for women coffee producers that is “separate but together with
the men,” and that women are producing coffee, “just as she has always produced coffee, but
now she is recognized for the work she does. She is no longer invisible” (ibid 2017).

II. Fair Trade as a Transnational Social Movement
The SCAAs provide a glimpse of the complex supply and value chain actors that
influence farmers’ perceptions of the Fair Trade system. Through Fair Trade, farmers enter a
complex transnational advocacy network of consumers, certification organizations, activists, and
businesses, all with different motivations and goals for participation in Fair Trade. Transnational
advocacy networks, such as Fair Trade, include diverse groups of international actors working on
a particular issue. Although these networks work toward common goals, they must also be
understood as political spaces where actors negotiate the meaning of their enterprise (Keck and
Sikkink 1998). These networks create links among international actors, such as farmers,
businesses, and activists that increase farmers’ access to international systems.
Fair Trade farmers and organizations negotiate the concept of “fairness” through Fair
Trade discourse. Participants may use the same word — fair — but it may mean very different
things. Tsing (2005) provides an approach to exploring global connection and the contested
construction of universals, by encouraging the exploration of “friction,” or “the awkward,
unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). While Keck

26

and Sikkink (1998) suggest that shared ways of framing an issue must be hammered out to make
transnational collaborations possible, Tsing (2005) argues that such frames may not be so
completely shared. Since the frames are not necessarily universally shared, the transnational
advocacy network of Fair Trade exists in a state of dialog where the meaning and purpose of Fair
Trade are consistently changing and potentially divergent for actors in various spatial, cultural,
and ideological locales in the Fair Trade network. As such, I look at the transnational Fair Trade
network as a “sticky engagement” (Tsing 2005:6), where the creation universals, like the concept
of fairness, are contested by various actors in the network. In the case of farmers at COOPFAM,
they dar um jeito, or find a way to work around tensions in the global network, or even work
around global standards to make Fair Trade work for them.
Fair Trade has also been characterized as an economic social movement (Moberg 2005;
Wilkinson 2006). Yet Fair Trade as a social movement has a contradictory existence. According
to Peter Leigh Taylor (2005), certified Fair Trade coffee is in the difficult space of existing in the
dominant world market but not being “of” this market. By this he means, Fair Trade aims to
change the market by using it, but because it still exists within the market, it is vulnerable to
market forces. Jaffee (2007) offers three different ways actors in the Fair Trade network view
Fair Trade’s relationship to the market; as a “market-braking” force, a “market-reform”
mechanism, or a “market-access” tool. Tensions and disagreements occur between people and
organizations that hold these three different ideas about the relationship between the market and
Fair Trade. Fair Trade as an alternative development paradigm is consistent with free market
objectives to promote trade-based rather than aid-based development strategies. However,
scholars and activists are skeptical of Fair Trade’s ability to leverage the free market to bring

27

about economic development for small-scale farmers (Bacon 2005; Bacon et al. 2008a; Bacon et
al. 2008b; Jaffee 2007; Lyon 2008; Oxfam 2002; Talbot 2004).

A. History of Fair Trade
Through third-party certification and labeling, Fair Trade attempts to address social and
economic inequalities facing millions of farmers as a result of governments’ limited ability to
regulate markets, subsidize agriculture, and provide social services. Fair Trade’s standards are
based on principles of sustainability and focus on improving the economic livelihoods of smallscale producers, their social and often cultural well-being, and protecting the local environment
and natural resources. Fair Trade attempts to address social and economic inequalities through
market-based mechanisms rather than governmental regulatory mechanisms. Fair Trade provides
farmers with a minimum price-per-pound for coffee, as well as premiums for social development
such as education and healthcare, and access to credit. In return, it requires equitable labor
practices, such as equal pay and recognition for women, freedom of association and democratic
decision-making within cooperatives, and adherence to environmental standards (FTF 2004).
Fair Trade, began as a solidarity-based movement between producers in the developing
world and consumers in developed countries, and is now a growing market-based movement.
Fair Trade’s solidarity-based roots date back to the period just after World War II when faithbased Alternative Trade Organizations (ATOs) began marketing handicrafts from war-ravaged
European communities. By the 1960s, these direct-marketing operations sold crafts and a few
food commodities such as coffee, tea, and cocoa to conscience-motivated consumers in dedicated
“World Shops.” These ATOs were founded on principles of direct trade, solidarity, social justice,

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and equity within commercial relations, which became the framework for the Fair Trade
movement (Raynolds and Long 2007).
Fair Trade began its mainstreaming process in the late 1980s by moving to a standardized
process of certification (Raynolds and Long 2007). In 1988, a Dutch development organization,
Solidaridad, created a new label for coffee that could be used by any brand, the Max Havelaar
label. This move increased the market for fairly traded coffee. The Max Havelaar label certified
that coffee producers had received a premium price for their coffee and that this constituted a
“fair return” (Jaffee 2007). The creation of the Max Havelaar label marks a significant split in
the Fair Trade movement between the arts and crafts side and agricultural products side of Fair
Trade. Today a highly standardized system of certification and audits exists primarily on the
agricultural side of Fair Trade, whereas arts and crafts production practices are far less
standardized. Moreover, coffee begins to emerge as the showcase crop for Fair Trade
certification at this time.

Coffee Crisis and the Growth of Fair Trade
The growth of Fair Trade coffee certification came as a response to the liberalization of
the world coffee market after the Cold War. During the Cold War, coffee producing and
consuming countries negotiated the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) to regulate the
international coffee market and protect farmers from price fluctuations through production
quotas and price floors. In 1989, following the end of the Cold War, the United States (US), the
world’s largest coffee consumer, withdrew from the ICA and it collapsed. The ICA's collapse
occurred in conjunction with environmental conditions that led to global overproduction of
coffee (Talbot 2004). In 2002, the world market price of coffee hit record lows. With a free

29

coffee market, prices declined to levels at which small farmers could not sustain themselves
(Oxfam 2002; Talbot 2004). To address the coffee crisis, farmers and activists began to turn to
market-based systems, such as Fair Trade, to counter the low market price of coffee.

B. Fair Trade Standards and Principles
In 2009, Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO) and the World Fair
Trade Organization (WFTO) created “A Charter of Fair Trade Principles,” to provide a concise
description of the main principles of the Fair Trade system. The Charter lists five core principles;
market access for marginalized producers; sustainable and equitable trading relationships;
capacity building and empowerment; consumer awareness raising and advocacy; and, Fair Trade
as a “social contract.” (WFTO and FLO 2009)
These principles were designed to provide economic and social benefits for producers;
they are broad enough to apply to both the producers of agricultural products that obtain Fair
Trade certification through FLO and artists and craftspeople that produce goods that are sold
under these principles by organizations that are a part of the WFTO.
To benefit from these Fair Trade principles, small-scale coffee farmers must gain Fair
Trade certification from FLOCERT. Farmers’ production methods and their organization must
meet a set of Fair Trade standards to become certified. There are four chapters to FLO standards
for coffee production: 1. General Requirements such as certification and that members be small
producers; 2. Trade Standards such as standards for traceability and the use of the Fairtrade
trademark; 3. Production Standards such as environmental management and labor conditions;
and 4. Business and Development Standards such as democratic participation and transparency.

30

The first chapter of FLO’s Fair Trade standards: General Requirements provides their
definition of what qualifies as a small producer since, in the case of coffee, certification is only
available for small producer organizations. To meet this standard, the majority of members of the
cooperative must be smallholders who run their farm primarily through their own family’s labor.
While they can hire workers occasionally, they cannot rely on them all of the time.

Figure 2: COOPFAM coffee labeled as Fair Trade and organic. Photo by the author.

The second chapter defines the Trade Standards that producer organizations must adhere
to, including standards for traceability, sourcing, contracts, and the use of the Fairtrade
trademark. Regarding traceability, cooperatives must carefully track their supply of coffee
coming in. They can only sell their members’ coffee as Fair Trade. Moreover, products from
non-members must be kept physically separate from members’ products at all times. The

31

organization must also maintain records of the Fair Trade products sold, provide documentation
to the buyer, and clearly mark the product as Fair Trade (FLO 2011a).
The third chapter focuses on Production Standards. These standards are composed of the
management of production practices, environmental protection standards, and labor conditions.
These are often the standards that are used in the marketing of Fair Trade products because they
require that the products were produced under fair labor condition and in an environmentally
sustainable way. Concerning environmental sustainability, these standards focus on minimizing
the use of agrochemicals and the exclusion of certain prohibited chemicals; proper and safe
waste management; no use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs); appropriate maintenance
of water resources and soil fertility; and controlling for soil erosion. In addition to the
environmental production standards, the labor standards in this third chapter include prohibitions
on child labor and discrimination based on many criteria including but not limited to race,
ethnicity, gender, and health status. Members must also have the freedom of association into
democratically organized associations.
The final chapter is devoted to Business and Development Standards, including
development potential, democracy, participation and transparency, and non-discrimination
standards. Organizations must plan for and document activities that build the capacity of the
business, members, environment, or community. This plan is called the organization’s Fairtrade
Development Plan, which is approved by the organization's general assembly. The organization
must create an organizational structure that gives members access to democratic decision-making
processes. Similar to the production standards, the organization must not discriminate against
any particular group or individual.

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Meeting all of the FLO standards can be difficult for small producer organizations, which
can create significant barriers to entry into the Fair Trade system. I describe these obstacles and
the assets COOPFAM was able to leverage to overcome them in Chapter Five of this
dissertation.

C. Limitations of Fair Trade as an Economic Social Movement
Farmers face a number of obstacles to participation in Fair Trade, including growing
competition in a saturated market, and a floor price that has only been marginally adjusted for
inflation and rising costs of living several times since its inception. While the worldwide demand
for Fair Trade coffee is growing, there is market saturation due to the growth in the global supply
of Fair Trade coffee outstripping global demand. As a result, cooperatives must be able to
identify buyers that are willing to purchase their cooperative’s Fair Trade coffee (Levi and
Linton 2003; Murray, Reynolds and Taylor 2003; Smith 2010). Fair Trade’s success depends on
market growth since more coffee is certified than can be sold at the premium price (Levi and
Linton 2003; Jaffee 2007). Some actors in the Fair Trade system have encouraged corporations
to offer Fair Trade products to grow Fair Trade’s market share. The entrance of corporations has
increased consumption of Fair Trade coffee in the US. In light of its market growth and popular
appeal, Fair Trade has become a mainstream concept. The sections below explore the tensions
encountered by farmers at COOPFAM and compare them to experiences, detailed in the
literature on Fair Trade that farmers in other areas have had.

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Fair Trade Market Growth, Standardization, and Institutionalization
As awareness of Fair Trade’s benefits has grown, more farmers seek to enter this niche
market. To accommodate more farmers and increase the market for Fair Trade coffee, the
certification system has become more standardized and institutionalized (Renard 2005). Fair
Trade has also been criticized for giving too much power to certification organizations and not
enough to farmers (Taylor 2005). Fair Trade has moved from a ‘self-regulated’ and ‘selfcertified’ system that established its own norms and criteria and controlled the processes of
inspection, to a highly institutionalized system of certification. The success of market niches
such as Fair Trade, in terms of growth in size and volume, and consequent complexity has led to
an institutionalization of the certification system through bureaucratic institutions (Renard 2005).
As a result, certifiers now manage access to the Fair Trade market, making them a powerful
entity in the Fair Trade network. Many producers believe that Fair Trade’s regulatory
organization, Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO), is guided more by commercial factors
than the interests of small-scale farmers, and acts more in opposition to them than in support of
them (Jaffee 2007; Renard 2005). FLO has proposed to increase sales by decreasing the Fair
Trade floor price paid to producers, and by differentiating this price by country (Renard 2005).
Moreover, to support an increasingly bureaucratic certification system, farmer cooperatives now
pay US $3000 for Fair Trade certification, a cost that was initially born by consumers (Jaffee
2007; Renard 2005).
COOPFAM has certainly felt increased competition, as more cooperatives in Brazil have
become Fair Trade certified. However, their strong relationships with loyal coffee buyers and

34

their production of high quality and dual organic and Fair Trade certified coffee differentiates
them from some of the newly certified Fair Trade cooperatives in Brazil. As of 2012,
COOPFAM was one of two Brazilian cooperatives producing dual-certified Fair Trade and
organic coffee.

Corporate Participation in Fair Trade
Some actors in the Fair Trade system have encouraged corporate participation to increase
Fair Trade’s market share. Corporations and advocates can use Fair Trade as a tool to support
sustainability (Stenzel 2012; Stenzel 2013a). For corporations, Fair Trade’s focus on social,
environmental, and economic sustainability makes it mesh well with progressive businesses’
focus on the same principles in the Triple Bottom Line (Stenzel 2012; Stenzel 2013a). Farmers
and activists have challenged corporate involvement and the institutionalization of Fair Trade
fearing they may compromise Fair Trade’s social justice potential or divert it from its initial aim
to foster solidarity-based partnerships (Jaffee 2007; Renard 2005). The institutionalization of
Fair Trade has been critiqued for giving too much power to certification organizations (Jaffee
2007; Renard 2005). Moreover, certifiers’, specifically TransFair USA’s (now Fair Trade USA),
courting of large corporations has drawn critique from scholars and resistance from Fair Traders
(Cycon 2008; Jaffee 2007).
In April 2000, Starbucks agreed to purchase Fair Trade coffee because of consumer
pressure. This was seen as a significant victory for the Fair Trade movement, and activists hoped
other mainstream specialty roasters and even conventional roasters would follow suit.

35

Starbucks’s entry into Fair Trade as well as other multinational corporations’ participation in
Fair Trade has brought to the forefront activists’ and scholars’ discussions of whether Fair Trade
is, or should be a market niche or a movement to transform the dominant neoliberal market
paradigm.
Activists and researchers have suggested that Fair Trade USA and FLO are too focused
on marketing Fair Trade and have neglected the needs of Fair Trade producers. FLO has been
criticized for not inviting more participation from producers in their decision-making process. As
described above, in 2004, FLO divided into two organizations FLO and FLOCERT in response
to criticisms that it was both the certifying body and marketing mechanism for Fair Trade, and to
avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Jaffee (2007) characterized Fair Trade’s acceptance of multinational corporations
participation in Fair Trade as a dance with the devil. Some activists have questioned
corporations’ motivation to purchase Fair Trade coffee, and commitment to the principles of the
Fair Trade movement. Some of those criticisms come because of corporations’ token purchases
of Fair Trade in comparison to their total market volume. For example, only three percent of
Starbucks coffee in 2005 was Fair Trade certified. Before Starbucks’ entry into Fair Trade, there
was a shared understanding among TransFair USA, roasters, and activists that companies must
purchase at least five percent of their products under Fair Trade terms. Roasters who sell only
Fair Trade-certified coffee were livid with what they saw as a double standard for multinational
corporations. Since then Starbucks has increased their percentage of Fair Trade certified coffee.
In 2011, Starbucks reported that eight percent of their coffee was now Fair Trade certified

36

(Starbucks 2017). Activists and scholars have suggested that these corporations will unjustly
benefit from association with the Fair Trade label, which may carry over to their non-Fair Trade
certified products. Others worry that multinationals will attempt to water down the Fair Trade
standards.

COOPFAM and Corporations
COOPFAM has had a combination of positive and negative experiences with
transnational corporations in the Fair Trade system. Cooperative administrators and farmers have
a love-hate relationship with some of their corporate clients. The farmers and cooperative
appreciate the significant buying power that large corporations such as Green Mountain Coffee
Roasters and Bom Dia have. These corporations have the capacity to purchase much greater
quantities of coffee from the cooperative than smaller roasters. The coffee they buy still has to
meet high-quality standards, but they do not necessarily pay the very high prices per pound of
coffee for the ultra-premium lots of coffee6 that some farmers produce. Adauto, the president of
COOPFAM in 2009, lamented that Café Bom Dia, who was roasting their coffee for sales at
Walmart, did not pay very much for their coffee. They had learned that Sara Lee would be taking
over the roasting for Walmart and the cooperative worried that this huge corporation would pay
even less than Café Bom Dia. Much of the coffee purchased by these large buyers goes into
blends and espresso. As such, the farmers and cooperative separate out the best of the best coffee
to capture extra quality premiums from smaller gourmet roasters.
6

In Chapter Six, I discuss the quality premiums that the farmers earn for their coffee on top of the Fair Trade and
organic premiums.

37

Large corporations also offer social and economic development programs for the
cooperative and farmers. For example, Walmart joined Fair Trade certifiers like Fair Trade USA,
and the Banco do Brazil to support the development of the rebeneficio (coffee processing plant)
COOPFAM built in 2008 and to finance the revolving loan program for drying patios with Fair
Trade USA. However, sometimes these investments promised by large corporations do not come
to fruition. For example, in 2009 construction on the new cooperative school, partially supported
as a social development project by Café Bom Dia, ceased when Bom Dia stopped funding the
project. In Chapter Five, I further discuss the programs that coffee buyers support for farmers at
COOPFAM.

Producer Knowledge of Fair Trade Principles
Research conducted in Mexico (Doane 2010; Jaffee 2007) and Guatemala (Lyon 2006)
on Fair Trade-certified farmers shows that many are not familiar with the concept of Fair Trade,
or what social and economic benefits it is supposed to offer them. Most farmers, excluding
cooperative administrators, do not know what Fair Trade is or what it should offer them (Doane
2010). Smith (2010) explains that the capacity building aspects of Fair Trade are not evenly
distributed among cooperative members, and those that take on leadership positions are better
positioned to benefit from Fair Trade networks of vendors, activists, and experts. This dynamic
leads to cooperative leadership having better opinions of Fair Trade and stronger commitments
to the system.
My research suggests many farmers at COOPFAM have dynamic perspectives on Fair
Trade’s meaning and impacts on their lives. Farmers there speak frankly about the adverse
impacts of agro-toxicants, particularly pesticides, on the health of the farm and their families.

38

They have expressed concern about their neighbors’ use of agro-toxics contaminating their land
and crops through pesticide drift and runoff. They see the advantages of the cooperative’s social
programs such as the courses offered to members and their children, their medical and dental
programs, and the new rebeneficio built to process and select coffee for quality. These highly
tangible benefits of Fair Trade may explain why these farmers seem to have a good grasp of the
benefits the system is supposed to offer them. The cooperative’s leadership is well versed in the
rhetoric of Fair Trade. The cooperative’s previous and current presidents have traveled several
times to the United States to attend Fair Trade and specialty coffee conferences. This dynamic
leadership may account for the cooperative members’ fluency with the principles of Fair Trade.
Dean Cycon, a 100% Fair Trade coffee roaster and Fair Trade advocate, has suggested
that the Fair Trade minimum price is overemphasized to the detriment of focusing on other more
qualitative advantages of Fair Trade (Cycon 2008). These qualitative benefits include support for
democratically organized cooperatives, empowerment of women, access to pre-harvest credit,
social development premiums, and direct and sustained marketing relationships between
cooperatives and roasters (ibid 2008). To fully understand how sustainable Fair Trade is for
farming families it is vital to account for not only the economic but also the social and
environmental impacts of Fair Trade certification and production. In Chapter Five, I delve into
the non-economic benefits for COOPFAM farmers that are related to their participation in Fair
Trade.

Certifying Coffee Plantations and the Split Between Fair Trade USA and FLO
In 2011, Fair Trade USA drew heavy criticism from small-scale farmers, FLO, Fair Trade
coffee buyers, and activists for opening up Fair Trade coffee certification to plantations. FLO

39

and Fair Trade USA jointly announced the split. FLO quickly began work to form Fair Trade
North America to have an alternative Fair Trade trademark that still represented FLO’s values of
only certifying coffee produced by small-scale farmers.
Fair Trade producer organizations from around the world denounced Fair Trade USA’s
decision to certify coffee plantations. The CAN Alliance of Fair Trade producer organizations
across Latin America, Asia, and Africa released a joint statement regarding their disappointment
with the move. In their official statement about Fair Trade USA’s decision to certify plantations
the Network of Asian Producers (NAP), Coordinadora Latino Americana y del Caribe de
Pequeños Productores de Comercio Justo (CLAC) and Fairtrade Africa stated that they were
“…very disappointed to learn that Fair Trade USA has resolved to leave the Fairtrade Labelling
system (FLO), all the more so as they have not been consulted prior to this decision. They are
also disappointed to see that Fair Trade USA has chosen to define its own orientations rather
than forming part of the global vision, key principles and shared strategy endorsed by all
members of Fairtrade International. The Producer Networks cannot support this unilateral action
on the part of Fair Trade USA, which goes against their aspirations and interests” (CAN 2011).
Moreover, coffee roasters expressed their outrage with the decision. Equal Exchange said
that Fair Trade USA had “…slowly but steadily chipped away at our principles and values, only
recently taking the final steps in building their strategy. They have taken the name Fair Trade
USA, then proceeded to leave the international Fair Trade System (FLO International/Fair Trade
International), lower standards, eliminate farmers from their governance model, and invite largescale plantations into coffee and all other commodities” (Equal Exchange 2017).
However, some Fair Trade coffee buyers, such as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
(GMCR), were supportive of the decision and intended to purchase coffee from the first Fair

40

Trade certified coffee plantations in Brazil and Columbia. At the 2013 SCAA Event, GMCR
spoke to a group of twelve Brazilian Fair Trade cooperative administrators about their decision.
GMCR agreed with Fair Trade USA that coffee plantation workers should have access to some
of the same benefits and protections that small-scale coffee farmers enjoyed because of the Fair
Trade system. The Brazilian Fair Trade cooperative administrators looked for reassurance from
GMCR that there would still be a market for their own coffee, but the tension between the
trading partners was palpable. FLO tried separately to reassure the small-scale farmers about
their commitment at the 2013 SCAA event by hosting a series of meet the buyer events with
roasters committed to only purchasing Fair Trade coffee from small producers. FLO also set up
an alternative Fair Trade North America booth, a short distance away from Fair Trade USA’s
booth, to promote their new US-focused trademark and support Fair Trade farmers at the event.
This split, its potential impact on Brazilian Fair Trade farmers, and their anxieties about
competing with Fair Trade plantations is further discussed in Chapter Six.

III. Environmental Impacts of Fair Trade
Fair Trade is just one of many third-party certifications systems for coffee — including
organic, shade-grown, bird-friendly, and Rainforest Alliance — that focus on the environmental
impacts of coffee production. However, Fair Trade certification is arguably more holistic than
the other environment-focused systems above and includes all three pillars of sustainability:
economic, social, and environmental.
Research on Fair Trade has discussed the link between Fair Trade’s environmental
principles and the ecological and labor problems encountered by farmers adhering to more strict
environmental standards. Jaffee (2007) and Moberg (2005) cite the need for increased manual

41

labor to compensate for extra weeding due to Fair Trade and organic certifications’ limits on
certain agrochemicals, such as synthetic herbicides. Fair Trade banana farmers’ attempts to
mechanically rather than chemically remove weeds also led to outbreaks of weeds and pests
(Moberg 2005). The need for additional labor to uphold environmental standards meant that the
farmers in Jaffee’s (2007) study had to hire additional workers to assist in weeding and other
farm activities. This reduced the proportion of Fair Trade’s price surplus that the farmers could
use on other farm and household needs. This research suggests that the environmental
sustainability could be in contention with the social and economic sustainability of Fair Trade. In
Chapter Four, I explore the impact of Fair Trade’s environmental standards on farmers’
agricultural practices, labor, and thinking about the natural world.
Several scholars studying coffee production generally, and Fair Trade coffee specifically,
have included an analysis of farmers’ different livelihood strategies. Scholars have suggested
that even with organic or Fair Trade certification small-scale farmers cannot sustain their
families on their earnings from coffee production alone (Bacon et al. 2008b; Jaffee 2007; Lyon
2008; Mutersbaugh 1999)
Mutersbaugh (1999) writes about the various strategies and projects that coffee farmers in
Oaxaca, Mexico use to sustain their families. In addition to growing and producing coffee, these
farmers sustain themselves by growing some of their food and by trying to implement various
income-producing activities through their coffee cooperative. For example, the cooperative has
established projects including a milking herd, honey production, furniture making, a wood-fired
bread-making oven, hog production, and weaving. Furthermore, men in the cooperative often
engage in short-term migration, usually four- to eight-week stints, to work on other farms and

42

supplement the families’ income (Mutersbaugh 1999). These farmers use multiple livelihood
strategies because no one method is sufficient to meet their family’s cash needs.
Jaffee (2007) also writes about the various livelihood strategies Fair Trade and organic
certified farmers implement. Fair Trade and organic certification for their farms is but one
strategy. During the coffee crisis farmers increasingly turned to producing more of their own
staples (maize, beans, and other vegetables) in their milpas7 because the market price of coffee
was so low. Fair Trade and organic certified farmers did not abandon their milpas although they
were earning more for their coffee. Instead they worked less in their milpas and hired day
laborers or mozos to work in the milpas and in the coffee fields. Many coffee farmers in the
Oaxacan villages where Jaffee conducted his study resorted to short and long-term migration to
send remittances home. Because of the coffee crisis, almost 45% of one of the villages in his
study had migrated to find work in Oaxaca City, elsewhere in Mexico, or in the United States
(Jaffee 2007). What is particularly interesting is that Fair Trade and organic certified farmers
actually had almost twice as many family members migrating out of the area, than conventional
farming families. Parents sending their children to school and the upfront costs associated with
migration explain why this additional migration was made possible by funds earned through Fair
Trade and organic production. Fair Trade and organic farmers have used some of their additional
earnings to diversify their livelihood options by sending family members away to work and send
remittances home. While other family members leave to gain an education and seek professional
employment outside of the village.
In addition to migration, Jaffee (2007) and Mutersbaugh (1999) highlight the necessity of
self-provisioning for coffee farming families. At COOPFAM all of the farmers I interviewed

7

Milpas are a traditional type of farming field found throughout Mexico and Central America for the production of
maize and other subsistence crops.

43

produced the majority of their own food. Moreover, some mentioned producing other products
such as dairy products, vegetables, and tobacco to sell. In Chapter Four, I explore the multiple
livelihood strategies farming families at COOPFAM employ to meet their families’ needs.
Furthermore, I examine what proportions of time farmers devote to subsistence and cash-earning
activities, and how these livelihood strategies contribute to the families’ overall income and food
security.

IV. Making Feminist Sense of Fair Trade
The growing body of literature examining the socioeconomic effects of participation in
Fair Trade is still lacking in attention to the gendered dimensions of Fair Trade. The literature on
gender and ethical trade, in general, focuses on women participating in large-scale agriculture
and their role as temporary hired workers (Barrientos et al. 2003; Prieto-Carron 2006; Smith and
Dolan 2006), not as integral parts of family farms organized into producer cooperatives.
However, there are some notable exceptions. Mutersbaugh’s (1999) research on an organically
certified coffee cooperative in Mexico has shown a strongly gendered division of labor in smallscale coffee-producing communities, with women contributing eighty percent of coffee
production labor. Within the community where Mutersbaugh (1999) conducted his research
women’s participation in cooperative activities was crucial. For eight years cooperative projects
that men instituted failed because women refused to participate in the projects, or resisted taking
on additional work traditionally done by men so that men’s labor could be freed for the
cooperative’s projects. Only when the cooperative began working with the women on their
bakery project did they have access to the decision-making mechanisms of the cooperative and
began supporting the organization’s other activities (Mutersbaugh 1999).

44

Anthropologist, Sarah Lyon (2008) summarized the small body of existing literature on
gender and Fair Trade and offered some of her observations of gender dynamics in a Fair Trade
certified coffee cooperative in Guatemala. She argues that Fair Trade has failed to meet its
principle to promote gender equity. She explains that patriarchal relations prevent women from
participating actively in the cooperative and its assemblies. Women do not seek out leadership
roles because these roles conflict with their responsibilities in the home. Lyon (2008) explains
that while materials produced by the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO)
highlight non-farm income activities for women, these endeavors typically received little support
from the cooperative or external sources.
A recent edited volume on Fair Trade adds to the small but growing body of scholarship
on the gendered impacts of Fair Trade certification (Lyon and Moberg 2010). The impacts of
Fair Trade on women differ by product and country in this volume. For example, in St. Lucia
women and men banana farmers have equally been able to take advantage of the benefits of the
Fair Trade market (Moberg 2010). However, in Guatemala and Kenya entrenched patriarchies
stand in the way of extending the benefits of Fair Trade to women producers. Lyon writes about
women struggling to find assistance for their weaving projects while their husbands and other
male relatives producing coffee are the priority of the local cooperative, Fair Trade buyers,
certifiers and non-governmental organizations (Lyon 2010). Coffee production itself is not a
practical or acceptable activity for some women, so they have sought alternative income earning
activities such as weaving. Similarly, Dolan (2010) argues that the gendered inequities she
observed among Kenyan small-scale tea producers are more the result of local patriarchies than
the impact of transnational commodity chains.

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Studies on the intersections of gender, the environment, and development demonstrate
many gendered problems with development programs organized in a top-down manner and
imposed on agricultural communities. For example, women may be forced to take on additional
environmental stewardship responsibilities when environmental conditions are imposed upon
communities by development programs (Jackson 1993). Development models that draw on
Women-in-Development and Ecofeminist approaches often view women as ‘natural’
environmental stewards, and have mobilized them as environmental managers as a result
(Jackson 1993; Schroeder 1999). This essentialist ideology may lead to additional unpaid labor
burdens on women. Women’s involvement in community or environmental management projects
may be more illustrative of the subordination of women, than of their affinity for community or
the environment.
Feminists have suggested that women may have less access and control over resources
and labor arrangements than men (see Jackson 1993; Rocheleau et al. 1996; Schroeder 1999).
Since gender equity is one of the key principles of Fair Trade, the lack of attention to this
dimension needs to be remedied. Brazil’s large-scale coffee farms have many hired farmworkers,
including groups of workers often segregated by gender (Stolke 1988). However, the coffee
produced by COOPFAM farmers is almost exclusively tended to and harvested by family
members.
We must consider the unbalanced gendered division of labor prevalent in many
agricultural communities because studies have shown that additional work burdens are born by
Fair Trade and organic coffee and banana producers as a result of the movements’ environmental
principles. In addition to environmental stewardship, Fair Trade and organic coffee production
require farmers to spend additional labor on selecting high-quality coffee. Mexican coffee

46

farming families rely heavily on women's labor during the coffee harvest (Mutersbaugh 1999). In
this case, additional workloads associated with Fair Trade’s quality control requirements also fall
on women’s shoulders (ibid 1999). Concerning Fair Trade production, additional labor burdens
both follow established gendered labor patterns and transform them. Any changes to the
gendered division of labor among Fair Trade coffee producers are likely to vary from country to
country, and culture to culture. In Chapter Four, I explore how participation in Fair Trade
impacts men and women’s labor on coffee farms in Poço Fundo, Minas Gerais.

A. Gender and Ethical Trade Paradigms
While literature examining Fair Trade’s gendered dimensions is only beginning to
emerge, scholars have focused more attention on gender and other ethical codes of conduct and
trade paradigms. In the 1990s ethical trade models and codes of conduct requiring safe and
equitable working conditions and environmental protections proliferated. Many of these codes
were implemented through European supermarket chains to protect workers in the African
Horticultural sector. Some transnational corporations have obligated or suggested their suppliers
adhere to corporate codes of conduct to clean up or protect their social and environmental
images.
These bodies of literature show several trends regarding ethical codes' gendered impacts.
In general, existing codes of conduct do not serve the needs of women workers well. Women
make up the bulk of informal workers in African horticultural sector, and in other geographical
areas as well. Women are not protected well by existing codes of conduct because of their
concentration in temporary, seasonal, and flexible labor arrangements, and due to structural
factors such as gender and sexual discrimination in many countries. Because of their temporary,

47

seasonal, and flexible status women often lack access to maternity leave, face addition
occupational health and safety issues, are paid low wages, and have high rates of job insecurity.
Many codes focus on permanent, full-time workers that are more likely to be men. Finally, many
women are not aware of existing codes of conduct or do not know or understand what the codes
provide for them (Barrientos et al. 2003; Prieto-Carron 2006; Smith and Dolan 2006).
Women also endure sexual and other harassment, discriminatory practices such as
different pay scales for men and women, and little opportunity for advancement (Barrientos et al.
2003; Prieto-Carron 2006; Smith and Dolan 2006). These acts are not as a result of codes of
conduct, but they also have not been well addressed by these codes.

B. Gender, Resource Allocation, and Empowerment
Studies of Fair Trade producers show that they earn some additional financial benefits
from participation in Fair Trade. The question remains on how households distribute these
benefits. For example, do women and men stand on equal grounds when negotiating financial
decisions in the home and on the farm? In practice, do women and men, and girls and boys have
equal access to the social benefits of Fair Trade such as improved healthcare and education?
Fair Trade’s principles provide an opportunity to empower women farmers, including all
women in farming communities. To address the potential of Fair Trade to empower women it is
important to explore the level of access and participation women enjoy in cooperative processes
and decision-making, including access and involvement in cooperative leadership. Women’s
participation in the cooperative assemblies at COOPFAM is much lower than men’s. Several
women are active in the Women’s group of COOPFAM and also often speak out and participate
in meetings, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. In Chapter Five, I explore

48

why these women choose to participate while other women often do not engage actively in the
cooperative meetings.
How or whether Fair Trade’s gender equity principles affect women’s decision-making
power in their homes or the cooperative also remains unexplored. Fair Trade’s gender equity
principles challenge traditional gender relations within households and within the cooperative
and as a result tensions between men and women occur. I also examine the differential impact
that Fair Trade has on men and women in diverse life stages and marital statuses. I examine these
sets of tensions and impacts in Chapters Four and Five of this dissertation.

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Chapter Three. Setting and Methodology

I. Introduction
A political ecology approach to examining the “fairness” of Fair Trade at COOPFAM
necessitates an exploration of the geographical and historical context in which coffee production
grew and flourished in Brazil. By beginning with a brief history of coffee production in Brazil
and state intervention in this industry, I set the framework for understanding coffee production
and its relationship to State actors in Brazil and market factors at the international level. I then
focus on the geography of the Sul de Minas region of Minas Gerais State where this study’s
cooperative, COOPFAM, is located. From there I will give a brief history of the city of Poço
Fundo and a history of the establishment of COOPFAM. Finally, I will outline the methodology
I employed to study the social, economic and environmental impacts of Fair Trade coffee
production at COOPFAM.

II. Environmental History of Coffee Production in Brazil
Coffee was brought to the Paraíba Valley of Brazil in the late eighteenth century. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, three states produced the majority of Brazilian coffee: Rio de
Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. Coffee was one of Brazil’s most lucrative export
commodities and a major source of foreign currency well into the 1960s (Welch 1999). Foreign
exchange earned from coffee was used to import equipment and technology to develop Brazil’s
nascent industries in the nineteenth century. Coffee’s prosperity led to the development of
Southeastern Brazil’s industrial base. Throughout history, Brazilian coffee producers have
exploited the environment and their labor force. Coffee production resulted in major

50

deforestation and environmental degradation in Southeastern Brazil in the nineteenth century
(Branstrom 2000; Stein 1957; Stolcke 1988).

A. Coffee, Slaves, Sharecroppers, and Colonos
The nineteenth century was crucial in the development of the Brazilian coffee industry. In
that century three states produced the majority of Brazilian coffee: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo,
and Minas Gerais (Lima 1981; Stein 1957; Stolcke 1988). The coffee industry was a major
contributor to the industrialization of Southeastern Brazil. Rio de Janeiro and Santos—São
Paulo’s neighboring port city—were key ports for the international coffee trade. Today they are
important centers of industry, commerce, and the import and export of agricultural and industrial
products.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Southeastern Brazil’s coffee industry was
growing, while Brazil’s sugar industry in the Northeast entered into decline. Southeastern coffee
planters were able to buy excess slaves from the Northeastern sugar plantations as well as newly
imported African slaves (Stein 1957). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the abolition
movement in Brazil was gaining strength. Coffee planters in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and
Minas Gerais opposed abolition, fearing slavery’s end would deprive them of their labor force.
Planters in São Paulo and Minas Gerais took different approaches to the provisioning of coffee
labor after Brazil abolished slavery in 1888.

São Paulo
The Brazilian State has often intervened on behalf of coffee farmers. During the second
half of the nineteenth century, the Paulista government subsidized large-scale European

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immigration (or the colonato system) to control the coffee planters’ labor costs in the state of São
Paulo. The majority of the colonos came from Italy (Roseberry 1995). Before the colonato
system, Paulista planters relied on sharecropping, where tenant farmers provided landowners
with a percentage of the crops they grew. The colonato system was less expensive for planters
but more exploitative of workers than the sharecropping system (Stolcke 1988). Colonos were
resident workers on the plantations. Entire families provided farm labor for the coffee
plantations. Plantation owners preferred colonos with large families to reduce their labor costs.
They looked for immigrant families with three or more members who could work in the coffee
fields. Plantations provided the colonos with housing and food in return for their labor in the
coffee fields (Stolke 1988).
By the 1860s São Paulo planters had introduced the mixed task and piece rate systems to
pay colonos. Colonos were encouraged to plant food crops in the rows or spaces between the
coffee trees they tended to supplement their subsistence needs. Colonos were rarely able to earn
enough under the colonato system to secure their own plot of land, whereas sharecroppers fared
a bit better economically (Stolcke 1988).
The explosive growth in the production of coffee under the colonato system led to
overproduction. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Brazilian government instituted
valorization schemes to sustain high coffee prices artificially. The government bought excess
coffee and warehoused it or dumped it into the ocean. This artificial bolstering of prices created
incentives for more domestic and international coffee production, leading to subsequent
problems with excess production and low coffee prices (Stolcke 1988). São Paulo planters were
able to survive these economic slumps by a variety of methods to reduce labor costs under the
colonato system. They could reduce the labor force by replacing colonos with wage laborers,

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hiring more single men on a temporary basis and paying them less, and by having colonos selfprovision with subsistence crops when coffee prices were low (Stolcke 1988). All these
strategies benefited planters at the expense of colono families.

Minas Gerais
Mineiros began cultivating coffee in the Zona de Mata in the nineteenth century like their
neighbors in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states. Three important factors explain the growth in
production and exports of coffee in Minas Gerais: the availability of land appropriate for coffee
production, an abundance of labor caused by the decline of mining in the state, and high coffee
prices (Lima 1981).
The decline of the gold economy in the central region of Minas Gerais brought many free
Brazilians and slaves into the Zona de Mata (Lima 1981). Like planters in São Paulo, Mineiros
were dependent on slave labor and opposed abolition. In the 1878 Agricultural Congress,
Mineiros opposed an immigration scheme like São Paulo’s. As a result, sharecropping was the
dominant labor system in Minas Gerais after slavery’s abolition (Stolcke 1995).
The Zona da Mata lacked previously uncultivated land8 at the end of the nineteenth
century. Moreover, a series of physical and financial obstacles obstructed the expansion of coffee
in the Zona da Mata (Lima 1981). The topography of the Zona da Mata was incompatible with
agricultural equipment, and the northern and central regions of the state were too arid for coffee
production. Coffee planters in Minas Gerais lacked sufficient capital to invest in the expansion of
coffee, additional labor, or coffee production technology. These three factors limited the growth
of the Mineiro coffee industry in the nineteenth century.
8

Land uncultivated by Europeans at least; Warren Dean’s (1995) environmental history of the Brazilian Atlantic
forest suggests that native Brazilians inhabited and cultivated Brazil’s rain and temperate forests centuries before the
Portuguese arrived in Brazil.

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Despite the decline in coffee production in the nineteenth century, Minas Gerais now
produces more coffee than any other state in Brazil (Barros 2016). There are three regions in
Minas Gerais that produce the most coffee due to excellent climatic and geographical conditions
for growing Arabic coffee. Those regions are the Southwest, the central-west, and the Southeast
of Minas Gerais (Barros 2016). Below, I describe the geography and climate of the
Southwestern region, or Sul de Minas, where COOPFAM is located.

B. Modernization of Agriculture
An abundance of land and cheap labor and the relatively high costs of agricultural inputs
delayed Brazil’s agricultural modernization project. The colonato system was strong into the
1960s until the 1963 Rural Labor Statute was passed. Stolcke (1988) shows that the majority of
coffee in São Paulo began to be produced using salaried labor when workers demanded the labor
rights stipulated in the 1963 Rural Labor Statute.
In the 1950s, Brazilian subsidies for farm machinery and fertilizers, price guarantees, and
technical assistance led to the partial mechanization of crops such as rice, wheat, and sugar cane.
São Paulo planters, however, were reluctant to implement new technical methods of coffee
cultivation until the 1960s. According to Stolcke only “after the colonato had become extinct,
did the introduction of technical innovations accelerate” (1988:87).
In the 1950s, São Paulo planters lost the option of bringing more land into production,
while their neglect of coffee trees had led to poor yields, mediocre quality coffee, and soil
erosion (Stolcke 1988; Welch 1999). The Agronomic Institute of Campinas had demonstrated
that, with the introduction of high-yielding coffee varieties, regular use of chemical fertilizers,
closer spacing of coffee trees, control of soil erosion through contour farming, and partial

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mechanization, yields on old coffee land could be akin to those achieved on newly cleared land
(Stolcke 1988). From mid-1962 to the end of 1967 the government instituted a program to uproot
millions of unproductive coffee trees (Welch 1999). A coffee export levy financed the program
but was begrudged by coffee planters. They protested the levy and negotiated a settlement that
eliminated the 1964 contribution quota and raised the domestic price of coffee by twenty-five
percent (Welch 1999). Concurrently, international demand for coffee rose, and prices increased.

C. Coffee Production and State Intervention
Brazilian coffee production has a long history of State interventions in the market to
regulate labor, price, and supply of coffee discussed above. In addition to interventions to control
the price and availability of labor in Brazilian coffee production, the State also intervened in the
market to stabilize the price of coffee. In the early 1900s, an expansion of coffee production led
to an oversupply of coffee and a fall in global coffee prices. Brazil, at that time, was the world’s
largest producer of coffee. As such, Brazil’s 70% market share of coffee exports was large
enough that interventions made by the Brazilian government could unilaterally influence prices.
In 1906, the state government in São Paulo instated the first “coffee valorization” plan, where the
state purchased eight million bags of coffee to keep them off of the market and keep prices high.
This amounted to nearly a third of world coffee production and more than half of Brazil’s
production (Talbot 2004). These purchases stabilized prices globally, as this coffee was then
slowly sold over the next ten years.
The cyclical nature of coffee production and market fluctuations continued throughout
the twentieth century. In the wake of World War Two, the Inter-American Coffee Agreement
came about as a result of Latin America being cut off from European markets. The Inter-

55

American Coffee Agreement set import quotas for the US Market from 1940-45. It was lifted
after the war ended, which led to rising coffee prices that set records by 1954 and resulted in the
over planting of coffee in many areas. Coffee producers began meeting after 1954 to discuss
ways to stop price decline. There were various unsuccessful attempts to regulate the market until
1962 when the US convened a conference in New York because of fears that unstable coffee
markets would increase the threat that communism would spread in Latin America (Talbot
2004). US anxiety about the spread of communism across Latin America was growing at that
time in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Furthermore, US President Kennedy was interested in
price stabilization efforts. As a result, the New York conference led to the International Coffee
Agreement (ICA) between producing and consuming countries. The ICA also established
production quotas to balance supply and demand.

The Coffee Crisis and the Rise of Fair Trade Coffee
The ICA governed the price and supply of coffee from 1962 until 1989, as a mechanism
partially set up to stem the spread of communism in Latin America. The end of the Cold War
hastened the demise of the ICA. In 1989, the United States (US), the world’s largest coffee
consumer, withdrew from the ICA and it collapsed. This liberalized the market for coffee and
producing countries were forced to sell coffee at the New York Commodity Price (C-Price).
Like all commodity prices, the C-Price for coffee rises and falls due to supply and
demand. Weather patterns have often had severe impacts on the C-Price of coffee. Soon after the
dismantling of the ICA, a killer frost hit the coffee fields of São Paulo, Brazil wiping out much
of the crop. Without the market regulatory power of the ICA, a temporary spike in the C-price of
coffee occurred. Farmers responded to the higher prices by planting more coffee. However,

56

coffee is a slow growing crop, and the first harvest is approximately five years after new coffee
plants are planted. At the same time a new giant in coffee production, Vietnam, began to enter
the market in the late 1990s. The combined over planting in existing coffee growing regions and
Vietnam’s rise in the market led to gross over production and historic lows in coffee prices in
2002 (Talbot 2004).
This period is now commonly referred to as the Coffee Crisis. Under this new freemarket paradigm, prices declined to levels at which small farmers could not sustain themselves
(Oxfam 2002; Talbot 2004). The origin stories of the Fair Trade movement typically point to the
Coffee Crisis as the sea change moment where market-based movements began to grow to
address the Coffee Crisis and the plight of poor coffee farmers. Indeed, at this time market-based
movements and second and third party certification systems began to grow in popularity and
were proposed as a simple solution to poverty in agricultural communities.

III. Description of Research Site
A. Geography and Coffee Production in Sul de Minas, Minas Gerais
Brazil leads the world in coffee production but has only recently entered specialty niches
such as Fair Trade. Minas Gerais produces 50.8% of Brazilian coffee, and 53% of this
production occurs in the Sul de Minas (Silveira et al. 2006). Minas Gerais is a mountainous state
in Southeast Brazil. The state is almost entirely inside the area known as the Brazilian Highlands.
Mountain ranges in Minas Gerais include the Serra da Mantiqueira, Serra do Espinhaço, Serra da
Canasta, Serra do Cipó, and Serra dos Aimorés. Although the state is quite mountainous, there
are considerable differences in the geography and climate in different areas of the state.

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The Serra do Espinhaço runs from Minas Gerais up to northern Bahia and is where most
of the mineral wealth is concentrated in Minas Gerais. The English translation of the state’s
name, “General Mines,” comes from the abundance of mineral wealth that was extracted from
the state, particularly during the eighteenth century often called the Século de Ouro (Golden
Century) (Levine 1999). Once the Século de Ouro ended, many people in the mining regions
either migrated or turned to subsistence agriculture (Furtado 1968).
The southeastern part of the state is called the Zona da Mata, which refers to the Mata
Atlântica. This area was where coffee production occurred in Minas Gerais in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century. Much of the Mata Atlântica in this area of the state was cleared to
produce coffee (Lima 1981).

Figure 3: Map of Meso Regions of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Map Source: Government of Minas Gerais (Governo de Minas Gerais 2017).
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The Serra da Mantiqueira range creates the borders between Minas Gerais, São Paulo,
and Rio de Janeiro. These mountains separate the coastal plain of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
from the central highlands of Minas Gerais. COOPFAM is located north of the Serra da
Mantiqueira range in the Sul de Minas region of Minas Gerais. Minas Gerais is a state highly
dependent on agriculture. Coffee production and dairy production are the main agricultural
activities in Sul de Minas. Sul de Minas is ideal for growing high-quality coffee because of the
fertile terra rosa soils there and because the area is in the Tierra Templada altitudinal zone
between approximately 750 to 1,800 meters in elevation. However, modified polar air can cause
severe frosts that can inflict extensive damage to coffee crops in Sul de Minas and neighboring
São Paulo. These occasional frosts are a contributing factor in many drastic rises and eventual
declines in the world market price of coffee due to Brazil’s global importance as a coffeeproducing nation.
According to data collected by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística in 2007,
the population of Minas Gerais was 45.7% White (Branca), 9.7% Black (Preta), 44.2%, MixedWhite and Black (Parda), and 0.4% Asian or Indigenous (Amerela or Indígena) (IBGE 2008).
This is relatively similar to the racial breakdown of Southeast Brazil in general, which is 58.4%
White (Branca), 8.4% Black (Preta), and 32.4% Mixed-White and Black (Parda), and 0.9%
Asian or Indigenous (Amerela or Indígena) (IBGE 2008).

B. Poço Fundo History and Geography
I conducted my fieldwork primarily with members of the COOPFAM cooperative located
in the city of Poço Fundo, MG. In 2006 I visited Poço Fundo for the first time. I caught a bus
from Alfenas about thirty miles away. The landscape surrounding Alfenas is low lying and

59

riverine, with long finger-lakes, and great swaths of swaying sugar cane plantations. About
twenty minutes out of Alfenas the landscape starts to change as foothills rise up and you can spy
coffee bushes. The former Mata Atlântica has largely been denuded of native plants and coffee
dominates the landscape. Mile after mile after mile of coffee plantations sprawl out. It is still
“low lying” here compared to the coffee growing regions I had come to know in Nicaragua and
Costa Rica. There are few shade trees on these plantations. The farms are relatively flat, and the
coffee is grown in full sunlight, ideal for quick harvesting, sometimes mechanically, with large
coffee harvesting machinery. The nutrient rich terra rosa soils peek out between the coffee
bushes and along the roadsides. Eventually, the hills become a bit steeper, and the coffee
persists.
The landscape changes around the city of Machado as the coffee farms become smaller.
Many are delineated by rows of banana plants, bamboo, or sugar cane. Small pink, blue, and
green cement homes, bordered by kitchen gardens, begin to dot the landscape. The bus ride from
Alfenas to Poço Fundo is a study in Brazilian agricultural production as great coffee plantations
rise out of seas of sugar cane. Between Alfenas and Machado lies Café Ipanema, one of the
largest coffee plantations in the world. The small-scale farms of Poço Fundo stand in stark
contrast to the enormous scale of production at Café Ipanema.
From Machado, it is only about a half an hour until the bus pulls through the entrance
gates to the city of Poço Fundo. As I walk toward COOPFAM from the bus station, I see the
very steep hills that lead up into the central part of the town, in a few short years I will become
very familiar with those hills.
Captain Francisco de Assis, Coronel José Dias de Gouvêa, and other farmers founded
Poço Fundo, originally named Gimirim, in April 1870. The Portuguese King granted Gouvêa his

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local landholdings. These men wanted to establish a city close to their fazendas (plantations).
The farmers lived far from urban centers and desired the amenities provided by a city, especially
proximity to religious services. Slaves and farmers cut down the native forest to erect the first
chapel in the bairro (neighborhood) of São Benedito in December 1870. In four years one
hundred homes had sprung up from where there had only been virgin forest previously (Noronha
2003).
Tobacco was the first major commercial enterprise and the most important crop in Poço
Fundo for many decades. Tobacco's significance is reflected in the city’s crest of arms and flag
that prominently feature a tobacco leaf. In 1953, the mayor decided to change the name of the
town to Poço Fundo, which was the name of a famous type of Brazilian tobacco grown there
(Noronha 2003). While Poço Fundenses still grow tobacco, it has been surpassed by coffee
production as the most significant economic activity in the municipality. Farmers in Poço Fundo
produced 8,765 tons of coffee in 2006 (IGBE 2017).
Poço Fundo, along with its neighboring districts of Machado and Campestre, is said to
produce some of the best quality coffee in Brazil (Silveira et al. 2006). The municipality of Poço
Fundo is 464 km2. Varying altitudes between 800 and 1300 meters are excellent for growing
Arabica coffee. Poço Fundo’s population in 2007 was 15,350 (IBGE 2008). In 2000 44.5% of
Poço Fundenses lived in the rural parts of the district. Agriculture is the most important
economic activity in the municipality, 62% of the population is engaged in some agricultural
activity (IBGE 2009). Of the 1698 farms in the district, 81% were considered to be family farms,
which generated 55.3% of the value of agricultural production there (Silveira et al. 2006).

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C. COOPFAM History
COOPFAM’s roots date back to 1984 when a group of farmers in the local sindicato
(union) in Poço Fundo began exploring alternative forms of agriculture. Small-scale farmers in
the area did not feel well represented by the union, which they felt was created to serve political
purposes and focused mainly on agricultural wageworkers, not small farmers. In 1984, the
farmers explain that it was a local priest, Agnaldo Perugini, who got them interested in
alternative agriculture. Father Perugini was a part of the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT)
movement. He spoke to the farmers about stewardship and alternative agriculture, linking
Christian values with environmental sustainability.
The CPT, an organization within the Catholic Church in Brazil, was associated with the
new union movement in rural Brazil during the country’s democratic transition between 19791989. The new union movement had strong support from the progressive sector of the Catholic
Church and was a radical movement of largely poor small-scale farmers. It was the most
important Church entity to emerge out of this pastoral movement (Houtzager 2000). The CPT
was conceived as a way to support small-scale farmers, like those who later formed COOPFAM,
in economic and political struggles.
In 1991, a small group of farmers worked with Father Perugini and organized the
Associação dos Pequenos Produtores de Poço Fundo e Região. They had no market for their
coffee and few members. In 1993, members of the Associação began pooling their resources to
buy inputs, such as fertilizer, collectively. The following year they started a rotating fund to
purchase inputs. In 1995, the organization furthered its commitment to alternative agriculture
when it began working with Sepucaí a local non-governmental organization (NGO) that provided
help and guidance on organic and biodynamic farming. The Associação and later COOPFAM

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(the cooperative) worked with Sepucaí until 2007. It was during this time that the Associação
began to seek organic and Fair Trade certification.
COOPFAM and its associations began participating in the Fair Trade movement in 1998
when the Associação dos Pequenos Produtores de Poço Fundo e Região (Association) worked
with Max Havelaar9 to become Fair Trade certified. Unfortunately, the Association did not have
an international market for their Fair Trade coffee for several years. In 2002, the Association
became the first in Brazil to receive Fair Trade certification from the main certifying body at the
time Fair Trade Labelling Organization (FLO). After obtaining FLO certification, the
cooperative was finally able to reach buyers interested in their Fair Trade certified coffee and
gain access to this new market. In 1997, the association received organic certification through the
Associação de Agricultura Orgânica (AAO). Today COOPFAM farmers continue to produce
Fair Trade coffee under FLO certification. Their organic coffee is certified by AAO for the
Brazilian market, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for the United States, and European
Union Agricultural Standard (EUROPA) for the European market, and Japanese Agricultural
Standard (JAS) for markets in Asia. COOPFAM exports Fair Trade and organic coffee to North
America, Europe, and Japan. In 2009, COOPFAM was the largest exporter of Fair Trade and
organic coffee in Brazil, exporting twenty containers of Fair Trade and organic dual-certified
coffee. During this period Cooperavitae was the only other Brazilian coffee cooperative
exporting dual-certified Fair Trade and organic coffee. In 2009, Cooperavitae exported three
shipping containers of dual-certified coffee.
COOPFAM is one of the most established Brazilian Fair Trade cooperatives. COOPFAM
had 205 member families in 2006, approximately 250 member families in 2009, and 307 member

9

Max Havelaar was a label created in 1988 by the Dutch development organization Solidaridad to certify that coffee
producers had received a premium price for their coffee.

63

families in 2011. The average size of a COOPFAM farm was seven hectares in 2009
(COOPFAM 2009), and eight hectares in 2011. Sixty percent of COOPFAM farmers have
organic certification (TransFair USA 2009). In 2007, the cooperative sold 12,300 bags
(60kg/bag) of coffee (COOPFAM 2009). While in the 2008-09 season, it sold 20,000 bags of
coffee due to a bumper crop. The cooperative expected about half that production in the 2009-10
cycle due to a rainy harvest season and naturally lower coffee yield after the previous year’s high
yield.
COOPFAM is rooted in social justice, and environmental movements, beginning with the
CPT in the mid-1980s and today is situated firmly in the organic and Fair Trade movements. The
religious rhetoric from the CPT movement is still present in many farmers’ descriptions of why
sustainable production is desirable. Farmers speak passionately about being stewards of the
earth. The cooperative administrators — who are all farmers themselves — share this
commitment to social and environmental issues. Education levels vary among the farmers and
administrators, but two of the cooperative’s recent presidents both had post-secondary degrees.
Luis Adauto Oliveira (President from 2003-2009), studied in the Seminary before returning to
Poço Fundo to grow coffee; and Marcelo de Paiva Gonçalves (President from 2009-2011),
studied agronomy at the Centro Superior de Ensino e Pesquisa de Machado.
Today, COOPFAM is made up of exclusively small-scale coffee farmers who live in Sul
de Minas region of Minas Gerais in or near the cities of Poço Fundo, Machado, Andradas,
Campestre, Ouro Fino, Cambuí, Paraguaçu, Santa Rita do Sapucaí, São João da Mata,
Silvanópolis, Natércia, Nepomuce, and Inconfidentes. Each cooperative member is also a
member of an agricultural association in the city where they live; the largest association in the
cooperative is in Poço Fundo.

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COOPFAM has an advantage over other cooperatives entrenched in conventional
markets and production practices because it was formed to access markets like Fair Trade,
organic, and other specialty markets. All of the farmers in COOPFAM have farms that are at or
below the maximum size permitted by FLO. Farmers interested in joining COOPFAM must join
one of the associations affiliated with the cooperative and participate actively, including going to
meetings for six months. Moreover, they must meet the social, environmental standards required
for Fair Trade certification. In 2009, the cooperative president, Luis Adauto Oliviera, spoke
about being hesitant to have more Fair Trade-only certified farmers join because 2008-2009 was
the first fiscal year that COOPFAM could not sell all of its high-quality, but conventional, Fair
Trade coffee. However, the cooperative was eagerly promoting organic production because the
demand for dual Fair Trade and organic certified coffee was still greater than their supply.

D. Snapshot of COOPFAM Family Farmers
COOPFAM is a cooperative that has approximately 300 member families; the numbers
vary from year to year as farmers join or withdraw from the cooperative. In COOPFAM’s 2011
census they listed 307 members, 105 of those held organic certification while 202 of them were
Fair Trade conventional. Of the families interviewed for this study, twenty-four were married
couples with children. Other research participants included a widow and widower, one married
couple without children, three unmarried men, and one unmarried woman.
COOPFAM families live in or near the cities of Poço Fundo, Machado, Andradas,
Campestre, Ouro Fino, Cambuí, Paraguaçu, Santa Rita do Sapucaí, São João da Mata,
Silvanópolis, Natércia, Nepomuce, and Inconfidentes in the Sul de Minas region of Minas

65

Gerais. Some of these cities are over three hours drive from Poço Fundo where the cooperative is
located.

Figure 4: Map of cities in Sul de Minas, Minas Gerais with COOPFAM members.
Map credit: Adrianne Daggett.

The average size of a COOPFAM farm is eight hectares, and the average area under
coffee production is 3.4 hectares. This is somewhat larger than Fair Trade and organic farms in
Mexico and several Central American countries. In Mexico, Jaffee (2007) reported that farmers
had about 4.4 hectares of land, 2.5 ha of which was in coffee production. In El Salvador, farms in

66

Méndez’s (2008) study were under collective land management and coffee plots were between
0.7-3.5 ha. While in Nicaragua, Westphal (2008) reported coffee holdings of three manzanas or
approximately two hectares.
In addition to coffee production, many farmers at COOPFAM have some land in pasture,
subsistence crops, or natural reserve. The map below is an example of land use map for a
COOPFAM farming family. Areas shown include two coffee fields Talhão Adensado (1.71 ha),
and Talhão Jatoba (2.56 ha), 1.79 ha of pasture (pasto), the location of a natural spring
(nascente), and two areas of forest reserve (reserva) totaling 5.90 ha. I provide production
information about the amount of coffee harvested and other subsistence activities on COOPFAM
farms in Chapter Four.

Figure 5: Map of a COOPFAM family farm.
Map Credit: Edimar Moreira Martins.

67

Figure 6: Aerial photo of a COOPFAM family farm.
Photo Credit: Edimar Moreira Martins.

E. Organizational Structure of COOPFAM
Nucleus
The nucleus is the smallest form of organization within the cooperative. There are 14
nuclei under COOPFAM. The farmers join a nucleus in the bairro where they live. The members
of the nucleus meet monthly. Each nucleus delegates at least one person to attend various
cooperative and association meetings on a monthly basis. For those nuclei outside of Poço
Fundo, it is not practical for them to travel to Poço Fundo regularly for cooperative functions.

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Association
Originally the members of COOPFAM formed an association in Poço Fundo. Today,
there are five associations within the cooperative. Each association represents a group of
cooperative members that live in a particular municipality, and each association has at least one
representative on the board of directors for the cooperative. The number of board members from
a particular association is related to the proportion of cooperative members in an association. In
2009, there were over 180 associates in Poço Fundo, at least 36 in Campestre, five in Andradas,
five in Ouro Fino, and five in Inconfidentes. Poço Fundo has nine representatives, and it is the
largest association. Campestre has two representatives, and the others each have one
representative (Andradas, Inconfidentes, Ouro Fino).

Cooperative
Under Brazilian law, the members of the original Association in Poço Fundo had to form
a cooperative to sell their coffee. They formed COOPFAM in 2004, to continue selling coffee
since producer associations cannot engage in the commercialization of their products in Brazil.

F. Organic and Fair Trade Coffee Production in Sul de Minas
Wilkinson and Mascarenhas (2007) suggest that, in Brazil, Fair Trade was not a
component of the social movements, producer organizations, civil society groups and
government policies that were directed at small farmers in the 1990s. However, they suggest that
in less than a decade the discourse of Fair Trade was incorporated into the official policy
discourse of the former President Luis Ignacio da Silva, various ministries, and public agencies.

69

Moreover, popular movements and non-governmental organizations in Brazil have adopted Fair
Trade discourse.
In 2008, TransFair USA (now Fair Trade USA) listed six Fair Trade cooperatives. The
Associação dos Pequenos Produtores de Poço Fundo e Região, the founding association in the
cooperative COOPFAM, was the first Brazilian coffee association to receive Fair Trade
certification in 1998 from Max Havelaar and later in 2002 by Fair Trade Labeling Organization
(FLO). The next cooperatives to become Fair Trade certified were Santana da Vargem in 2003,
Coocafé in 2005, and Coorpol, Coopervitae, and PRONOVA all in 2006 (TransFair USA 2009).
In 2011, this number had grown to nineteen Fair Trade certified coffee cooperatives and
associations in Brazil (FLOCERT 2011), fourteen of which were located in Minas Gerais.
Today, FLOCERT lists thirteen coffee cooperatives and seventeen associations with Fair Trade
certification (FLOCERT 2016).
Geography and the size of coffee farms play a role in determining whether a farm is
eligible for Fair Trade certification. Brazil’s large-scale plantations were not eligible for Fair
Trade certification until 2011 when Fair Trade USA initiated a pilot program to certify
plantations. Although Fair Trade standards were designed to benefit small-scale farmers, the
system under FLOCERT, also allows for plantations of some products such as tea to receive Fair
Trade certification. Coffee producers and activists were successful in pressuring certifying
organizations not to allow Fair Trade certification of coffee plantations until Fair Trade USA
broke away from FLO in 2011. Brazil’s mega-plantations are a concern for small farmers and
activists fighting to reserve Fair Trade certification for small-scale farmers in democratically
organized producer cooperatives. Furthermore, some in the specialty coffee industry criticized
Fair Trade organizations for not certifying medium to large estate grown coffee. Since these

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estates are not organized into producer cooperatives, they cannot receive Fair Trade certification
under Fair Trade Labeling Certification (FLOCERT). In 2011, Fair Trade USA (formerly
TransFair USA) began a pilot program to certify coffee plantations, with the first two pilot
plantations located in Brazil and Colombia. I describe the tensions around this change to certify
plantations later in Chapter Six of this dissertation.
The Sul de Minas is also the locus of Brazilian organic coffee production. In 1992 the
first Brazilian coffee farms received organic certification in the Sul de Minas, Minas Gerais
(Souza, Saes, and Dolnokoff 2005). Although Brazil produces the most coffee in the world —
roughly 30% of the world’s coffee — the entire specialty coffee industry accounts for only 6%,
and organic production accounts for less than 0.5% of total production (Souza, Saes, and
Dolnokoff 2005). In the 1990s several coffee quality contests such as the Cup of Excellence and
Illy Award began in Brazil. These contests brought attention to the specialty coffee industry and
provided growers with incentives to improve the quality of their coffee.
In 1992 a farmer from Machado – Poço Fundo’s nearest neighboring town — exported
250 bags of organic coffee to Japan. Soon after, organic coffee producers began winning coffee
quality awards. In 1999 a different farmer from Machado won second place in the prestigious
Cup of Excellence competition, and in 2001 another organic coffee grower from the Sul de
Minas won the Cup of Excellence. His coffee sold for over US $700 a sack (60 kg/sack) at a time
when the conventional price of coffee sold for US $35 a sack. In 2008, the first Fair Trade coffee
quality competition was held in Minas Gerais. Several farmers from COOPFAM won quality
awards, including first place, which went to the cooperative president at the time Luis Adauto
Oliviera. The competition was co-sponsored by TransFair USA (now Fair Trade USA), Serviço
Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (SEBRAE), and Café Bom Dia.

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During the coffee crisis, when market prices bottomed out in the late 1990s and early
2000s, farmers in the Sul de Minas saw organic coffee production as a way to earn more for their
coffee (Souza, Saes, and Dolnokoff 2005). Fair Trade offered them a financial safety net while
transitioning from conventional to organic coffee production by providing a set floor price per
pound of coffee sold. Having a set price is important to farmers transitioning to organic because
they may initially have low yields in the first years. With this kind of help and an eye to the
future, farmers in Fair Trade certified cooperatives such as COOPFAM are increasingly
transitioning to organic production. Once farmers achieve organic certification, the higher Fair
Trade premium price they receive improves farmers’ economic stability.
The type of small-scale coffee farmers participating in Fair Trade fills a relatively
unstudied niche in the vast amount literature on agricultural production and agricultural
movements in Brazil. While many of these farmers own land, they have never been part of the
powerful land-owning class in Brazil; nor are they the workers found on the coffee plantations of
São Paulo, or part of the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), or other landless people’s movements in
Brazil.

IV. Methodology
A. Methods
I employed common anthropological methods including participant observation and
semi-structured interviews to collect the data for this study. Since this is a multi-sited
ethnography, I collected data among supply and value chain actors in both Brazil and the United
States. A description of the types of methods used among these various agents follows below.
Data for this study was collected and analyzed with the approval of Michigan State University’s

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institutional review board (IRB) under two different approvals # 06-469 for data collected from
Brazilian coffee farmers and administrators, and # 06-264D for research conducted with Fair
Trade coffee buyer, certifiers, and activists. Research participants were given the option for their
names to appear in the final work or to elect confidentiality, in those cases where a research
participate elected confidentiality I have used a pseudonym.

Brazilian Research Sites
I conducted my fieldwork with two Fair Trade certified cooperatives in Sul de Minas,
Minas Gerais. My work was primarily done at COOPFAM with supplemental interviews carried
out at another cooperative in the region, Coopervitae. I spent seven months conducting my
dissertation research in Minas Gerais, Brazil in 2009 and two months conducting my predissertation research there in 2006, and a two-week follow-up visit in 2012.
I used multiple methods to collect data on the impacts of Fair Trade and organic coffee
production on the lives of small farming families. My methods included: semi-structured
interviews, informal interviews, participant observation, as well as collection and analysis of
textual, photographic and video-graphic material
I conducted semi-structured interviews with 36 farmers at COOPFAM and four farmers
at Coopervitae. I also interviewed the presidents of these cooperatives, three at COOPFAM and
one at Coopervitae. At COOPFAM I conducted semi-structured interviews with a member of the
fiscal council, two administrative directors of the cooperative, three presidents of associations
within the cooperative, the agrotechnical advisor for the cooperative, and the cooperative's
internal organic auditor. I also interviewed one of the two women on the association’s board of

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directors, as well as the president of the women’s group in the cooperative, and several of the
group’s members.
In open-ended interviews with cooperative administrators, I questioned them on why the
cooperative selected systems such as Fair Trade and organic. I asked them to reflect on the
rationales they had for and against certification, the certification processes and standards they
had to meet, and changes to the cooperative due to Fair Trade certification. To understand the
changing dynamics in the Fair Trade system, I asked them how Fair Trade certification has
evolved over time; if the entrance of newly certified cooperatives has affected the market for
existing cooperatives’ coffee; and if concepts of “fairness” differ between members of
established and newly certified cooperatives. To examine the power dynamics between the
cooperative, farmers, and outsiders such as certification organizations and coffee buyers, I asked
administrators about their roles in the decision-making processes of the cooperatives and the Fair
Trade system. I also asked them about their experiences with certification auditors, and how they
negotiate contracts with purchasers.
Farmer interviews and participant observation with COOPFAM members occurred with
farmers from the municipalities of Poço Fundo, São João da Mata, Inconfidentes, Natércia, and
Andradas. Participant observation also occurred with farmers from the municipality of
Campestre. Participant observation and interviews with farmers and administrators from
Coopervitae happened in Nova Resende. Participant observation was conducted in farmers’
homes, on their farms, in the cooperative offices, or during cooperative meetings, lectures,
classes and special programs. Interviews with farmers were organized around several themes
including access to Fair Trade and its impacts on farmers’ lives; gender and labor issues in Fair

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Trade and organic coffee production; gender and power in the cooperative; and farmers
livelihood strategies.

US Research Sites
In addition to my field sites in Brazil, I conducted research in multiple locations in the
United States. In 2010 and 2013, I conducted follow-up research at the Specialty Coffee
Association of America Events (SCAA) and conducted participant observation at these three-day
events. I acted as an interpreter for each of COOPFAM’s presidents in their business meetings
with coffee buyers and certifiers at the SCAAs. I also conducted several interviews with coffee
buyers of COOPFAM’s coffee in the United States.
From 2010-2015, I served on the board of a Fair Trade non-profit organization in
Chelsea, MI. During that period I engaged in a campaign to work with businesses, institutions
and the city of Chelsea to adopt policies to become a Fair Trade Town. As a result of that
campaign, Chelsea was the first Fair Trade Town in Michigan as designated by Fair Trade USA.
This engagement in Fair Trade advocacy served as an important form of praxis to foster positive
impacts of Fair Trade through educational efforts in the US.

Access to Fair Trade and Impacts on Farmers' Lives
I asked who decided to participate in Fair Trade and why to gain insight into farmers’
rationales about taking part in the Fair Trade system. I asked farmers to tell me more about their
lives, to explain what it is like to be a small-scale coffee farmer. I also asked them to explain, in
their words, what Fair Trade and organic certification and production entail. I inquired about the
obstacles they faced in becoming certified and what they would change about the Fair Trade and

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organic systems. These questions focused a better an understanding about the processes farmers
undergo to gain access to Fair Trade and organic certification. I also asked about their
experiences meeting with international actors including Fair Trade and organic auditors,
international coffee buyers, and Fair Trade activists, to examine farmers’ interactions with other
actors in the Fair Trade and organic coffee commodity chains. Moreover, to understand how
these systems have impacted farmers' lives, I asked if and how participation in Fair Trade
changed their lives socially and economically.

Farmers’ Livelihood Strategies
The farmers at COOPFAM do not solely rely on coffee production to support their
families. As mentioned previously, dairy and tobacco production are also important sources of
income in the mountainous areas of Sul de Minas. I asked farmers to discuss what crops they
grow and animals they raise for their family’s consumption and barter or sale locally. Finally, to
understand the balance of on farm and off farm labor, I asked whether or not any of the family
members engage in wage work locally or out of town, and if so what part of the family’s income
comes from wages or remittances from family members living outside of the area.

Gender and Labor in Fair Trade and Organic Coffee Production
Using participant observation and informant interviews, I explored the gendered division
of labor. I asked men and women farmers about the types of activities they do during different
seasons on the farm in coffee production, in the home and in taking care of their families, in
other farming or livestock responsibilities, and in other types of labor such as wage labor.

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In addition to asking about the types of work women and men do on the farm, and in the
home throughout the year, I asked focused questions about the environmental stewardship work
required by Fair Trade and organic certification. This line of inquiry led to additional questions
in the field regarding the extra work and specialized care needed to meet the quality exigencies
of the Fair Trade and organic coffee market.

Gender and Power in the Cooperative
At the farm and cooperative levels, I explored perceptions about the “fairness” of Fair
Trade through informant interviews and participant observation. I attended many different types
of meetings at the cooperative including cooperative monthly assemblies, sub-group meetings—
such as COOPFAM’s women’s group, and other formal and informal cooperative activities and
events such as visits from Fair Trade and organic certifiers and lectures from experts on organic
and biodynamic agriculture. At these assemblies, meeting, and events I examined women and
men’s positions within the hierarchy of the cooperative and observed how and when women and
men participate in meetings and whether their concerns and suggestions are given equal
consideration. In interviews with farmers, I asked about their suggestions, concerns, and
complaints about, as well as praise for Fair Trade.
I conducted informal interviews and participant observation with various coffee buyers,
teachers at the local cooperative school, and a manager at Café Bom Dia, to better understand the
relationships and power dynamics at play in the cooperative’s supply chain. I also conducted
participant observation while I interpreted for foreign coffee buyers and farmers on their visits to
the cooperative and farmers’ homes. I also spoke and met with several Brazilian agronomy
professors, TransFair USA employees, and several farmers, agronomists, and managers at a

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conventional coffee cooperative in the Sul de Minas region, Cooxupé. I accompanied internal
and external organic auditors on their visits to farms and joined other technical advisors who
visited the cooperative and farms to observe their interactions with farmers and cooperative
administrators. Moreover, I interviewed several external auditors while at the cooperative
including an organic auditor and a representative of FLO.
Finally, I collected archival material including articles from local newspapers, website
coverage of the cooperative’s activities, locally published books, maps, and other printed or
online material. I used this material to further flesh out the oral history I collected from farmers
about the cooperative and the municipality of Poço Fundo. I examined materials about
COOPFAM in between field visits to stay abreast of cooperative activities and to craft additional
lines of inquiry for subsequent conversations with farmers, cooperative administrators, Fair
Trade certifying bodies and coffee buyers.

Data Analysis
I recorded all of my interviews with farmers, cooperative administrators, coffee buyers,
certifiers, and Fair Trade activists with their permission. The interviews were transcribed and left
in their original language, Portuguese or English, for analysis. I coded and analyzed the
interviews and my fieldnotes using ATLAS.ti, following this I pulled over relevant data sets for
each chapter for secondary analysis in either Scrivener or Excel. I pulled quantifiable data on
livelihood practices into Excel for additional analysis and graphic representation of the data. I
translated quotes originally in Portuguese into English for this dissertation.

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Chapter Four: Café que Bebe: Gender, Livelihoods, and Producing a Cup of Quality Coffee

I. Introduction.
In this chapter, I explore why farmers at COOPFAM seem to be faring better
economically than Fair Trade-organic coffee producers in other parts of Latin America. Several
factors, including diverse livelihood strategies and the farmers’ production of relatively large
quantities of high-quality coffee, account for the economic stability that many farmers at
COOPFAM enjoy. Farmers at COOPFAM produce a much greater amount of coffee per hectare
than Fair Trade and organic coffee farmers in Mexico and Central America. Dual certified
COOPFAM farmers report that they typically produce twenty to twenty-five sacks (sixty
kilograms per sack) of green coffee beans per hectare. Given that the average landholding in
coffee for a COOPFAM farming family is 3.4 hectares, these families each typically produce
4,080 kg-5,100 kg 5,100 kg of coffee per year. In Nicaragua, small-scale coffee farmers were
producing an average of 528.85 kg of green beans a year (Bacon 2010). Farmers at COOPFAM
can produce large amounts of quality coffee because of the amount of labor and inputs they
apply in their fields. In addition to their farms’ higher productivity per hectare, farmers at
COOPFAM produce very high-quality coffee, which earns them a price premium above the Fair
Trade-organic floor price.
Farmers at COOPFAM engage in a number of livelihood strategies in addition to
producing coffee for international Fair Trade markets. In this chapter I explore the different
income earning and non-monetary livelihood strategies that farming families engage in to sustain
their families and examine which members of the family participate in each of these activities. I
pay special attention to the gendered division of labor on farms and within homes. Livelihood

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strategies range from in-home domestic work to income earned via off-farm activities. Moreover,
I discuss how the quality and environmental standards of the export market and Fair Trade and
organic certifications have increased the amount of work needed for coffee production. As well
as, exploring the role different technologies play in both reducing the hours of labor necessary to
produce quality coffee and increasing the ability of the cooperative to segregate and select the
highest quality coffee for the export market.

II. Coffee Farmers’ Livelihood Strategies
“I thought earnings from coffee, particularly certified coffees, would be enough to put children
through school, would be enough to put food on the table all year long, and provide farmers with
a reasonable quality of life. But what I learned was that’s not true; that certified coffees are
helping, there’s no doubt in my mind, they are helping, but the fact is that coffee by itself is just
not enough for small-scale farmers.”
- Rick Peyser, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. in “After the Harvest,” 2011

In April 2011, the documentary film “After the Harvest” debuted at the Specialty Coffee
Association of America Expo in Houston, TX. “After the Harvest” was a project supported by
various NGO partners and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc., the largest buyer of Fair Trade
certified coffee in the world. The film sheds light on the problem of food insecurity and hunger
in the coffee lands and the fact that farming families in many parts of the world face lean months
despite the price premiums some farmers earn from selling certified coffees. A growing body of
literature has documented either chronic or seasonal food insecurity, and hunger among smallscale coffee producers selling certified coffees (Bacon et al. 2008a; Bacon et al. 2008b; Jaffee
2007, Méndez et al. 2010; Putnam 2013).

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The literature on certified coffee production and food insecurity as well as popular
accounts such as “After the Harvest” problematize Fair Trade’s promotion as a certification
system that allows small-scale coffee farmers to earn a sustainable amount of money for their
coffee production. Fair Trade is promoted as a simple solution to address poverty among small
farmers. However, coffee production is rarely profitable enough for small-scale farmers to rely
on for 100% of their livelihoods. Small-scale farming families with a greater diversity of
livelihood strategies are likely to fare better than their counterparts relying solely or primarily on
coffee production.
Coffee farmers producing certified coffees in many parts of the world rely on diverse
livelihood strategies to support their families (Barham et al. 2010; Jaffee 2007; Méndez et al.
2010; Mutersbaugh 1999). It is critical to farmers’ survival that they produce food in addition to
cash crops such as coffee. Even with organic or Fair Trade certification, small-scale farmers
cannot sustain their families on their earnings from coffee production alone (Barham et al. 2011;
Jaffee 2007; Méndez et al. 2010; Mutersbaugh 1999). In the literature on Fair Trade and organic
coffee production, farmers’ livelihood strategies range from subsistence agriculture, horticultural
and livestock production for local markets, as well as the production of crafts and artisanal
goods, agricultural and non-agricultural wage labor, and remittances from family members in
other parts of their home country or the United States (Barham et al. 2010; Jaffee 2007; Lyon
2010; Méndez et al. 2010; Mutersbaugh 1999).
In addition to growing and producing coffee, farmers at one cooperative in Oaxaca,
Mexico sustain themselves by growing some of their food, and trying to implement various
income-producing activities through their coffee cooperative. Income earning projects included a

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milking herd, honey production, furniture making, a wood-fired bread-making oven, hog
production, and weaving (Mutersbaugh 1999).
Like their counterparts studied elsewhere, farmers at COOPFAM rely on subsistence
production, and often on other income-earning activities to supplement their income earned from
coffee production. All of the farmers interviewed at COOPFAM said that they earned enough
from coffee production to purchase the food their families need. However, the majority of
farmers produce most of the food that their families consume, so the amount of food that needs
to be purchased is relatively small.
The explorations of Fair Trade and organic coffee production often exclude the large
amount of domestic work done in the home and community to sustain families and communities.
As a result, the existing studies do not account for a tremendous amount of invisible labor done
primarily by women in coffee farming communities. Martha Ward (1999) explains how many
types of work that women do is invisible. The four types of “invisible” work that Ward discusses
are: informal sector work, reproductive work, the work of status enhancement, and work as
morale, caring, repairing and integration. Since these types of work are invisible, or are not given
recognition, women may face discrimination, and their worth is not collectively and publicly
accounted for. Feminist political economist, Marilyn Waring has written extensively on women’s
labor and the missed opportunities to truly account for the economic productivity we would
realize “if women counted” (Waring 1999; 2003). Drawing on the work of feminist scholars such
as Ward and Waring, my exploration of livelihood strategies among farming families in
COOPFAM includes invisible domestic labor, largely done by women, including cooking and
food processing, housekeeping, child and elder care, as well as community and relationship
building activities. These activities are crucial to account for when considering the sustainability

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of certified coffee production and the gendered division of labor that goes into sustaining smallscale coffee production.
The number one income generating activity for the farmers at COOPFAM is the
production of high-quality, Fair Trade, and sometimes organic certified coffee. I begin my
discussion of the farming families’ livelihood strategies, in the next section, by exploring the
human resources and capital necessary for farmers to produce specialty coffee, or café que bebe.

III. Bebida Boa: Labor, Technology and the Production of a Quality Cup of Coffee
A. Environmental and Quality Standards and Labor
“… [It] doesn’t matter if my coffee is organic if I am not careful, if it has defects and não beber
[doesn’t drink, isn’t of quality] when they put it in the cup.”
- Sebastião Oliviera Silva

Producing a cup of high-quality, dual certified, specialty coffee requires a significant
amount of human resources, access to large quantities of agricultural inputs, and adequate coffee
production technologies. Coffee farmers whose coffee is not up to the quality exigencies of the
specialty coffee market cannot access export markets and obtain the price premiums associated
with Fair Trade and organic certification. Farmers at COOPFAM employ considerable human
resources, utilize purchased and self-produced agricultural inputs, and have access to
technologies such as coffee sorting machinery through the cooperative.
The environmental and quality standards of Fair Trade and organic coffee production,
and selling coffee for export, in general, have changed the amount, style, manner, and type of
labor that men and women do on the farm, on the drying patio, and within the cooperative. Both
women and men have to do more work to produce export quality coffee. In many parts of the

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world, coffee farmers do not have access to sufficient capital to invest in their farms or adequate
labor to work the land to produce large quantities of high-quality coffee. Moreover, farmers need
access to training programs to learn techniques that can help them improve the quality of their
coffee.
Both Jaffee (2007) and Moberg (2005) discuss the link between Fair Trade’s
environmental principles and the ecological and labor problems encountered by farmers adhering
to more stringent environmental standards. Farmers employ additional manual labor to weed in
around their crops due to Fair Trade and organic certifications’ limits on synthetic herbicides
(Jaffee 2007; Moberg 2005). Changes in production techniques can have adverse effects. In St.
Lucia, Fair Trade banana farmers’ attempts to remove weeds mechanically instead of chemically,
led to outbreaks of weeds and pests when weed-whackers spread an invasive weed in the banana
groves (Moberg 2010). Fair Trade and organic coffee farmers in Mexico had to hire wage
laborers to assist them with weeding and working in their milpas (fields) to produce food and
other coffee activities so that they could uphold the certification systems’ environmental
standards (Jaffee 2007). The environmental standards of Fair Trade and organic production may
put the economic sustainability of these certification systems into jeopardy for some farming
families due to the additional labor burdens on farmers.
In this section, I explore how the environmental and quality standards necessary to sell
organic and Fair Trade certified coffee demand additional labor from both women and men
coffee farmers. Farming families also employ appropriate technology and seek out technical
assistance to help them meet the quality and environmental exigencies of the organic and Fair
Trade market.

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B. Gender and Division Labor in Coffee Production and the Agricultural Cycle
Coffee production is a labor-intensive, year-round activity for the coffee farmers at
COOPFAM. Most coffee farming families employ a gendered division of labor to handle coffee
production, other agricultural activities, and domestic activities. Of the 31 families interviewed
in this study, 24 families were married couples with children; there were one widow and one
widower, three single men and one single woman; and one married couple without children. All
four of the single adults have parcels of land that they cultivate for coffee production, and all
four of them live with their parents.

Planting, Weeding, and Fertilizing
Coffee, like many other crops, requires several steps to bring a bean to fruition. When
farmers wish to plant new coffee bushes they do so during the rainy season, in Poço Fundo, from
December to March. Coffee farmers also cut or till under weeds frequently during the rainy
season, and at least quarterly throughout the rest of the year. To ensure that their coffee plants
are healthy and productive, farmers fertilize their coffee groves throughout the year.

Table 1: Coffee production tasks and gendered division of labor.
Task

Time frame

Traditional Responsibility

Plant coffee

December - March

Men

Fertilize coffee

Seven months

Men

Weed coffee

4-5 times a year

Men

Harvest coffee

May - August

Both

Dry coffee

May - October

Women

Hull coffee

July - October

Done by machine, men transport

Bring coffee to rebeneficio Post harvest
Receive payment

Men

December - April
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Men typically make the decisions in the family on whether or not to plant new coffee
bushes. Men are largely responsible for planting new coffee bushes, pruning existing plants, as
well as fertilizing, and weeding in the groves. Fertilizing the soil in the coffee groves and
weeding both take more time than in the past because of Fair Trade and organic certification’s
environmental standards. Under these two certification systems, farmers cannot use herbicides so
weeds must be removed by hand or mechanically. Men weed or till between their coffee rows 35 times per year depending on rainfall to keep the weeds from stealing nutrients and water from
the coffee. Manually or mechanically, weeding takes longer than the application of herbicides,
and is more physically demanding work.
Ensuring that the soil where organic certified coffee plants are grown has the proper
amount of nutrients is very demanding. The certified organic farmers actively fertilize their
coffee groves with compost, the husks of dried coffee cherries, manure, castor seeds (mamona),
leguminous plants, and permitted organic fertilizers and minerals. Marcelo de Paiva Gonçalves,
the president of the cooperative from 2009-2011, explained that Ana Primavesi, Brazilian soil
scientist, and organic agriculture expert, suggests that coffee needs approximately 80 tons of
organic matter per hectare per year for proper fertilization. Marcelo explains that it takes him
eight days to bag, move, and spread the compost he uses on his 2.4 hectares. He says he is
fertilizing or weeding his coffee groves five to six days a week, for seven months, and then
harvesting six days a week for four months. Some of the inputs for the coffee are from the farm
and essentially free, but others must be purchased — such as certain types of fertilizers, or
minerals to amend the soil. The cooperative works with outside companies to sell some
fertilizers that are appropriate for organic and Fair Trade certified coffee.

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Figure 7: Dried coffee cherry hulls. Photo by author.

Figure 8: Chicken manure for fertilizer. Photo by author.
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Figure 9: Dried coffee cherry hulls for fertilizer. Photo by author.

The Harvest
“What I like is funny. If I tell you, you’re going to think it’s funny, but I’m saying this sincerely.
Harvest time, it’s the time that I like the most, because I get plenty of exercise on the drying
patio and it keeps my head occupied, and I don’t get sick of it because it breaks the routine.”
- Rosângela de Souza Paiva

Coffee is harvested over a period of four months from mid-May to mid-September.
Harvest is a labor-intensive time for both men and women. Men and women begin harvesting
coffee cherries together, but soon women must turn their attention to drying the coffee cherries
on their terreiros (drying patios). Families spend 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week,

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working in the coffee fields harvesting coffee cherries and drying the cherries on the terreiros
during the harvest season.
The gendered division of labor during the coffee harvest varies from country to country.
For example, according women in the Michiza cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, “the men would
say they do most of the harvesting, but it is really the women who work the hardest in the
harvest” (Jaffee 2007:117). For Michiza members, women are responsible for hand selecting the
best coffee and drying it on the home patio (ibid 2007). On the other hand, in Guatemala, coffee
harvesting and drying is considered to be men’s work (Lyon 2011). Harvesting and drying coffee
at COOPFAM are tasks with a strong gendered division of labor, and both activities take more
time for men and women because of the quality demands of the export market.
Most farmers at COOPFAM engage in some level of selective harvesting of their coffee.
However, farmers’ definitions and implementation of a selective harvest vary from farm to farm.
Some farmers selectively harvest by picking coffee only from certain rows, others go by bush by
bush, and still others only select the ripe cherries on a particular coffee bush.

Figure 10: Vâmia Lúcia P. Silva selectively harvesting ripe coffee cherries. Photo by author.

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Farmers explained to me that they used to simply harvest all of the cherries all at once by
stripping all the beans from each branch. By harvesting all the cherries at once green, ripe, and
fermented cherries were all harvested together. One producer explained to me that they used
even to pick up the coffee that falls onto the ground on its own. “…[The] coffee that falls to the
ground is sorted, this doesn’t bebe [drink], then you have to sell it as conventional, only those
that are on the bush make a bebida boa [good drink].” Today, if that coffee is picked up they sort
it out and then sell it on the domestic market, thus it is not mixed in with the coffee they are
preparing for export.

Figure 11: Leonardo Carvalho winnowing coffee cherries to remove leaves, rocks, and sticks.
Photo by author.

Many farmers take extra time to do some level of selective harvesting because they earn
more money for higher quality coffee. Some harvest certain rows that are full of ripe cherries,

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others decide bush by bush, and still others only harvest the ripest berries from any one bush and
return later when the other cherries to mature to harvest them. It is unclear how much additional
labor is necessary for this selective harvest, partially because of technology like a motorized
derriçadeira de café, a device with little plastic “hands” at the end, which vibrates and cause ripe
cherries to fall from the bush and be collected in tarps carefully spread below the bushes. Not all
farmers have access to these machines, but they save time for those that do. The derriçadeira de
café costs R$1,500 for the engine and rod and another R$800 for the vibrating hands attachment
for coffee harvesting.

Figure 12: Marcelo de Paiva’s Gonçalves mother and sister-in-law helping him dry his coffee
on their terreiro. Photo by author.

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During the harvest, women spend many hours on their drying patios to ensure their coffee
dries evenly, quickly, and does not ferment. Ninety percent of Arabica coffee is dried in the
cherry form in Brazil (ICO 2017), a process called natural processing. Farmers explain that it
takes 20-60 days of drying on the terreiro for coffee to reach optimal dryness level of 12%
moisture content. Coffee on the patio requires much attention to ensure that it does not dry
unevenly or ferment.
At COOPFAM, women work more hours per day and more days per year to turn the
cherries on their drying patios in order to meet export-quality standards. After harvesting, the
coffee cherries are taken and spread out on terreiros to dry. Many, but not all, farmers have
cement drying patios. COOPFAM has partnered with Fair Trade USA on a rotating loan program
for farmers to build cement patios. Farmers are lent money by the cooperative to build the patios
and when they repay the loan the cooperative then lends that money to a new group of farmers.
Women turn the coffee as often as every hour so that it dries evenly. Turning the coffee start
early at 7:00 am and they pile it up around 4:00 pm every day. In the evenings the coffee cherries
are swept together in long rows on the terreiro to retain the heat absorbed by the sun during the
day so that it can continue to dry overnight. After about eight days, the coffee has shed some
moisture and is piled up in large piles in the evening and covered with a tarp to keep in the heat
overnight and protect it from getting moist from dew overnight.

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Figure 13: Coffee cherries drying in a row on Ozório José dos Santos’s terreiro.
Photo by author.

Figure 14: Nearly dry coffee cherries piled under a tarp to conserve heat overnight and protect
them from rain. Photo by author.
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During the harvest, women farmers like Rosângela spend many hours on the drying patio.
Rosângela has to balance all of her regular domestic, gardening, bee keeping, and care-taking
activities with this additional workload on the drying patio for several months in the winter. She
explains her challenging schedule during the coffee harvest and how she tries to balance the
extra hours spent on the drying patio with her normal routine.
“…[W]hen we have coffee on the drying patio I still have to do all this and mix the coffee. I sort
the coffee, mix the coffee, clean the bathroom, mix the coffee, my work doesn’t stop and I can’t
put things in their place, nothing gets in its place when we have coffee on the drying patio,
because I’m accustomed to having a clean house. I make lunch and leave everything all set out
and wash clothes, and then I stop. I stop washing clothes and mix the coffee, after this and start
washing the clothes, and I stop again and mix the coffee, and then I have to stop washing clothes
because they are not ready to finish before making lunch, then I stop making lunch and go to mix
the coffee. I leave the coffee to finish making lunch. I finish lunch and before eating it I mix the
coffee, then I go back and have lunch, then I go wash the clothes. I starting washing the clothes,
stop washing clothes and go mix the coffee and then it goes on much longer. I joke with Luis
Carlos that I don’t know if I’m mixing the coffee or throwing water on the coffee.”

Women’s time on the drying patio mixing the coffee is absolutely critical to producing
high-quality coffee. In the past, many farmers left their coffee in the field after it was harvested,
either in bags or in-between the rows of coffee. However, this lowers the quality of the coffee
because cherries can ferment, sometimes within a few hours. Farmers would later spread their
coffee out at their leisure to dry; many dried it though on dirt patios near their homes before
investments were made to build cement drying patios. The decision to have women take on
additional coffee drying responsibility is linked to their historical role in turning coffee on the
drying patios and the fact that the patios are adjacent to the home, a feminized space on the farm.
On the other hand, men have traditionally planted new coffee, applied fertilizer, and removed
weeds around the coffee groves. The coffee groves are seen as a more masculine space, except
during the harvest when women historically spent more time assisting in picking coffee than they
do today.
At COOPFAM farming families have benefitted from coffee education programs that
instructed producers how to properly dry their coffee. Classes like this are one of the benefits
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offered by the cooperative and one of many activities the cooperative supports to help farmers
improve the quality of their coffee. The cooperative encourages women to attend these specific
trainings because they have traditionally been the ones who tend coffee on the drying patios in
the region. Rosângela explains that before the classes they did not pay as close attention to the
drying process as they do now. In the past, women said they would turn the coffee, using hoes,
rakes, and brooms about three times a day. However, now they turn the coffee six to ten times a
day to ensure more even drying and to prevent fermentation. These training programs have been
especially important to valorizing women’s work on the drying patios and to the women’s own
professionalization as coffee farmers.

“We knew that we had to mix the coffee, we’d mix it twice and that was good, the coffee could
rest there on the farm until the next morning. And then everything was new when we learned
how to make café que bebe. We have already gone to the courses and participated. If I didn’t go,
Luis Carlos would go, sometimes I went on my own and I would bring back the new
developments, until it was time to do another course on quality. We have talked about this with
the women [from the women’s group], and I thought that we really needed to innovate with new
things to help us.”
Today, farmers bring their freshly harvested coffee cherries back to the terreiro each
evening. Women have historically been in charge of the coffee on the terreiro at COOPFAM.
The farmers explained that this was historically women’s work because women typically work in
the home and can more easily care for the coffee on the terreiro, which are co-located next to the
home. Coffee fields are not usually adjacent to the home and terreiro; the farmers explained that
this makes it more practical for women to tend to coffee during the drying process at
COOPFAM. Rosângela explained that they work to keep the coffee on the drying patio
organized because different lots are in different phases of dryness. She separates the lots with
pieces of wood to keep them separate. Rosângela claimed that men thought this was fine but “

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…we women are more demanding. We don’t mix it all together. Look there [gesturing to the
terreiro] you can see that this coffee is almost ready. And here there’s new cherries.”
The increased daily time commitment needed to dry coffee to meet higher quality standards
means that women spend very little time picking coffee after the first days or weeks of the
harvest. They explain that they soon stop harvesting coffee in order to spend a significant amount
of time on the terreiro each day. Women in the cooperative’s women’s group cancel their
monthly meetings each year for a few months at harvest time. Women explained that when they
are pregnant or have very young children, their coffee quality suffers unless a relative is
available to help them. Without help they are not able to spend an adequate amount of time on
the terreiro.
Depending on the weather, the drying process for one batch of coffee requires anywhere
from 20-60 days. Environmental factors like heavy rains can also complicate and elongate the
drying process. During the 2009 harvest farmers explained that excess rain was increasing the
time needed to dry the coffee and also affecting coffee quality. Some farmers took their coffee to
large drying machines to finish the drying process. José Antonio Ribeiro explained how too
much rain on the drying patio degraded the quality of his coffee, which did not “drink.”

“…I couldn’t sell all of my coffee as bebida boa [good drink] because last year it rained too
much and we had coffee that didn’t bebeu [drink], it wasn’t bebendo [drinking], its value falls a
lot and I don’t have a way to say I’m not going to earn anything for this because it didn’t bebeu
[drink], this that didn’t bebeu [drink] was the normal price…”
- José Antonio Ribeiro
Once the coffee is dry, a hulling machine removes the dried fruit. There are hulling
machines in most bairros and some farmers have access to mobile hullers that are brought to the

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farm on trucks. The hulls of the dried coffee cherries are collected and put on the coffee grove to
compost and provide necessary organic matter for the coffee plants.
After the coffee is cleaned via the hulling machines it is typically men who bring the
green coffee beans to the cooperative. As such, they are the ones who often receive payment for
the coffee. In interviews with farming families, men and women often said they made decisions
on how to spend their income earned from coffee production together. However, when asked
more specifically about which decisions are made by men and which are made by women, men
tended to decide what should be spent for on the farm expenses and women decided what to
spend on in home expenses.
Husbands are also more likely than their wives to be listed on COOPFAM’s member
registrar. However, there are some exceptions where both spouses are listed separately. In total,
there are only 23 women listed as active COOPFAM members out of 307 active members in the
2011 census. However, being listed as a member did not necessarily mean that a woman might
not vote and have a leadership role in the cooperative. In fact, the two women who were elected
to the boards of the association in Poço Fundo, and the one woman elected to the cooperative’s
board were all unlisted on the membership roster.

C. Sharecropping, Hiring Labor, and Family Labor Swaps
A minority of the farmers in the cooperative hire labors to help with coffee production.
Most of this hiring is done during the harvest. Some more wealthy farmers like Adauto and Cida
and Valdir and Paula10 have laborers working for them regularly. Since Paula has arthritis and
they have no kids, they hire workers to help Valdir on the farm. Adauto explained that he needed

10

Paula and Valdir’s farm, and their interactions with coffee buyers, are discussed further in the following chapter.

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to hire help because of his administrative duties when he was the president of the cooperative
from 2003-09.
Many families practice labor swaps with each other during the harvest. Siblings, in-laws,
parents and other family members trade labor on each other’s farms for a few days. I witnessed
this quite often during the harvest. Marcelo, the president of the cooperative from 2009-11, is
unmarried so his mother helps him on the terreiro, as do his two brothers’ wives. Moreover,
Marcelo and his two brothers trade days of labor on each other’s land.
A few farmers work as sharecroppers or have sharecroppers work their land. This is the
case for Maria Raquel Contim. Raquel is one of the few never married women farmers. She
cannot work all of her land on her own, so she sharecrops some of the land her father left her to a
man who grows coffee on it. At the end of the year, she receives some of the coffee he harvests.
Raquel has several brothers who also inherited land from her late father. One brother, is married
and lives with his own family, grows coffee, but is not a part of the cooperative. Raquel’s other
brother lives with her and her ailing mother who has diabetes. Raquel struggles to manage both
her coffee production and care for her ailing mother. Although Raquel and her brother live
together in their mother’s home and are both unmarried, the two siblings do not work in each
other’s fields. Coffee farming is Raquel’s second career. She had lived and worked in the city of
Andradas before but returned to the farm to take care of her mother and work the land after her
father’s death. Raquel performs work on the farm that is traditionally seen as men’s work, and
then manages the terreiro in addition to all her domestic responsibilities.

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D. Technology
Appropriately scaled technology plays an important role on many farms. Because coffee
production is extremely labor intensive, certain technologies can save farmers time, increase the
quantity of coffee they produce, and even improve the quality of the coffee they bring to market.
As mentioned above, some small-scale farmers use a hand held coffee harvesting device called a
derriçadeira de café that looks like two plastic hands connected to a two cycle engine and a rod.
This machine vibrates and knocks the ripe coffee berries from the bushes. The same device can
be used with a weed-whacker head to remove weeds. This device is quite expensive R$1500 for
the rod and engine, and R$800 for the vibrating hands part. Due to the high price, some families
share the device between parents and children, siblings, or other family members.

Figure 15: Derriçadeira de café, device used to harvest ripe coffee cherries. Photo by author.

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Farmers can increase the quantity of coffee they produce and improve the quality of
coffee by making sure that the soil has sufficient nutrients for healthy plant growth and disease
resistance. Some farmers use tractors or trucks to haul inputs such as organic-certified fertilizers,
coffee cherry hulls, manure, compost and other organic matter to fertilize their coffee. Trucks
and tractors are also used to haul freshly harvested coffee to the terreiros, and finally to the
beneficios (primary processing facilities), and rebeneficios (secondary processing facilities) for
processing.
At the beneficios, the fruit and hulls of dried cherries are removed from the coffee beans.
Some beneficios also have large coffee drying machines used to remove any excess moisture
before hulling. Beneficios are either in fixed locations or farmers in a particular area will rent or
borrow a mobile hulling machine. Some farmers, like Carlos Henrique and his brother Flavio,
invested in building their own beneficios and earn extra income by selling the service to farmers
in their neighborhood. Tractors, trucks, and beneficios are investments that require access to
capital and/or loans. According to various scholars, this access to technology (and the necessary
capital to buy it) is not common among farmers in Mexico and Central America. Farmers at
COOPFAM have access to more credit and more capital to make these investments than farmers
elsewhere. This is partially due to state-run loan programs such as Funcafé (Fundo de Defesa da
Economia Cafeeira) and Pronaf (Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar)
that Brazil offers to low or middle-income farmers, and also due to the fact that some of the
farmers at COOPFAM earn enough income to buy the instruments with cash or by using credit
cards.
The cooperative itself utilizes various technologies to improve the quality of the coffee,
and select the highest quality beans to be sold. The cooperative contracts with nearby

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agrotechnical institutes to test farmers’ soil quality. They also are experimenting with a device
called a Brix meter that can measure the sugar content in the cherries to find out what the optimal
conditions are for high-quality coffee. Differentiating and selecting the highest quality beans is
done by a series of machines in the cooperative’s rebeneficio. These large machines are used to
mechanically sort the coffee by size, weight, and even color. The machines in the rebeneficio use
vibrating tables and screens, forced air, and even an optical scanner to sort and select for the best
beans. After the beans are segregated by quality, samples are taken and roasted in the onsite
cupping lab. The cooperative has a part time Quality Grader, or Q-Grader, who has been trained
to differentiate the flavors in the coffee and detect if there are defects in the coffee. Individual
farmers are compensated according to how much their own lots sell for. Some farmers have
super high-quality coffee that brings in very high premiums and has even won quality awards.
At the time of this study, the cooperative was building a coffee roasting and grinding
facility. The coffee roaster they intend to use is emissions and smoke-free and energy efficient.
They also invested in two different machines to bag the processed coffee: a regular vacuum pack
machine, and a special one that injects a small amount to nitrogen into the bag to remove any
oxygen, thereby reducing oxidation and the breakdown of coffee quality.

E. Technical Assistance
COOPFAM puts a lot of focus and energy into continually improving the quality of their
coffee. In 2009, the cooperative had an agronomist who worked part time – Renato. Renato is
trained in organic and biodynamic production and has worked with COOPFAM since 2007.
Cooxupé, a conventional cooperative not far from COOPFAM, focuses technical assistance
almost entirely on diagnosing plagues and prescribing chemical inputs to address the problems.

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COOPFAM, on the other hand, concentrates on a preventative approach by looking at the health
and quality of the plant, soil and coffee cherry. Renato helped individual farmers address
problems in their fields and coordinates the yearly soil testing for the organic farmers.
Unfortunately, the cooperative only had funding to pay Renato for two days of work per week.
Marcelo de Paiva Gonçalves, a farmer and the cooperative’s president from 2009-2011, was also
trained in agronomy. He has done some of the internal auditing for organic compliance within
the cooperative along with Renato. Renato and Marcelo both focus on proper nutrition and care
for the coffee plants to increase productivity and ward off pests. These two men were fully
committed to fostering organic production at COOPFAM.

Figure 16: Soil samples labeled and ready to be shipped for analysis. Photo by author.

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F. Quality Grading and Coffee Cupping
The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) sets the quality standards that
COOPFAM looks to for their export quality coffee. Under the SCAA quality standards, green
coffee beans must have certain physical attributes such as being a large enough size, uniform
shape (i.e., not broken or misshapen), and free of blemishes such as insect holes, black spots,
mildew, etc. It is paramount for farmers to produce high-quality coffee so that it can be sold on
the export market. High-quality coffee beans are typically larger than a #16 screen. To examine
the quality 300 grams of green beans are measured out, in that sample there cannot be more than
five full defects and there cannot be any primary defects (see Table 2). Also, the moisture
content of the coffee must be between 9-13% (Mutua 2000). The coffee must also have at least
one distinctive attribute in its flavor, aroma, body or acidity, which is determined through the
coffee cupping process.

Table 2: List of primary defects in green coffee beans. Source: Mutua 2000.
Primary Defect

Number of occurrences equal to one full defect.

Full Black

1

Full Sour

1

Pod/Cherry

1

Large Stones

2

Medium Stones

5

Large Sticks

2

Medium Sticks

5

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Table 3: List of secondary defects in green coffee beans. Source: Mutua 2000.
Secondary Defects

Number of occurrences equal to one full defect

Parchment

2-3

Hull/Husk

2-3

Broken/Chipped

5

Insect Damage

2-5

Partial Black

2-3

Partial Sour

2-3

Floater

5

Shell

5

Small Stones

1

Small sticks

1

Water Damage

2-5

Another realm of technical assistance that the cooperative invests in is their cupping
laboratory. Coffee cupping is a process where green coffee is roasted, ground and brewed to
specific standards and then trained professionals called Q-graders taste the coffee to detect its
flavors and if it has any defects. To determine the body, flavor, aroma, and acidity of the coffee
COOPFAM employs a Q-Grader, who cups the coffee to taste it and categorize it. This process is
reminiscent of wine tasting in that there are specific materials, practices, and rituals that go into
properly ascertaining the attributes of coffee. The cooperative can then talk to coffee buyers
about the various flavor profiles of any lot of coffee to meet the buyers’ needs and preferences.
Specialty coffee buyers make up the majority of buyers for COOPFAM’s export quality coffee,
they each look for particular characteristics to meet the quality standards and flavor profiles that
their own consumers demand. There are myriad possibilities of flavors for coffee, coffee buyers
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and Q-Graders use tools like the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Coffee Taster’s
Flavor Wheel to categorize the flavors they detect in the coffee.

Figure 17: Coffee cupping laboratory at COOPFAM. Photo by author.

Figure 18: The author tasting coffee in COOPFAM’s cupping laboratory.
Photo by Jeremy Caves.
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Commitment to Environmental Principles
Most farmers, administrators, and staff at COOPFAM are very committed to the
environmental principles of Fair Trade and organic coffee production. Protection of the
environment and human health were the most often cited reasons for and benefits of participating
in Fair Trade or organic production. During my research period, approximately 50% of
COOPFAM’s farmers had at least a portion of their coffee under organic certification.
COOPFAM’s history with the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) movement may account for
some of the collective environmental ethos among the farmers. The CPT movement laid the
groundwork for an environmentally conscious group of farmers to organize and seek out new
ways of production and new markets that reward sustainable production. COOPFAM was
formed from a social justice movement much like many Fair Trade cooperatives in Mexico and
Central America.
Many of the original or long-term members of the cooperative share an ideology about
sustainability that is firmly rooted in their Catholic faith. Many farmers today speak passionately
about their stewardship of the earth being intimately linked to their Christianity. They explain
that as Christians they are charged with being stewards of the Earth. Farmers explain that their
faith guides them to protect the soil, water, plants, and animals. It also strengthens their
commitment to avoid using agrotoxicants, which harm life, especially human health. Many of the
farmers also used to grow tobacco but moved away from it when they saw it as a crop that was
harmful to health and thus unethical to continue producing.
This environmental ideology is pervasive, especially among the organic farmers. The
economic benefits of organic production are not so high when one considers the costs of labor
and other inputs. As such, organic farmers often cite non-economic motives for organic farming.

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Unlike Fair Trade certified farmers in Mexico and Central America who are essentially de-facto
organic (Bacon 2005; Jaffee 2007; Lyon 2010), the use of synthetic chemical fertilizers and
pesticides in coffee production is quite prevalent in Brazil generally and in Poço Fundo
specifically. So farmers must make a significant shift in their agricultural processes if they
decide to transition from conventional production to Fair Trade or organic production.
Farmers also speak passionately about the human health benefits of Fair Trade and
organic production. Many talk about how comforting it is not to worry about their kids being
poisoned in the fields if they play there or eat coffee cherries or other fruit off the trees in their
coffee groves. They explain that other parents do not have this security, and they must worry
about their children being harmed by agrotoxicants.

“… you know that you can take your kids to the field and everything is natural, we don’t mess
with any agrotoxicants, it’s good, it is a great comfort, it’s really good.”
- Vâmia Lúcia P. Silva
Farmers speak frankly about the elevated levels of cancer and other chronic conditions in
the countryside, as well as high levels of pesticide poisoning among their neighbors. Pesticides
have poisoned some farmers. One COOPFAM farmer, Wilsom de Freitas Marcílio11, from the
town of Inconfidentes, lost his hearing as a result of acute pesticide poisoning. Although he is
one of the newer members of the cooperative and lives more that a two-hour drive from
COOPFAM, he believes that producing coffee under stringent environmental standards is worth
the effort. He and his two brothers were in transition to organic production when I met them in
2009. When asked what he thought about Fair Trade production Wilsom responded:

11

Wilsom and his two brothers’ farms and interactions with the cooperative are further discussed in Chapter Six.

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“I think it is a good thing because it is improving things in every way. Those who drink the
coffee are drinking pure coffee without poisons, and for us, it provides benefits, if only by not
using poisons. Who does that help? For our health, by our nature, we are not good for ourselves.”
- Wilsom de Freitas Marcílio.
Some of the farmers, particularly the organic certified ones, have reserves of forest on
their land to protect their local watershed. Others plant more trees in their coffee fields for shade
and to provide foliage for compost. Farmers intercrop with nitrogen fixing plants and grew castor
bean plants to provide potassium. Still, much of the coffee production is done in full sun, which
is less ecologically advantageous than shade grown coffee, which supports biodiversity and
curbs climate change. On the other hand, most of the land around Poço Fundo has been
deforested for over a century due to coffee and tobacco production. Conventional agricultural
production systems, (tobacco, cattle, and sugar cane) in the area are even less environmentally
friendly than coffee production.
Coffee grown in full sunlight in climates like Poço Fundo’s results in higher coffee
production yields. Dual organic and Fair Trade certified farmers at COOPFAM produced around
25 sacks (60kg/sack) of coffee per hectare, or an equivalent yield of 1,500 kg/ha. While shadegrown coffee is more environmentally friendly, it is also much less productive. Shade-grown
coffee is common on many Fair Trade certified farms in other parts of Latin America (Jaffee
2007; Lyon 2011; Martínez-Torres 2008; Méndez 2008; Westphal 2008). Jaffee (2007), for
example, reported production of shade-grown, organic and Fair Trade coffee in Mexico to yield
213 kg/ha; while Martínez-Torres (2008) found organic and shade-grown productivity across six
regions in Chiapas, Mexico to be approximately 443 kg/ha. However, this difference in yield is
also partially attributable to other production practices such as applying compost and other
natural fertilizers to coffee bushes. I explain these processes below.

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Figure 19: Luis Adauto Oliviera spreading newly harvested coffee on his terreiro.
Photo by author.
When I asked farmers at COOPFAM about the pests or plagues that impact their coffee
the most, farmers tend to say that they have very few problems with insects or other pests. They
name and call out some examples of different types of common problems like rust and coffee
borers but say these are rare enough not to cause much damage. Several farmers explain that this
is because healthy plants have a natural resistance to insects, fungus, and other plagues. Marcelo
says that conventional fertilizer relies on three nutrients, while natural fertilizers provide the over
forty nutrients and micronutrients that the coffee needs for optimal health.

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Figure 20: Ripe coffee cherries on the bush. Photo by author.
Organic and Fair Trade certified farmers at COOPFAM manage to hold onto high yields
of quality coffee by using large amounts of organic material and allowed fertilizers on their
fields. Some Fair Trade-only farmers were at first worried about a drop in yields in the transition
to organic agriculture. However, the organic farmers I spoke with keep their yields high and
perhaps, more importantly, consistent year-to-year by having their soil analyzed yearly to see
what nutrients their coffee needed and by working tons of organic material, minerals, and
organically certified fertilizers into the earth.

Differences and Similarities Between the Standards
While there are cooperatives that allow for some members to be Fair Trade and others
not, this is not the case at COOPFAM. Complying with all of the Fair Trade standards and
principles are a requirement for their membership at COOPFAM. Organic production is

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encouraged, but it is voluntary. Approximately half of the farming families at COOPFAM have
some organic coffee production. The majority of these farmers have some plots that are certified
organic and others that are only Fair Trade certified.
Both Fair Trade certification and organic certification have environmental standards to
which the farmers must adhere. While the organic standards are stricter than the Fair Trade
standard, there is considerable overlap between the two standards. For example, in both Fair
Trade and organic standards farmers must keep records of how they manage their coffee on the
farm and terreiro, and they must track the chain of custody for their coffee while it is in their
possession. They also cannot use prohibited agrochemicals on their coffee or any other crops in
parallel production, they cannot use GMOs, they must manage their waste properly, and they
must care for the soil and water resources on their farms. Farmers at COOPFAM are careful to
manage their waste by separating food waste, recyclables, and non-recyclable waste. For
example, farmers use household scraps of vegetable matter to feed their chickens or compost
them for their kitchen gardens or coffee fields.
Under organic certification’s more stringent environmental standards, farmers have
further restrictions on the types of agricultural inputs that they can use on their coffee.
Furthermore, they cannot have parallel production of organic and conventional coffee soon after
their transition period to organic certification. The transition period for organic certification is
three years, while Fair Trade certification has no such transition period. During the organic
transition period, coffee farmers cannot sell the coffee under transition as organic. Organic
farmers must plant barrier crops such as bananas or fruit trees between their organic plots and
their neighbor’s conventional plots. This is done to stop pesticide drift from contaminating the
organic coffee. While not a requirement in Brazil, organic coffee farmers are strongly

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encouraged to plant shade trees on their farms. They also have to control for erosion by planting
cover crops or ensuring their coffee trees are properly terraced on hillsides. Finally, farmers are
also required to preserve a certain amount of protected natural areas on their property if they
have them and also to build up protected areas and not grow crops within a barrier zone around
springs, streams, waterfalls and other bodies of water.
While Fair Trade certification is somewhat more lenient on environmental requirements,
it is stricter regarding social equity and adherence to democratic principles. For example, Fair
Trade has standards relevant to on-farm labor and democratic participation in the cooperative.
Regarding Fair Trade’s labor requirements, farmers must not use child labor, they must not
discriminate when they hire laborers, and they must not employ laborers a majority of the time.
When farmers hire laborers, they must compensate women and men equally for their labor.
Finally, the farmers are required to participate in cooperative decision making through the
various meetings, assemblies and democratic processes that the cooperative makes available to
them.
It is important to note that regardless of the work that the farmers do to meet the Fair
Trade and organic standards, they will not be able to sell their coffee at the price premiums
offered by these certification systems if they do not meet basic export quality standards. The
farmers at COOPFAM are keenly aware of the fact that quality matters. They know that the
coffee they produce that does not meet the export quality standards must be sold on the domestic
market for significantly less money, regardless of the resources expended to meet the
environmental and social exigencies of Fair Trade and organic certification. Coffee that is very
high-quality brings in a larger price per pound of coffee than the certified premium prices. While
this can greatly supersede the certification prices, it is considered additive because buyers of

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COOPFAM’s coffee deliberately seek out coffee with one or more certifications. In effect, highquality coffee increases the amount earned per pound, but to benefit from the services provided
by COOPFAM, the farmers must at least be Fair Trade certified.
To ensure their coffee is high-quality, the farmers selectively harvest their coffee
choosing only the ripe cherries. They ensure that the plants have adequate nutrients to thrive and
fight off pests. Moreover, they are careful in the natural drying process to follow best practices
on the drying patios to ensure that the coffee dries evenly and does not ferment. The optimal
moisture level of green coffee is 12%. When the harvest season is particularly wet, farmers may
opt to dry their coffee cherries in large drum dryers. While this process is less desirable that
natural processing, it can make a difference when the weather would otherwise jeopardize the
coffee on the drying patio. Some factors impact quality that farmers may have less control over,
such as the altitude of production. Arabica coffee grown at higher altitudes has more sugar
content as measured by a Brix meter and is generally higher quality. If farmers do not work for
quality very little of their coffee harvest will be able to be sold on the Fair Trade market. Also,
the cooperative is working to add value to this coffee by roasting and packaging it onsite. This
vertical integration will likely provide more money for the lots of coffee that don’t meet the
export market quality exigencies.
Coffee quality varies considerably among farmers, but it is not necessarily due to a
farmer's lack of understanding about the best practices in coffee production. Instead it is related
to structural factors, often outside of the farmer’s control. For example, not all farmers have
access to high altitude plots whose cool temperatures cause coffee cherries to concentrate their
sugar content. Some farmers lack sufficient financial resources to procure the best organic
inputs, or are not able to leverage enough human resources to devote a significant amount of

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time to all of the labor intensive activities on the farm including fertilization, selective harvest,
and drying the coffee on the terreiros. This is especially true for elderly or ill farmers without
adult children to help with on farm labor, and women farmers who are unmarried or widowed.
While achieving very high-quality coffee can provide farmers with the highest premiums
for their coffee (as explained in Chapter Six), Fair Trade certification provides farmers with
consistent access to export markets and numerous non-economic benefits (as discussed in
Chapter Five) that otherwise they would not have. Furthermore, it is important to recall that Fair
Trade certification also provides a floor price for coffee when the volatile commodity price of
coffee falls to unsustainable levels. Moreover, there is a growing market for dual Fair Trade and
organic certified coffee, so the cooperative has been encouraging organic certification. While
there have been times when COOPFAM’s export quality Fair Trade-only certified coffee does
not sell right away, they have never had a problem selling all of their dual organic/Fair Trade
certified coffee during the research period.

IV. Food Production, Local Markets, and other Livelihood Strategies
“The whole specialty coffee industry is focused on quality. And I think companies need to step
back and take a look at the basis of quality. Farmers that are growing specialty coffee,
particularly small-scale farmers, will invest in quality only after they are able to feed their own
families. They’re not going to feed their coffee plants before they feed their families.”
- Rick Peyser, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. in “After the Harvest” 2011.

While farmers at COOPFAM can earn a relatively high price for their coffee, they still
supplement their earnings from coffee production with multiple livelihood strategies. The daily
lives of farming families combine hard work in the coffee fields and on the drying patios with
equally demanding schedules caring for livestock, horticultural production, and caring for family

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and the community. The mix of livelihood strategies and the number of activities undertaken
differs for each family. However, food production for home use and sale, domestic care, and paid
labor are common livelihood strategies.

A. Daily Life
Luis Carlos de Paiva and Rosângela de Souza Paiva were two key informants at
COOPFAM. They were both involved with the cooperative and association from its inception. In
2009, Luis Carlos was on the fiscal council of the cooperative and Rosângela was the founder
and president of the cooperative’s women’s group. In 2010, Rosângela was elected as the first
women on the board of directors for the cooperative.
They have three children and live in a modest home in the bairro of Cardoso, on land
owned by Luis Carlos’s father. Luis Carlos’s father is elderly now and does not farm, but he
used to grow tobacco, corn, and beans. Luis Carlos and Rosângela grow coffee on 4.5 hectares of
his father’s 30 hectares of land.
Like most of the COOPFAM farmers, Luis Carlos and Rosângela employ a variety of
livelihood strategies to support their family. While coffee production is their main income
earning activity, it is not the only product they sell. One hundred percent of their coffee is
certified organic. Luis Carlos explains why he decided to join the association and produce
organic coffee.
“I decided because of my philosophy with respect to nature, to work with a product that doesn’t
harm your health, and also not to endanger those who consume that product, not to have residues
of agro-toxics. So the philosophy is that I don’t want that for me and I don’t want it for others, so
these were the strongest motivations to enter this work of organic production, and also religious
philosophy our group always was about religious philosophy, we are people that go to church.”
- Luis Carlos de Paiva

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In addition to coffee production, they grow 80% of their food, and the only staples they
buy are rice and pasta. They have dairy cows, and Rosângela makes cheese from their milk.
They grow their own vegetables, fruit, beans, and corn. They also raise pigs and chickens for
home consumption.
The couple sells coffee, tomatoes, and beans locally and in the organic market in the city
of Pouso Allegre. They keep bees to make and sell honey and propolis at the market and from
their home. The bees are very important to Luis Carlos. As a farmer and ecologist, he
understands the important role the bees have on his farm. However, his connection to them is
deeper than that. They are not pets, but they are certainly what Donna Haraway refers to as
companion species (Haraway 2008), providing that mutually beneficial connection to and
concern for another species. Something is happening in the beehives around Poço Fundo. Luis
Carlos and others who keep bees have been losing significant portions of their hives. Walking
down to one of the fields where he grows coffee Luis Carlos recounted his sadness and
frustration at losing his bees. I could see the pain in his face and hear the worry in his voice when
he talked about the loss of some of his bees. He worries that pesticides, climate change, or
disease might be destroying the local beehives. By 2012, Luis Carlos and Rosângela’s honey
production was greatly reduced, and they had lost 30% of their beehive population.
Coffee farmers and bees have a symbiotic relationship. Farmers plant the coffee bushes,
which the bees pollinate. Coffee that is pollinated by bees has a higher pollination rate than
coffee that is pollinated by the wind or self-pollinated (Klein et al. 2003). Coffee farmers benefit
from the labor of the bees through higher quantities of fruit on their coffee bushes.
Like many women farmers at COOPFAM, Rosângela bears the primary responsibility for
the majority of the domestic tasks in the home. Rosângela wakes up each morning around 5:00

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am and makes breakfast for the family before getting her three children, Fernanda, Franciele and
Luis Paulo up for school that day.
Rosângela prepares lunch early in the day for Luis Carlos to take out into the field and
then a second lunch for when her kids come home from school at noon. We had lunch several
times at Rosângela’s house. Unlike an “American” lunch that I might make such as a sandwich,
salad or leftovers from dinner, Rosângela cooks an entire meal from scratch three times a day.
Lunch and dinner at Rosângela’s and in other women’s homes are usually composed of the
compensatory rice and beans, stewed chicken that they raised, a salad of onions, tomatoes, and
lettuce from their garden, homemade bread, a cooked vegetable or pasta, and homemade sweets
or cake for dessert.
After she has made all the lunches for the family and cleaned up, she does the laundry
and ironing and picks up around the house. With these domestic tasks complete, she takes care of
their chickens and pigs and spends some time out working in their kitchen garden. Rosângela
collects the honey from their hives and takes orders for honey and propolis over the phone from
friends, neighbors, and customers throughout the day. They have a honey extractor out in their
shed that spins the combs to extract the honey. In all, tending the garden, taking care of the pigs
and chickens, and extracting honey takes her two to three hours.
She often goes to visit her children’s school and neighbors during the day too, because as
she says, “here it’s a community and you have to work on this too.” Rosângela also does
whatever is necessary that day on the farm; sometimes it is picking beans, or taking the cows out
to pasture. At the end of the day, she makes dinner for the family. In the evening she often has
meetings at the cooperative or for the cooperative’s women’s group that she leads, then church

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activities, or her driving classes. She ends her workday around 9:00 pm, after dinner and dishes
are done, and all of the meetings end for the day.

Figure 21: Honey and coffee for sale in Poço Fundo from Luis Carlos and Rosângela’s farm.
Photo by author.

B. Food Security and Selling Other Products
Families within COOPFAM are food secure, meaning that they have consistent access to
“sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active
and healthy life” (FAO 1996). Families procure food by purchasing it from local markets and
supermarket, through trade or barter, and by growing, raising and processing it themselves.
Almost all of the families interviewed produce a significant amount of their own food ranging
from 60-95% and only buy some things like flour, salt, sugar, oil, and rice. All the farmers I met

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grow staple food products including beans, corn, and manioc, and a few grew rice. Farmers also
cultivate a diverse amount of fruits and vegetables (see Table 4). Regarding animal husbandry,
most farms raise chickens, pigs, cattle and dairy cows, some keep bees and have fishponds. Most
farming families process food and medicinal products (see Table 5). Growing and producing
these foods and medicinal items takes a considerable amount of time for both women and men.

Table 4: Types of food produced for family consumption.
Staple foods

Fruits

Vegetables

Animals

Other

Processed items

Beans, corn,
manioc
(three
varieties),
rice.

Oranges,
limes,
bananas (four
varieties),
papaya,
passion fruit,
plums, cidra
(citrus),
pitanga
(Surinam
cherry),
acerola
(Barbados
cherry),
melons

Tomatoes,
lettuce, collard
greens, okra,
squash,
pumpkin,
potatoes, sweet
potatoes, beets,
carrots, chu
chu (chayote),
avocados,
onions, garlic,
olives,
cabbage, jiló
(Scarlet
eggplant)

Cattle,
dairy cows,
pigs,
chickens,
bees, fish

Peanuts,
popcorn,
sugar
cane,
loofah

Yogurt, cheese,
bread, cakes,
sweets, pão de
queijo (cheese
bread), rapadura
(dried sugar
cane juice),
cachaça
(fermented
sugarcane
liquor), honey,
propolis
(medicinal resin
from bee hives)

Some families sell products other than coffee in Poço Fundo or neighboring cities. For
example, Luis Carlos and Rosângela, in addition to producing honey and propolis, grow organic
produce like tomatoes, watermelons, and lettuce. They sell these products both from their home
and at the organic fair in Pouso Allegre. Many families sell roasted and ground coffee locally.
Several farmers also sell milk or eggs locally. Before the cooperative built their own roasting
facility, the farmers took their coffee that did not meet export quality standards to the

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agrotechnical institute in Machado to have it roasted and ground. A small number of farmers still
grow, process, and sell tobacco, which used to be the main crop grown around Poço Fundo.

Table 5: Crops Sold Domestically and Internationally.
Cash crops sold

Horticultural products sold

Coffee (export
Tomatoes, melons, lettuce,
market, domestic bananas (organic market in
market, local
Pouso Allegre)
market), tobacco
(domestic
market, local
market)

Animal products sold

Processed items sold

Eggs, milk, honey,
propolis (local
market)

Rapadura (brown
sugar in cake form)

Women tend to care for the small livestock like chicken and pigs, while men care for
dairy cows and cattle. Women also care for kitchen gardens. Both men and women harvested
horticultural products from their farms for sustenance. Men harvest the sugar cane and process
rapadura. Women make processed food products like sweets, cakes, and cheeses, which they
sometimes sell or trade with other families.

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Figure 22: Pigs cared for by COOPFAM farmers for family consumption. Photo by author.

Figure 23: Laying hens at COOPFAM farm. Photo by author.

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C. Work in the Home
In the home, women’s domestic activities contribute significantly to the emotional and
financial well-being of the family. To save money, many women process food in the home,
including dairy items such as yogurts and cheese, baking and bread making, cooking and other
food processing and preserving. Women also tend to do their homes housekeeping, something
that is frequently done by empregadas, or domestic workers, by their counterparts in Brazilian
towns and cities. Women are the primary caregivers for children and sometimes for elderly and
disabled adults as well.

Figure 24: Religious festival out in the roça. Photo by author.
Women in the countryside do an incredible amount of work in and around the home.
They are responsible for taking care of children and elder relatives, cooking from scratch not
using processed food like some in the city, cleaning, and laundry (mostly done by hand). Women

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also care for the kitchen garden, preserving food, and small animals like chicken and pigs. They
are responsible for turning the coffee on the terreiro, as well as cooking and preparing for
religious festivals and other events. Cooking goes way beyond simply making dinner and
includes regularly making bread, pão de queijo, cheese, yogurt, candies, cakes, and other sweets.
Unlike women in the city, most women farmers do not have hired domestic help for cooking,
cleaning, and childcare.

D. Working Outside the Home and Farm
In other studies of small-scale coffee farmers producing certified coffees, it is
commonplace for some members of the family to work outside of the home and farm (Barham et
al. 2010; Jaffee 2007; Méndez et al. 2010). At COOPFAM, many households have family
members working outside of the farm. These include families that have adult children who are
working away from home and farmers (men and women) whom themselves seek work outside
the farm to earn extra income. In addition, to off-farm labor, many families have a child
attending college. Farmers have mixed feelings about their children continuing to farm. They
feel that farming is good for them but a difficult way to make a living. Most families are happy
that some of their children are pursuing careers in other sectors and that their earnings from
coffee production can support their children’s career aspirations.
Farmers who work outside of the home tend to do so because they cannot earn enough
income through coffee production or other on-farm activities, or because they have a
professional interest in another career. Farming families who need to work outside of the farm
for financial reasons tend to have an unmet financial need because of a lack of access to
sufficient land to grow coffee on. For example, Leonardo Carvalho engages in several off-farm

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income-earning activities to meet his family’s cash needs. He works for the cooperative doing
maintenance, and in the rebeneficio, and also works on other farms during the harvest, or
occasionally does some construction work. His farm is so small that he has to do extra work to
sustain his family. In addition to Leonardo’s work off the farm, his wife Helenice has
occasionally worked as an empregada (domestic worker) for other families. Several other
women have worked from time to time as empregadas to make ends meet.
A number of farming families have adult children who work outside of the farm. For
example, at the time of my research two of the secretaries at the cooperative and association
were the daughters of farmers in the cooperative. Poliane, the association’s secretary in 2009,
was working for the association while studying agronomy at the local university. She hopes to
work as an agronomist for the cooperative or other organization when she graduates.

V. Conclusion
The multiple livelihood strategies which farming families at COOPFAM engage in help
them achieve a level of income and food security not reported elsewhere in the literature on Fair
Trade coffee farmers. There are some conditions that lead to this level of security for
COOPFAM farmers. These include producing a significant proportion of their food, selling other
agricultural products and non-export quality coffee locally. In addition to this, the farmers earn a
high price per pound of coffee because of the labor and resources expended to ensure that the
coffee is very high-quality. This attention to cultivating high-quality coffee, in addition to other
outside economic factors, leads to a high price per pound of coffee as will be discussed further in
Chapter Six.

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Chapter Five: How "Fair" is Fair Trade? Accessing Fair Trade’s Social Impacts

I. Introduction: The Promise of Fair Trade
Fair Trade is promoted as a third-party certification system that small-scale farmers can
participate in to receive certain benefits such as a minimum floor price for their products, social
development premiums that they can use for various social programs in their community, prefinancing from purchasers, and access to a democratically organized structure.
To obtain the benefits promised by the Fair Trade system producers must meet the
certifications’ standards and overcome many barriers to entry into the system. First, I discuss the
general principles and standards of Fair Trade, and then the barriers producers encounter when
trying to obtain certification. This chapter identifies and explores the common barriers faced in
accessing Fair Trade and organic certification. I then move to discuss what assets COOPFAM
employed to overcome those obstacles, and then finally what, primarily non-economic, benefits
the cooperative and farmers now enjoy as a result of Fair Trade and organic certification.
Moreover, I discuss a number of social and economic programs, not directly attributable to Fair
Trade, which the cooperative and farmers might not have been able to leverage without Fair
Trade certification.
This chapter focuses primarily on the non-monetary impacts of Fair Trade, while Chapter
Six covers the economic impacts of certification and the relationship between Fair Trade
certification and global market factors such as currency fluctuations and commodity prices.

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II. Barriers to Accessing Fair Trade Certification
There are many obstacles that farmers and cooperatives have to overcome to obtain Fair
Trade and organic certification. These barriers broadly fit into three categories; capacity related
barriers, barriers related to democratic decision-making, and barriers encountered in meeting Fair
Trade standards.

A. Capacity Barriers
Some of the first barriers farmers face in accessing the Fair Trade and organic
certification systems are related to education levels and literacy. Cooperatives and farmers must
both have a high degree of capacity concerning education and business acumen to access the Fair
Trade system and successfully participate in it. Fair Trade and organic certifications both require
careful and regular record keeping about agricultural activities on the farm and in the
cooperative. Farmers with low levels of education or literacy may find this record keeping
difficult, intimidating, or impossible. Farmers are supposed to note their production practices,
such as the inputs and the quantities and frequencies in which they were applied, and keep this
information for Fair Trade and organic auditors when they visit their farms.
Administrators for a certified cooperative have even more demanding administrative
tasks such as overseeing budgets, contracts, and running the cooperative as an international
business. While some Fair Trade and organic cooperatives have professional administrators,
others rely on the work and leadership of democratically elected farmer-administrators and a
limited support staff. These administrators need to navigate the sophisticated international trade
system and complex supply chain discussed in Chapter Two. Moreover, business conducted
along this supply chain is most often done in a language other than the farmers’ first language.

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B. Democratic Decision Making
The Fair Trade system requires participation in the cooperative and democratic decision
making processes. This necessitates that farmers buy into the system and commit to democratic
principles including a high level of involvement in the democratic process. Farmers have to
make time to go to meetings to learn about cooperative business, programs, and to make
decisions collectively. This time commitment is difficult for some farmers. Women find it
particularly challenging to participate because they often have child care responsibilities in
addition to work on the farm and the home, and often lack access to transportation to and from
meetings.
Cooperative leadership has to be able to provide members with a variety of educational
opportunities and services. This requires a time commitment from them and other farmers who
travel to attend workshops, lectures, and other activities. For these programs to be successful,
farmers must have a high level of receptivity to what is essentially extra, unpaid work. In
addition to training, farmers are expected to participate in monthly meetings at the nucleus level
and annual general assemblies. Women are additionally encouraged to join the women’s group
for their monthly meetings. Moreover, farmer-administrators also have regular directors’ and
subcommittee meetings they must attend to coordinate the business of the cooperative.

C. Meeting the Standards
One of the common complaints about certification was the multitude of certifications and
their various standards. Farmers found it difficult to keep track of the ever-changing organic
standards and consistently spoke about wanting one uniform organic standard, rather than four
different sets of rules for the USA, EU, Japanese, and Brazilian organic certifications. Some

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farmers seek out ways to work through or get around some rules. For example, some farmers
avoided the organic rule about not having parallel production of organic and conventional coffee
by placing the organic coffee in one spouse’s name and the conventional in the other’s name.
Different systems have different standards and allow for different inputs or types of land
management. Even within one certification system, like organic, there are various national and
regional certifications such as USDA (United States), JAS (Japan), and EUROPA (European
Union), each with slightly different requirements and prohibitions. For example, farmers at
COOPFAM would talk about how one treatment for a pest was allowable under one program but
not the others, this was confusing, and the farmers never seemed to receive a satisfying answer as
to why there was a discrepancy.
Farmers also complained about the top-down nature of certification systems. They felt
that these systems did not necessarily work well in every case. Both farmers and local
agronomists at COOPFAM thought the transition time for organic was too long under US, EU,
and Japanese certifications because these systems did not take into account how quickly
decomposition works in the Brazilian climate, and that the growing season is year-round. This is
in contrast to a shorter season as it is in Northern climates where organic certifications were
pioneered. However, the farmers have little recourse to change the rules of these systems,
especially since they are international standards, which have to apply across a wide variety of
climates and landscapes.
Another set of barriers encountered by farmers wishing to participate in organic and Fair
Trade production are the requirements regarding agrochemicals. Many Brazilian coffee farmers
are accustomed to using agrochemical inputs because of a long history of their use in the area
and because governmental policies in Brazilian have promoted and subsidized their use. Farmers

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entering into Fair Trade or organic have to take on an entirely different approach to farming, and
they may not have access to the appropriate technical assistance needed to transition to organic,
pesticide-free, or biodynamic agriculture. Simply stopping the use of agrochemicals without a
proper system of natural pest control and proper fertilization of the soil would cause a drastic
decline in productivity. Farmers benefit from having their soil analyzed and other technical
expertise in deciding which nutrients they need for optimal production, and which remedies will
help control diseases and other pests.
At COOPFAM, as in many organic or Fair Trade certified farms, more labor is needed to
compensate for the lack of use of herbicides and conventional fertilizers. As discussed in Chapter
Four, organic farmers have to add a tremendous amount of organic inputs, including compost,
manure, coffee cherry hulls and other amendments, to their soil to ensure proper plant nutrition
for robust production and disease resistance. While the organic farmers I spoke to lauded the
productivity and health of their organic plants, they also talked about how much hard work went
into applying these organic inputs. In addition to organic fertilizers, farmers also expend more
labor in weeding out or tilling under weeds in their coffee groves because they do not use
herbicides. Farmers at COOPFAM consistently said that they did not have very many problems
with pests because of their general health of their plants and the abundance of nutrients including
micronutrients in their soil because of the organic inputs, which helped their plants build
resistance to common diseases that farmers were dealing with in neighboring areas.
Several other environmental barriers exist for farmers looking to transition to organic
production including the creation of buffer zones around organic plots, and care of buffers
around springs and rivers. Under Brazilian law, there must be buffer zones around certain bodies
of water. Organic certifications also require buffers around organic plots to stop pesticide drift

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from depositing agrochemicals onto organic plants. Farmers at COOPFAM tended to use rows of
banana trees or sugar cane as buffers between their organic plots and the conventional plots
owned by their neighbors. These buffers also serve as windbreaks on the farms to help with soil
conservation by reducing erosion. Organic farming also requires other soil conservation such as
terracing to reduce erosion. Farmers have to make soil conservation plans and implement them
over time. While better for the environment and the health of the plants in general, these soil
conservation techniques require investments of time, continuing education, financial resources,
and labor to implement them.
To meet the Fair Trade standards, cooperatives like COOPFAM must have the capacity
to run and coordinate the activities of a democratically organized cooperative and a successful
international business. With the support of their small staff, the farmer-administrators at
COOPFAM have been able to grow the business of the cooperative and facilitate the entry of
additional cooperative members. Employees and administrators have been able to identify and
obtain various financial, environmental, educational, and development opportunities for the
cooperative and its members. These opportunities are described later in this chapter. The next
section discusses many of the assets that COOPFAM was able to leverage to gain access to Fair
Trade and organic systems despite the many barriers that stood between them and certification.

III. Access to Fair Trade
The existing literature on barriers to cooperatives wanting to enter the Fair Trade market
has focused on issues of quality in conjunction with the rise in the market for specialty coffees
(Jaffee 2007; Martinez 2002; Roseberry 1996; Smith 2010). Fair Trade producers have had to
improve the quality of their coffee as more cooperatives entered into the Fair Trade market and

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competition for market share increased. Some farmers and cooperatives have found Fair Trade’s
quality standards to be a barrier to participating in the Fair Trade system. Over time, the Fair
Trade and specialty coffee markets have come to resemble each other. Fair Trade advocates and
producers have significantly increased their focus on quality coffee production. Specialty coffee
companies have increasingly sought out third-party certification and other programs to offer
more environmentally friendly and socially just coffee. These specialty roasters are looking to
capitalize on consumer demand for sustainable coffee (Smith 2010).
In addition to increasing quality standards for Fair Trade coffee, there is a growing
expectation that Fair Trade coffee producers obtain dual Fair Trade and organic certification
(Jaffee 2007; Wilkinson and Mascarenhas 2007). Dual certification puts additional financial and
labor burdens on farmers. Farmers and cooperatives must pay for both the Fair Trade and organic
certification costs. Many cooperatives participate in several national or regional organic
certification programs; including USDA, EU, and JAS organic certification. Several scholars
have expressed that organic or Fair Trade production requires additional labor from farmers to
meet environmental standards (Jaffee 2007; Moberg 2005).

IV. Assets
A. History
COOPFAM was able to leverage a broad range of assets to overcome the obstacles that
stood between them and organic and Fair Trade certification. COOPFAM’s history is illustrative
of the some of the factors that helped them access these certification systems. As discussed in
Chapter Three, in 1984 a small group of farmers organized themselves into an agricultural
association because the local agricultural union did not meet their needs as small-scale farmers.

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According to several of the founding members of the association — the Associação dos
Pequenos Produtores de Poço Fundo e Região (Associação) — this group was concerned about
the environment because of their interactions with the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) a social
movement led by the Catholic church. The founders of the Associação worked closely with a
local priest, Father Agnaldo Perugini, to learn about environmental stewardship. These early
interactions laid the foundation for an association grounded in environmentalism and social
justice principles. Many of the farming families view their environmental commitment as a part
of their Christianity. The religious rhetoric from the CPT movement is still present in many
farmers’ descriptions of why sustainable production is desirable. Farmers speak passionately
about being stewards of the earth. The cooperative administrators — who are all farmers
themselves — share this commitment to social and environmental issues. The cooperative’s
former president (2003 to 2009), Luis Adauto Oliveira, first studied in the Seminary before
returning to Poço Fundo to grow coffee.
In the mid-1990s the Associação began working with Sepucaí, a local NGO focused on
environmental sustainability. Sepucaí offered technical assistance to the farmers and encouraged
their participation in organic and biodynamic agriculture. The Associação and later COOPFAM
were formed to access markets like Fair Trade, organic, and other specialty markets and did so
without the handicap of being entrenched in the conventional market for a long time before
seeking alternatives. In 1997, the Associação received Associação de Agricultura Orgânica
(AAO) certification. Today farmers at COOPFAM produce Fair Trade coffee under FLO
certification, and organic coffee under AAO, USDA, EUROPA, and JAS. The cooperative’s
environmental and social justice roots served to attract other like-minded members. In this way,
COOPFAM built on a core group of individuals who shared the same values.

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COOPFAM and its associations have participated in the Fair Trade movement since
1998, when the Associação worked with Max Havelaar to become Fair Trade certified, however,
they did not become FLO certified until 2002. COOPFAM was the first Brazilian coffee
cooperative to receive Fair Trade certification. COOPFAM’s size and the size of the individual
farms were other assets in obtaining certifications. All of the farmers in COOPFAM have farms
that are at or below the maximum size permitted by FLO, with the average farm size being six
hectares (Wilkinson and Mascarenhas 2007). Farmers interested in joining COOPFAM must join
one of the associations affiliated with the cooperative and participate actively, including going to
meetings, for six months prior to membership. Moreover, they must meet the social and
environmental standards required for Fair Trade certification. This initiation period ensures that
new members share the same core values as the rest of the cooperative.

B. Education
Another asset farmers at COOPFAM have is the level of education of the farmeradministrators who run the cooperative. Two of the cooperative’s recent past-presidents both
completed post-secondary degrees - Luis Adauto Oliveira (president 2002-2009) attended the
Seminary, and Marcelo de Paiva Gonçalves (president 2009-2011) completed a bachelor degree
in agronomy. Education levels attained by other individual farmers vary with some completing
only a few years of elementary school and other with college degrees.
Regardless of the farmers’ education levels, the record keeping needed for Fair Trade and
organic certifications was not a barrier for the farmers I interviewed. Farmers are accustomed to
keeping a record of their farming activities. When questioned about the requirements of Fair

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Trade certification, many farmers mentioned they keep daily records of their activities in the
coffee grove, and the inputs they use on their coffee plants.
COOPFAM was able to leverage the assets discussed above to obtain Fair Trade
certification. In the next section I discuss how the cooperative’s commitment to capacity
development has allowed them to maintain their certifications, increase the number of members
in the cooperative, improve the quality of their members’ coffee, and maintain relatively high
prices and strong demand for their members’ coffee.

C. Capacity and Social Development
One of the factors contributing to COOPFAM’s success in obtaining and maintaining
third-party certifications is their commitment to building capacity within the cooperative at all
levels. The cooperative invests in the education and training of their staff, the farmers, and their
children. The cooperative is committed to fostering leadership among the farming families and
has taken advantage of many social development and leadership development programs offered
by NGOs, certifiers, and the government.
The farmers themselves with a small team of paid administrative staff run COOPFAM.
They include a president, three secretaries, several men employed full-time maintaining and
running the rebeneficio, and up to two agrotechnical advisors. Other paid staff members include
a full time accountant, a part-time Q-Grader, and part-time temporary positions when additional
manual labor is needed. This team runs all of the business at the cooperative. COOPFAM’s
farmer-administrators and staff have an impressive capacity for running both a democratically
structured organization and an international business. Cooperative administrators and employees
negotiate contracts with many different companies on four continents (South America, North

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America, Europe, and Asia). They also coordinate all exportation requirements for the coffee
because COOPFAM is a Fair Trade certified exporter.
The cooperative activities undertaken by the staff include: contracts, negotiation and
communication with buyers, and exporting the coffee. In addition, staff members supervise the
construction of the roasting and grinding facility, do the general upkeep and maintenance of the
cooperative, warehouse, computer lab, house, and meeting space. Cooperative staff and
administrators coordinate the cooperative’s meetings, computer classes, and handle financial
business like paying the farmers, and providing them with access to pre-financing. Moreover,
they administer the Fair Trade and Café Femenino premiums. The cooperative runs a rebeneficio
(processing mill) with state-of-the-art equipment to sort and select the best quality coffee beans
and recently opened a new facility with the capacity to roast and grind their coffee for the
domestic market. The financial benefits of these two facilities are discussed in Chapter Six.
Cooperative leadership is focused on the environmental impacts of production, social
development and benefits to the farming families and the broader community. The cooperative
provides continuing education programs for farmers to learn new techniques for improving the
quality of their coffee and protecting the environment around their farms. These educational
programs foster the economic sustainability of individual families and the market opportunities
for cooperative itself. Cooperative staff and administrators are always looking for new
opportunities including new markets, technologies, innovative techniques, and certification
systems.

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D. Training and Development
COOPFAM organizes many training workshops and lectures for its members throughout
the year. Some of these programs are on the farms and hands-on to provide instruction on new
techniques or other best practices, others are held in the cooperative’s meeting room where
scholars or other experts come in to talk about improving coffee quality or complying with
organic standards. Outside organizations like Fair Trade USA, support some programs such as
one where a consultant helped the certified organic farmers improve their farming practices.
Other workshops focused on teaching women the best techniques to dry the coffee on patios to
enhance their coffee’s quality.
One example of a training organized in partnership with other non-governmental or
governmental organizations was a yearlong leadership development program that about twenty
farming families participated in. This group, while still primarily composed of male farmers, had
more women involved in it because they were explicitly encouraged to come by the woman,
Andrea Salerno Cassiá, who ran the program and they were welcome to bring their children with
them. The program was a partnership between the cooperative, Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às
Micro e Pequenas Empresas (SEBRAE), and supported by funds from Fair Trade USA. Andrea
worked for SEBRAE and ran monthly programs on leadership development with farmers.
The cooperative also organizes a variety of outreach efforts. In one such effort, they
contracted with a nurse who met with groups in the different nuclei to talk about women’s
health, stress reduction, and other health concerns. Funding for these types of programs comes
from a variety of sources. In some cases, funding these programs created tension between certain
farmers or groups within the cooperative and the cooperative administration when farmers felt
that there was a lack of transparency on the sources of financing for various programs. The

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health care outreach program is one example where tensions between the cooperative’s women’s
group and the cooperative’s administration came to a head. At one of the women’s group
meetings, a nurse named Andrea was brought in to talk with the women about an upcoming
program on women’s health that the cooperative would be providing for them. Andrea was under
the impression that the funding for this program was coming from funds provided by Café
Femenino. Rosângela later at her home confided in me that she was not happy with this because
the women in the group had not agreed to have Andrea be the person to present to them, rather
they had a specific physician in mind for the session. When Rosângela approached Adauto and
the cooperative administration, Adauto clarified that a grant from Taylor’s of Harrogate, and not
Café Femenino, would finance the nurse’s presentation. While this clarified this particular
situation, it also highlights the ongoing lack of trust and miscommunication between the
women’s group and the cooperative administration.
Many educational programs offered by the cooperative focused explicitly on coffee
growing practices to improve the quality of the coffee or to train the farmers on sustainable
production processes. This commitment to environmental quality improvement was a founding
principle of the cooperative, which in its early days worked very closely with a sustainable
agriculture NGO, Sepucaí. The cooperative would occasionally bring in experts to talk about the
links between agriculture and the environment. One renowned visitor, Ana Primavesi, was
described by the cooperative’s agrotechnical staff as one of Brazil's premier soil scientists and
leader in the movement toward organic and biodynamic agriculture in the country. Dr. Primavesi
spoke to a room packed full of cooperative members and lectured for over two hours to the
captivated crowd. Other instances of training came from experts in organic agriculture who
presented to the farmers and also visited some of the organic farms to see their production and

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offer suggestions for improvement. These educational programs in tangent with the cooperative's
investment in appropriate agrotechnical assistance from agronomists with trained in organic and
other sustainable production techniques helped the farmers overcome the obstacles they faced in
transitioning to organic farming, and in meeting organic’s and Fair Trade’s environmental
standards.

E. Engagement
There is a group of 20-30 farmers who regularly participate in the meetings and events
the cooperative holds, including special lectures and important meetings to improve production
practices. A much larger number of farmers attend the annual assemblies and special events that
the cooperative organizes, but for cooperative members who live far away from Poço Fundo
(more than two hours away in the case of those in Andradas and Inconfidentes), attending regular
meetings is difficult. One or two leaders from those distant nuclei typically attend meetings and
bring the information back to their groups. Ozório José dos Santos and Maria Raquel Contim
(Raquel) represented one of these nuclei, the Andradas nucleus.
Raquel and Ozório live with their families near the city of Andradas, which is
approximately a two-hour drive from Poço Fundo. Raquel, one of the few never married women
farmers in the cooperative, lives with her mother and an unmarried adult brother who was also a
part of the cooperative. Raquel, her brother, Ozório and one other farmer made up the nucleus in
Andradas. Ozório and his wife lived and farmed together, and he was the president of their
nucleus. They made an effort, as often as possible, to travel to Poço Fundo for cooperative
activities and educational opportunities. I first met them when a researcher named Rosana Vieira
Ramos came back to the cooperative to present her dissertation research on the cooperative. The

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cooperative often welcomed many foreign and domestic researchers who have worked with them
to return and present their study’s findings to the farmers. Raquel and Ozório, although they
lived far away, attempted to take advantage of the programs the cooperative offered and spoke to
me about the importance of belonging to the cooperative and in particular their commitment to
organic coffee production. COOPFAM offered them educational resources on organic
production techniques that they otherwise would not have been able to access.
In general, women were less likely to participate in cooperative meetings than men.
However, a few women are emerging as leaders in the cooperative-community. In late 2009, the
cooperative elected Rosângela de Paiva to be the first women to the cooperative board of
directors. Previously two women had served on the Poço Fundo association’s board Vâmia Lúcia
P. Silva and Rosana Silva Pereira. There are only a few women who regularly attend cooperative
meetings. Women explain that sometimes they do not attend because their husbands represent
them, or that they would like to attend but find it difficult to do so when they have children to
care for, or if they do not have access into transportation to town where the meetings are held.
Rosângela de Paiva described why women in Poço Fundo don’t participate as much as men as
compared to some of the women she met years earlier at an organic fair in Rio de Janeiro, “the
women who are the poorest really were the ones who did the most work on their own because
they had to, they had to, to survive. Women in this area around Poço Fundo, they have a little bit
more, they have a little bit more economic security and cushion and they sort of just cross their
hands and let the decision making be done by the men.” Rosângela went on to explain that those
women who did participate in cooperative activities tended to be leaders in some other facet of
their community like their church. In conversations with other women one of the things
mentioned for their absence from participation was that they lacked the courage to seek

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leadership roles in the cooperative. For example, Paula told me that it was not that the women
were not capable of being leaders it was that they did not have the courage to do so. She felt that
the women in the cooperative needed more leadership training, that classes on cooking and
painting were fine, but not what they needed to develop as business women.

Women’s Participation and Growing Tensions Within the Cooperative
A small group of women within COOPFAM have organized a women’s group to address
issues of importance to them and build the women’s capacity within the cooperative. Rosângela
de Paiva is the leader of the Mulheres Organizadas Buscando Independência (MOBI) women’s
group; she has served as the director of the group from its inception in 1997. After the birth of
her first child, the group became inactive until 2006 when Rosângela and other women
reinitiated the group. When I first visited COOPFAM in July 2006, the MOBI group held their
third meeting since the group was rekindled. The women’s group had between 15-20 active
participants. The group primarily focuses on developing projects for the women where they
could have more financial independence in their families. In 2009, the group was developing
ideas for new programs to pitch to representatives from Café Femenino, a coffee buyer focused
on purchasing 100% women-produced coffee that had started purchasing coffee from the
cooperative the year before.
The MOBI group and Café Femenino program brought to the surface certain tensions
between the cooperative administration and subgroups within the cooperative. Café Femenino is
a second party certification system run by the founders and owners of Organic Products Trading
Company (OPTCO). Café Femenino “certifies” and sells 100% women-grown, organic and Fair
Trade coffee from eight different countries (OPTCO 2017). OPTCO and Café Femenino are both

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run and were started by Gayleen and Garth Smith; after fifteen years of working with coffee
cooperatives, Gayleen was approached by some of the women farmers in a cooperative in Peru.
The Peruvian women were producing their own coffee but their husbands controlled the money
earned for the coffee. The women in the cooperative asked Gayleen to help them market their
own coffee separately from the men in the cooperative so that they could control their own
production and revenue. Today, Café Femenino describes their program as a social mission, not
just another mark or certification program. The introduction to the handbook Café Femenino
provides coffee cooperatives this information about their program “…women however are
responsible for the majority of the coffee production, the entire household, the family garden,
livestock and the children. Inside the culture of Central and South America, many women coffee
producers do not have a value equal to that of the man as human beings. The woman does not
have the ability to make economic decisions for herself or her children.” It is under this premise
that Café Femenino conducts their programs. They describe that they have created an economic
system for women coffee producers that is “separate but together with the men,” and that women
are producing coffee, “just as she has always produced coffee, but now she is recognized for the
work she does. She is no longer invisible.” However, this premise does not actually fit the
dominant coffee-production paradigm of small-scale family farmers at COOPFAM.
As discussed in Chapter Four, farming practices are highly gendered activities with
women and men doing different tasks throughout the production process. Indeed, those single or
widowed farmers without partners typically have to rely on hired labor or other family members
to assist in coffee production in order to meet all of the environmental and quality exigencies of
Fair Trade and organic coffee production. Café Femenino requires that their coffee be 100%

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produced by women, a production system that is highly impractical at best for COOPFAM
families.
In 2009, COOPFAM was one of the cooperatives certified by Café Femenino and the
only one in Brazil. Women farmers participating in the Café Femenino program receive a
US$0.02/lb. premium for their coffee in addition to opportunities to apply for grants for social
development and capacity building grants. In return, the women farmers and the cooperative
must adhere to a number of standards. Only women producing dual Fair Trade and organic
certified coffee are eligible to participate. Coffee sold to Café Femenino must be 100% produced
and harvested by women. If a man and woman work a farm jointly, her coffee has to be kept
separate and marked throughout the process. The coffee must meet high-quality standards as
well. The US$0.02/lb. premium is either paid directly to the women coffee growers or given to
the cooperative’s Café Femenino group. The women must form a Café Femenino group and
democratically decide how they will use this premium. The premium is to be used solely at their
discretion and is not for general use by the cooperative. The Café Femenino group will decide
how to use the premium as a group or individually. The women must both be active participants
in the Fair Trade cooperative and hold regular meetings of the women’s group. The cooperative
must work to integrate women into the leadership of the cooperative. Moreover, the Café
Femenino mark is to be used exclusively by OPTCO and Café Femenino. Women must also be
on or added to any land title that exists for the property in the family. The women and the
cooperative must choose someone to interface with the staff of Café Femenino. In the case of
COOPFAM, the cooperative had selected Andréa Maira da Silva, the cooperative’s head
secretary, to be the liaison to Café Femenino.

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Café Femenino Tensions
In the spring of 2009, COOPFAM was preparing for a visit from representatives of Café
Femenino and OPTCO for the first time. Women in the MOBI group were very excited about
their visit and had been preparing for a party to welcome the Café Femenino staff. The leader of
the women’s group Rosângela de Souza Paiva spoke enthusiastically at the MOBI meetings and
in private conversations with me about several projects and leadership proposals that they
wanted to unveil for the Café Femenino visit. For several years the women in the MOBI group
had been organizing to build a commercial kitchen where they could produce and sell candies
and other confections to earn more money. The women had also started talking about wanting to
have more women involved in the leadership of the cooperative. While two women had at the
time served on the local association’s board of directors, a woman had not yet been elected to the
cooperative board in 2009. Rosângela began to suggest that the MOBI group should consider
running a whole slate of women for all of the leadership positions of the cooperative that fall.
While Rosângela admitted that there certainly would be some machistas who would oppose
having women lead the cooperative she believed there would ultimately be enough support for
some women to be elected.
The proposals for the commercial kitchen and for running an all-female slate for the
cooperative board were not met with enthusiasm by the cooperative president, Luis Adauto
Oliviera, or the staff at the cooperative. Several days before the Café Femenino visit, Rosângela
pitched the idea of running a slate of women for the cooperative board to Adauto and Andréa the
head secretary at the cooperative at the time. They immediately dismissed the idea and said that
the cooperative needed to focus on electing the best people to the positions, those individuals
who had the experience to run the cooperative. Rosângela argued with them in the break room of

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the cooperative, challenging the notion that women are not well qualified to run the cooperative.
Later that day I was assisting Adauto by translating an email he received from Café Femenino
when he told Renato Pereira da Silva, the cooperative’s agronomist and Vanessa de Paula
Araújo, another cooperative secretary about his conversation with Rosângela about having only
women run the cooperative. They joked that if Rosângela were president, the women would put
all of the cooperative’s money into running the women’s commercial kitchen to make
confections.
In preparation for the Café Femenino visit, the women at the May MOBI meeting
coordinated what food and refreshments to prepare and planned to give the Café Femenino staff
a gift in appreciation of the program. They were eager to show off their confectionary skills to
demonstrate that their commercial kitchen concept would be viable. There was more excitement
about this visit than any other coffee buyer’s visit. The women in the MOBI group left the
meeting full of anticipation and excitement to meet the people who created a coffee certification
program that recognized and rewarded women's work directly.
In late May 2009, Dustin Johnson and Connie Kolosvary came to visit COOPFAM.
Dustin worked directly with OPTCO Organic Products Trading Company, which is an importer
of coffee, organic coffee, and Connie is the director of Café Femenino. During Connie and
Dustin’s visit, it quickly became apparent that there were many communication problems
between the cooperative’s staff, Café Femenino, and MOBI, the women’s group. The first
indication of communication problems happened during lunch the first day of their visit while I
interpreted for Connie and Dustin. Connie and Dustin asked a few questions about the work that
the group did with Café Femenino generally and the women’s group in particular. They asked if
Andréa, the cooperative’s head secretary was the coordinator of the women’s group. Andréa said

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that she was and that she did the coordinating for the group. The problem with this assertion was
that the women in the MOBI group did not consider Andréa to be the coordinator of the group,
she attended the meetings, but she was not a MOBI member or farmer herself.
During the lunch, Dustin and Connie asked about women’s work and if it was valued on
the farms. The farmers and the cooperative’s staff there explained that women’s work was
valued and talked specifically about the important role that women play in the natural processing
of coffee that they do at COOPFAM. They explained that women’s work is valued because they
are the ones who turn the coffee on the drying patios to ensure that it dries evenly and does not
ferment. They recognize the importance of this work because without it the coffee quality would
be jeopardized. Toward the end of the conversation, Dustin probed deeper to see if women’s
work in coffee was valued prior to when they learned about the importance of proper drying
techniques, or did this appreciation for their work come after the farmers realized the economic
value of drying coffee properly. Unfortunately, lunch was wrapping up at that point, and that
question was left unanswered.
After the lunch, Connie and Dustin the staff and farmers returned to the cooperative to
meet with other farmers there. Leonardo (Leo) Portillo joined the group at that point. Leo
worked for Fair Trade USA as their Consulting Local Project Associate in Brazil. He often
accompanied Fair Trade coffee buyers on their visits to cooperatives to aid in language
interpretation between the English speaking buyers and Portuguese speaking farmers.
In the meeting of the cooperative board members, Adauto asked Dustin and Connie to
introduce themselves and their businesses. Dustin explained what his position was with OPTCO.
He explained that OPTCO buys organic and Fair Trade coffee and that he is their producer
relations’ representative. He explained that his role was to be in regular communication with all

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the producer groups to find out what is going on with them and make certain there are no
problems during the harvest. Connie explained that her role within Café Femenino was to work
directly with the women’s groups on various capacity building projects and to foster women’s
empowerment within the cooperatives. Connie explained that in many of the other Café
Femenino cooperatives there is much more overt oppression of women, including high rates of
domestic violence than she understood was common at COOPFAM. She also explained that
women in certain countries like Peru, do the majority of the coffee-farming work, but the men
take the coffee to the market and control the revenue without sharing it with the women. She
explained that the way that the farmers at COOPFAM spoke about family farming was different
from the experiences of women farmers elsewhere. The different gendered division of labor at
COOPFAM, as compared to Café Femenino programs in other countries, would eventually prove
to be incompatibility with Café Femenino’s 100% women-produced coffee standard. The
production system needed to produce high quantities of export quality and dual Fair Trade and
organic certified coffee at COOPFAM, relies on a highly gendered division of labor.
One of the objectives of the Café Femenino visit was to learn more about the
cooperative’s women’s group and to explain the Café Femenino program and its standards to the
cooperative leaders and the women participating in the program. For example, Café Femenino
coffee must be both Fair Trade and organic certified and produced exclusively by women. To
their credit, Adauto and the cooperative leadership tried to explain the production system at
COOPFAM and how critical the gendered division of labor was to producing high-quality
coffee. They explained that while women initially directly harvested ripe coffee cherries they
soon had to direct their attention to the drying patios to ensure that the coffee did not ferment
during the natural drying process. Leo from Fair Trade USA explained the difference between

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the natural processing done at COOPFAM and how that was very different from the washed or
semi-washed coffee processing that Dustin and Connie were familiar with from their work with
coffee farmers in Mexico, Central America and other countries in South America. They
explained that it was very tough for any one person, man or woman, to produce their own lots of
coffee without help from their spouse, adult children, other relatives or paid laborers. Adauto
kept trying to explain that all of the organic farming families had women producers who worked
in coffee production and that, because of the specific production system there, they considered
them to be the cooperative’s Café Femenino producers.
Another point of contention was the Café Femenino standard that required the formation
of a women’s group for Café Femenino producers. These groups are supposed to be comprised
of women producing their own dual certified organic and Fair Trade coffee. The MOBI group
made the claim that they were the rightful group to use the funds distributed by Café Femenino.
Connie’s visit with the MOBI emboldened the women. They soon began to demand that the Café
Femenino premium was rightfully theirs to use. On multiple occasions, they asked Adauto to
transfer these funds into an account that they had set up for the women’s group. The women
wanted to run some educational and health programs with the money. One problem the MOBI
group had with the Café Femenino standards was that only women with dual certified organic
and Fair Trade coffee were supposed to be members of a Café Femenino group. The leaders of
the MOBI group objected to this because some of their long-time members were only producing
Fair Trade coffee and not dual certified coffee. They did not want to exclude these women.
Connie and Dustin met many different COOPFAM families, visited numerous farms and
dined in the homes of several families during their three-day visit to COOPFAM. The MOBI
group organized a celebration with food and refreshments, they presented their plans for using

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Café Femenino funds, and they thanked Connie and Dustin and presented them with handmade
souvenirs to take home and remind them of the women of COOPFAM.
Over the course of their visit, Adauto’s persona was different with the representatives
from Café Femenino than his normal behavior with the farmers or even with us. He was more
reserved and quiet than normal, while still friendly, he tempered his typically sharp wit. He was
more cautious with newer buyers of the cooperative’s coffee. In this particular situation, possibly
more than any other I witnessed in my work with COOPFAM, the power was certainly in the
hands of the Café Femenino staff. Adauto clearly knew that OPTCO and Café Femenino could
just decide not to buy the cooperative’s coffee. Over dinner the last night of Connie and Dustin’s
visit, Adauto expressed his level of frustration with the complexities of the Café Femenino
system, and the challenge it would pose to restructure their production system to sell a relatively
small amount of coffee. He said that he now better understood the requirements of the Café
Femenino system but did not know if it would be worth it for the women or the cooperative to
sell one container of coffee under this mark. He postulated that maybe it would be worth it for
two containers. He remarked that he probably could sell all of the cooperative’s coffee to Royal
Coffee but that he knew it was important to diversify their sales.
Dustin then explained that they did not have the market yet for more Brazilian Café
Femenino coffee because they did not have the story to tell about the Brazilian women. He
remarked, that was one of the purposes of this visit. He said that it is just based on the market
and that when they have more people that wanted to buy the Café Femenino brand of coffee
from Brazil, then they could buy more containers.
The Café Femenino visit highlighted the power dynamics between coffee buyers, the
cooperatives, and the farmers themselves. Adauto, as the cooperative president, lobbied the staff

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at Café Femenino to consider a different production system than they were accustomed to and
challenged them to see that such a system could empower women farmers. Adauto, Rosângela
and others at the cooperative tried to describe the nature of the division of labor on the farms and
how at least two people were needed because of the simultaneous need to harvest coffee and
begin the time consuming drying process on the patios. Connie and Dustin visited farms and saw
men picking the coffee and women turning it on the patios. While they saw this division of labor
and heard from many farmers how women’s work on the patio was crucial to coffee quality, they
stressed that the standards are what they are, and that the women and cooperative did not have to
produce coffee for Café Femenino. It was always their choice.
I argue that, while it might have been their choice to participate, the inflexibility of the
standards created an impossible choice for the MOBI women. They were eager to pursue
economic development and saw Café Femenino as a tool to do so. However, they realized that
Café Femenino’s standards around 100% women-produced coffee could have negative impacts
on families earnings from coffee production, despite the $0.02/lb. Café Femenino premium.
Women farmers would have to add on a tremendous amount of work to apply fertilizer to their
coffee plants and remove weeds — work that is typically done by men in families with at least
two able bodied partners. Moreover, they would have to forgo critical time on the drying patios
during the harvest, to work in the fields picking their own coffee cherries. This would likely
jeopardize the quality of the women’s own coffee, and possibly all of the farmers’ coffee. Since
the quality premiums that farmers receive for their high-quality coffee are higher than the Café
Femenino premium most farmers could not see the clear benefits of participating under the
program’s existing standards. As such, the farmers and cooperative continued to try and
negotiate the standard by explaining their production processes, and how an adjustment in the

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Café Femenino standard, would actually make the program fairer and more worthwhile to the
women and their families.
Furthermore, because Café Femenino was driven by consumer desires for dual-certified
coffee, the program excluded women who were not organic producers. These women did not
have the power or resources (human or financial) to invest in organic production. Not only were
women in conventional farming families excluded from receiving the $0.02/lb. price premium
for their coffee, they were also excluded from participation in the Café Femenino women’s
group. This meant that some of the cooperatives most economically vulnerable women might not
have access to services provided via the Café Femenino premium funds.
Rosângela, the president of the MOBI women’s group, expressed concern about
excluding women whose families did not produce organic coffee. A number of these women are
in the existing women’s group. And a newly formed Café Femenino group would be in
competition with MOBI. MOBI was developed in 1997 by the women-farmers of COOPFAM
for all women and focused on all women’s economic independence. Rosângela worried about the
repercussions of excluding some women, especially those who had committed to their own
empowerment work for many years. The Café Femenino program’s standards regarding group
membership would serve to exclude women seeking empowerment in this case, rather than bring
it to them as promoted in their marketing materials.
The Café Femenino visit also brought to the forefront tensions between the cooperative
administration and the women’s group. As the vignette regarding the delay in transferring the
Café Femenino funds from the cooperative to the women’s group illustrated, women farmers felt
they should have more control over the resources provided by the Café Femenino program. They
also felt that the cooperative administrators, all of whom were men, should not make the

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decisions on how the women’s group should use Café Femenino funds. This impasse precipitated
a lack of trust that continues to grow between the leaders of the women’s group and the
cooperative’s administrators.
COOPFAM’s tensions with the Café Femenino standards eventually led to Café
Femenino’s determination that the production system at COOPFAM was incompatible with their
program. The cooperative was not distinguishing which coffee was being produced exclusively
by women and which was not; they were offering all of their dual certified organic and Fair
Trade coffee as Café Femenino so determining who should actually be in the Café Femenino
women’s group was impossible. In 2012, the cooperative lost their Café Femenino certification
because they did not rectify this problem. Café Femenino stopped buying their coffee after the
cooperative sent two identical samples to OPTCO, both with OPTCO and Café Femenino labels
on them. As discussed in Chapter One, in 2011, the new cooperative president at the time
Marcelo de Paiva Gonçalves met again with Connie and Dustin at the SCAA Event in Houston,
TX about the Café Femenino program. He listened carefully, apologized for the earlier problems
and admitted that there were a few women, mostly unmarried women or widows, who produced
coffee entirely on their own at COOPFAM and that they might be interested in participating but
that ultimately it would be their decision and not the cooperative’s. To date, COOPFAM has not
sold any more of their dual certified coffee to the Café Femenino program.
The negotiations between Café Femenino and COOPFAM are a visible example of the
challenges both certifiers and producers encounter when a certification system scales up. The
more that relationships between coffee buyers and coffee producers are negotiated through a set
of global standards, the more that they lose the flexibility to respond directly to the nuanced
needs of farmers and cooperatives. On the other hand, these standards do make certain sets of

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expectations clear for both farmers and buyers. This can provide a more level playing field for
farmers to negotiate with buyers. This is more likely to occur when the farmers and the buyers
have a long term relationship and there is some flexibility in the standards to account for
differences in farmers’ cultures and production practices.

V. Benefits of Fair Trade and Organic Certification
Once farmers and cooperatives overcome the barriers to entry into Fair Trade, there is a
wealth of benefits that they may be able to access. Some of these benefits are directly provided
by Fair Trade such as access to programs financed through the use of the Fair Trade premium
and programs run by Fair Trade organizations that are only available to certified cooperatives.
Other benefits available to Fair Trade producers and cooperatives are not necessarily a direct
benefit of Fair Trade certification. Instead, these indirect benefits are due to programs offered by
socially and environmentally responsible coffee buyers and other stakeholders, or programs that
cooperatives can access because of the training and capacity they have developed through
participation in Fair Trade.
While the economic advantages of the Fair Trade floor price are often discussed in the
literature on Fair Trade, other benefits are also very important to cooperative members. In 2009,
Adauto Oliviera, then the president of the cooperative said this when speaking about the
economic and non-economic benefits of Fair Trade.

“This is important to add because the idea of Fair Trade is not only that you put a price premium
on top of the price of the product. Really the impact happens in the life of the producer
independent of the premium. His participation in the market is what bares fruit. He has to
promote new situations of movement and growth independent of the use of those resources. So
this has to be very clear as well, it’s not only getting money that signifies growth. Development
and knowledge have to be applied, and the way that they are applied makes the difference.

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Because you see communities that receive a premium, but nothing ever changes in the lives of
the producers. What is important is to raise consciousness independent of the money provided by
the premium. This is what transforms and makes for a better quality of life and social
environment. It’s not the money in and of itself.”
- Luis Adauto Oliviera, cooperative president 2002-2009
A. Programs Financed through Fair Trade Premium
One of the benefits of Fair Trade certification is the US $0.10/lb. social development
premium cooperatives receive and can reinvest into their members and community. COOPFAM
has used the social development premium to invest in education for farmers and their children,
healthcare, agricultural technology, and business development.
At times, the cooperative leverages the funds of the social development premium to work
with local businesses to secure discounts for farming families. For example, COOPFAM farmers
can visit certain private doctors, dentists, and orthodontists and receive discounts for their
services. While health care is free in Brazil under a single payer system, many people elect to
pay for private services in order to be seen more quickly or to receive what they believe to be
superior care and access to services with private practitioners.
In a similar vein, public education is provided by the state in Brazil, but many middleclass families elect to pay for private education for their children. Farming families at
COOPFAM can take advantage of discounts offered to them at the private cooperative school
Centro Educacional Cooperar (CEC). In addition to the discounts subsidized by the social
development premium and partnership with the CEC, COOPFAM youth have the opportunity to
receive a limited number of scholarships offered by Fair Trade coffee buying companies, as
discussed in the following section.
COOPFAM also invested in educational programming for farmers and their children. The
cooperative invested in building a computer lab adjacent to their assembly space in town. In the

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lab, groups of children and adults can learn how to use computers. The cooperative also offers
cultural programs like guitar and drawing lessons. Moreover, they have used the social
development premium to sponsor cultural events in the community like the local samba school,
which performs during Carnival and other holidays.
As mentioned above, capacity building is vital to accessing Fair Trade certification and
maintaining the quality and environmental standards necessary to sell certified coffee.
COOPFAM offers numerous agricultural training opportunities for their members. Many of these
focus on ways to improve coffee quality in order to earn more money per pound of coffee sold.
Other trainings focus on organic and other agricultural production techniques.
Investing in technological resources to maintain and improve quality and to maintain
organic certification are also important ways COOPFAM uses their Fair Trade social
development premium. COOPFAM partners with Fair Trade certifiers to provide soil testing for
their farmers, where the soil is sampled, and tests are run to analyze nutrient content. After
analysis, the cooperative’s agrotechnical advisors work with farmers to help them improve their
soil health through different techniques and make suggestions on organic materials that can be
used to amend the soil. In addition to soil health, the cooperative has undertaken a mapping
project at the behest of their organic certifiers. The cooperative’s agrotechnical advisors are
mapping the organic farms using GPS and sharing this information with the organic certifiers.
See Figure 5, in Chapter Three for an example map of a COOPFAM farm created by
COOPFAM’s agronomist Edimar Moreira Martins.

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B. Programs Available to Cooperatives Through Certification Organizations
Fair Trade certifying organizations finance additional programs for farmers, including
coffee quality improvement programs. These types of programs are a win-win scenario for the
cooperative and the certifier. The cooperative gets to produce more quality coffee and earn a
quality premium for its production, while the Fair Trade certifiers promote the quality
improvements of certified coffee and tell the story of how they are investing in the quality
infrastructure of the cooperatives with which they work.
Fair Trade USA has a major role in identifying and leveraging resources from third party
partners to help certified farmers and cooperatives. Fair Trade USA hired a Brazilian, Leonardo
(Leo) Portillo to work as their Consulting Local Project Associate in Brazil to work in close
collaboration with Fair Trade certified cooperatives and help them with interactions with Fair
Trade buyers and assist them in improving the quality of their coffee. Leo accompanies many
different coffee buyers on their visits to COOPFAM. Often he assists in translating for the
cooperative and the buyers because of his native fluency in Portuguese and proficiency in
English. This investment by Fair Trade USA has been particularly significant because many
coffee buyers do not speak any Portuguese.
At COOPFAM, their drying patio revolving loan program is one example where Fair
Trade USA enrolled Fair Trade buyers and governmental agencies in a program to improve the
quality of Fair Trade coffee. Representatives from Fair Trade USA regularly visited COOPFAM
to check in on the cooperative and the projects they supported. Café Bom Dia, Fair Trade USA,
and USAID financed the revolving loan program. In a visit to Café Bom Dia, their
representative, Alex Donizeti do Rosário, spoke about their partnerships with Fair Trade
certifiers and other organizations to provide funding for quality infrastructure. He explained that

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Bom Dia put in more than fifty percent of the capital for the project and also provides technical
assistance. Through this program, ten families received a loan to build themselves a cement
drying patio. By drying their coffee on a cement patio, they would increase the coffee quality and
in theory earn more money per pound of coffee. After a period of time, the farmer is expected to
pay back the loan so the cooperative can then extend a new loan to a new family for them to
build their own drying patio.

C. Benefits Provided by Coffee Buyers
COOPFAM frequently receives visits from their roasters, importers, and other coffee
buyers. Most of these visitors are from abroad, including the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Cooperative administrators, staff, and many farmers are accustomed to these visits. Farmers
frequently welcome coffee buyers into their homes to talk about their farms, families, and lives.
The cooperative tends to take these visitors to a select set of model farmer, in close proximity to
the cooperative headquarters to show off the success of their programs. This gives buyers a false
perception since they do not visit the poorest farmers, or those living far away from the
cooperative. It is these poor and distant farmers who would benefit most from buyers’ and
certifiers’ attention. However, those who do not typically host buyers may still encounter them at
the cooperative’s office.
Quite a few coffee buyers visit COOPFAM each year. During my fieldwork coffee
buyers, including Organic Products Trading Company (OPTCO), Café Femenino, Thanksgiving
Coffee, Urth Coffee, Casa Brasil, Taylors of Harrogate, and Sant’Eustachio Il Caffe, visited the
cooperative. In addition to buying coffee at the Fair Trade price, a number of these coffee buyers
support social programs at the cooperative and in the city of Poço Fundo.

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COOPFAM has traded with some of its partners for many years including Royal Coffee,
Casa Brasil, and Sant’Eustachio Il Caffe. The cooperative puts a considerable amount of effort in
seeking out, developing and maintaining close relationships with various coffee buyers.
COOPFAM’s cordial long-term relationships with buyers have facilitated their growth and
success in the Fair Trade market. These long-term relationships are one of the principles of Fair
Trade. Many coffee buyers come to COOPFAM each year to visit the cooperative and the
farmers. These buyers are taken on tours of the rebeneficio and the roasting and packaging
facility being built, then taken out to farmers’ homes and fields to witness the coffee production.
Translators are typically necessary for these buyers since none of the farmers are proficient in
English, although some have a working understanding of Spanish or Italian. Sometimes buyers
bring their own translators like Hannah from Taylors of Harrogate, others rely on Fair Trade
USA representatives like Leo Portillo when available, and still, others ask the cooperative to find
translators or try to get by with Spanish.
During my fieldwork, I often served as a translator for the cooperative when buyers came
to visit, and then later back in the United States at the 2011 and 2013 Specialty Coffee
Association of America Events (SCAA). This mutually beneficial relationship allowed the
cooperative to have free translation during business meetings and gave me an intimate view of
the power dynamics occurring in business transactions between the cooperative and coffee
buyers.
There is a familiar routine when coffee buyers come to COOPFAM; cooperative staff or
administrators are on hand to welcome the buyers and give them the requisite tour of the
facilities. Hannah Eatough’s — a green coffee buyer from Taylors of Harrogate — visit began in
this way. A Brazilian woman who had worked in London with Hannah and the woman’s

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husband accompanied Hannah. I joined the group as they toured the rebeneficio and the roasting
and grinding facility that was being built. At the time of Hannah’s visit, the building construction
was completed, and the machinery was beginning to come in. Adauto, explained that the
cooperative planned to install a state of the art roasting machine that would not have any
emissions, smoke or odor. In addition to this, they would install and use two different types of
packaging machines; a typical one that vacuum packs the coffee, and one that injects nitrogen
into the bag that displaces oxygen and thereby stops the oxidation process, preserving the quality
and shelf life of the coffee. When the facility is finally completed, Adauto explained the
cooperative hoped to be able to sell the first dual Fair Trade and organic certified coffee in
Brazil.
Cooperative administrators often told buyers that they intended to hire family members of
the cooperative to run and work in the facility upon completion. On that day, Adauto explained
they were running to catch up and finish the facility, because they were able to get some
additional loan and grant funding from Banco do Brasil. As a result, they were shooting to
inaugurate the new facility in October 2009 instead of in 2011 or 2012.
Taylors of Harrogate is based out of London, England and is one of COOPFAM’s longterm buyers. They purchase Fair Trade conventional coffee, and in 2009 they wanted to buy an
additional container of coffee from COOPFAM. Like many coffee buyers that COOPFAM sells
to, Taylors works with the cooperative on a social program. Taylors is particularly interested in
occupational health and safety. They funded a program at COOPFAM where twenty families
would receive health and safety training and equipment. In the first year of the program
COOPFAM selected thirteen families to receive the training and equipment, another seven
would be enrolled the second year. The cooperative hired a health and safety specialist to run the

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training program. Taylors completed a social audit of the cooperative in 2007 with the ethical
trading initiative and gave US $3,000 to COOPFAM for the program.
When buyers visit the cooperative, the staff or administrators usually take them to visit a
few farms. On this particular occasion, we went into the roça (countryside) to visit Ana Paula
Mendes (Paula) and Valdir José de Oliviera because they were one of the families participating
in the health and safety program funded by Taylors. Paula and Valdir are one of the few families
that have employees. They have two paid workers on their farm, partially because Paula has
rheumatoid arthritis, which limits the types of work she can do and also because they do not have
any children who can help on the farm. The couple has one of most beautiful homes of all the
cooperative members. They built it a few years earlier with the aid of their extended family. The
house sits on a hillside with a breathtaking view of the scenic valley below and mountains
beyond.
Hannah was visiting Paula and Valdir to present them with their health and safety kit. We
all stood together on their patio. Renato explained that they had to work to change the culture of
the farmers because people were accustomed to working in their fields without closed toed shoes
and men without their shirts on. I had walked through many a farm with farmers and their
families donning Havianas (flip flops). Although during the harvest or other labor-intensive
activities most farmers wore boots. Renato went on to explain that changing behavior was
proving to be a slow process, and the cooperative was taking three steps to make these changes.
They were working to motivate the families about the importance of the program, reaching out to
the workers on the farms, and asking the leaders of the nuclei to indicate a family they thought
might participate in the program. Some farmers were resistant and did not want to participate.
They resisted certain changes more than others. For example, some farmers did not want to wear

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gloves because they wanted to feel the coffee when they were harvesting it. So the cooperative
took that feedback and purchased gloves with a thinner, stickier surface so the farmers could still
feel the coffee cherries.
Each family in the program received a kit from the cooperative and could purchase others
if they so desired. The package contained a pair of gloves, a sun hat, boots with rubber soles and
leather uppers, a first aid kit, sound blocking earphones, and masks. They were also going to
receive field toilets very soon. Upon learning about the field toilets, Hannah became very excited
and told us how the cooperative administrators thought she was crazy when she initially
explained that they needed to provide field toilets to be in compliance with Brazilian labor laws.
Renato broke into laughter and said they must have thought that this little blond from England
was very silly. His high-pitched laughter rang out as he exclaimed “A toilet in the middle of the
field!”
For Hannah, a toilet in the middle of the field represents a significant advancement in
health and safety standards, yet for the farmers Renato alluded to, the toilet is out of place in the
field. Their farms are closer to nature in the farmers’ minds. They are not like factories or offices
where one would expect to find toilets. The farmers’ resistance to aspects of the program, like
the toilets or the gloves discussed above, shows their negotiations of what standards must they
adhere to, like toilets in the field, and which ones can they renegotiate, like thinner and stickier
gloves for harvesting coffee cherries.
While the program Taylors of Harrogate supported focused on occupational health and
safety, different coffee buyers supported many other programs for the cooperative members and
the community. For example, Casa Brasil pays for several students to attend the cooperative
school in town. Thanksgiving Coffee has sponsored and judged a Fair Trade coffee competition

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in Brazil. While Walmart and Café Bom Dia were building a new building for the cooperative
school. However, this project ran into problems and construction stopped in 2009.
Another buyer-supported program the cooperative participates in is the Minas Olympica
program for at-risk kids. Minas Olympica is an extracurricular program youth in Poço Fundo can
participate in before or after school. It is supported a combination of government and private
funds; including support from COOPFAM and one of their buyers, Sant’Eustachio Il Caffe based
in Rome, Italy.
I visited the Minas Olympica program one day with Karina, one of its directors. Karina
picked me up at 8:00 am, and we drive across town to the Poliesportive (Poli), a big gymnasium.
On the way, Karina saw two students who were enrolled in the program. She stopped the car to
ask them if they were planning to come that morning. One boy said yes straight away, and the
other agreed to come once Karina explained that today would be lots of fun because it was
physical activity day. The Minas Olympica program offers various activities for the students
each day, ranging from physical activities days like the day I visited, to math and language
studies.
Upon arriving at the Poli, Karina set out to greet each student with a handshake and a kiss
on the cheek, a customary greeting. Karina then introduced me to Pricilla, the education intern,
the two physical education teachers there, and the custodian. When we finished making
introductions, Karina called the students, and we all gathered in a big circle and held hands.
Karina explained to the kids that I was an American here to study coffee production and that they
needed to be on their best behavior so I would return home and tell everyone how good the kids
in Poço Fundo were. We wrapped up the circle activity with the kids reciting a pledge and a
prayer together.

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The youth in the Minas Olympica program primarily come from disadvantaged
backgrounds. On the day I visited, three little girls there were living at the orphanage in town,
and others Karina, explained were victims of abuse or neglect. There were twenty-one students
the morning of my visit, but a total of 105 students enrolled between the morning and afternoon
sessions. The sessions are open to younger students in the morning and older students in the
afternoon.
Activities that day comprised various games, including a “don’t forget the lyrics” game,
spelling game, and even a coffee sack race, where the students used coffee sacks to hop across
the gym and back. In addition to the physical activity and academic programs, the students in the
program are fed a snack before the session ends, and they head to school. The day I visited we
had a French bread sandwich with ground beef and fruit juice drink. Before I left Pricilla took me
into the classroom at the back of the Poli where they run their academic programs. The kids had
desks and books there and timetables and other resources on the walls.
Support for programs like Minas Olympica helps COOPFAM gain social capital in Poço
Fundo. The cooperative is often able to leverage more funding for a program than they could
offer on their own by partnering with a coffee buyer — in this case, Sant’Eustachio Il Caffe.

D. Programs Accessed due to Increased Capacity, Training, and Investment
Government
COOPFAM has been able to leverage support from the Brazilian State as a direct result
of their participation in Fair Trade and because of increased organizational capacity from the
farmer-administrators’ increased capabilities and business acumen. The cooperative’s
administrators were able to identify financing, training and other governmental programs for

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their members in many areas. Since the farmers at COOPFAM meet the Brazilian government’s
definition of family farms, they could participate in the PRONAF (Programa Nacional de
Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar) program. PRONAF defines a family farm as one where
the majority of the family’s income comes directly from agriculture. PRONAF provides lowinterest loans for small family farmers in Brazil to sell their agricultural products, in the case of
COOPFAM to local schools. Farmers at COOPFAM are able to earn supplemental income
through this program to sell bananas and other fruit to the schools in the area.

Quality
Training and infrastructure are perhaps the most important investments COOPFAM takes
advantage of from participating in Fair Trade. Training and infrastructure improvements
contribute to the production of higher quality coffee. Different stakeholders in COOPFAM’s
supply chain share this commitment to coffee quality. It is in the direct interest of the farmers
and the cooperative to produce high-quality coffee so that they can continue to consistently sell
their coffee at a premium above the Fair Trade and organic certified floor price. And it is in the
interest of the coffee buyers to be able to offer their customers a premium product and justify the
price premium they receive for their finished product. Finally, it is in the interest of Fair Trade
and organic certifiers to hold on to their market share, expand their niche to include coffee
consumers interested in gourmet coffee, and also to counter critiques that Fair Trade coffee is
low quality.
Farmers at COOPFAM understand the importance of quality coffee and all those
interviewed in this study took special care of their coffee in one or more ways to ensure the

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quality of their product. Many farmers participate in trainings hosted by the cooperative to learn
production practices and techniques to improve coffee quality.
As discussed in Chapter Four, many factors including altitude, climatic factors, soil
quality, and production practices influence coffee quality. Farmers affect the quality of their soil
and thus their plant health by following best practices for production. Many of the training
workshops offered by the cooperative and supported by other partners, focus on plant health via
soil health. Farmers told me how they learned that coffee plants need both macro and micro
nutrients and approximately eighty tons of compost and other natural fertilizers per hectare, per
year to protect the plants from pests and to have large yields of coffee. The soil around Poço
Fundo, where the majority of COOPFAM farmers live is highly nutrient dense terra rosa soil.
Still, farmers learned from soil scientists, like Ana Primavesi and other agricultural experts on
how they could maintain this natural soil health and improve it. The cooperative also utilized
technology like soil analysis to determine what nutrients a farmer should add to the soil.
Moreover, the cooperative was also experimenting with a Brix meter, which is a sugar-testing
device to determine the sugar content in the cherries. This was important to test which
production practices and other parameters led to higher sugar content in the coffee cherry since
sugar content is a key indicator of coffee quality.
Coffee quality is built and developed on the plant and is vulnerable as soon as the coffee
is harvested. There are risks of losing coffee quality from the moment the cherry is picked.
Actions after coffee cherries are picked can frequently degrade their inherent quality. Farmers
received training on various strategies of selective harvesting to improve quality. Before these
trainings, most farmers would harvest all the cherries at once regardless of their level of ripeness.
Many farmers now use one or more methods of selective harvesting. As discussed in Chapter

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Four, the most selective method utilized is hand picking only the ripest cherries on each bush and
leaving the others on the bush. The next most selective methods are to harvest mechanically
(using a derriçadeira de café) or by hand, only those bushes that are at peak ripeness. The final
selective harvesting method is to harvest those rows or plots on the farm that are the ripest, and
then return at another time to harvest other sections.
After selecting the cherries, the farmers start the critical drying process. In Brazil farmers
typically use natural processing as opposed to washed or semi-washed processing. As discussed
in Chapter Four, in natural processing, coffee is taken to drying patios with the fruit of the coffee
cherry intact. From there, the coffee is spread out on the patio to dry in the cherry. Because it is
in the cherry, it is important to keep moisture levels down so that the fruit does not ferment and
start to diminish the quality of the coffee. COOPFAM and partners like certifiers and buyers
have invested in trainings on how to best dry coffee on the patios. As described in Chapter Four,
women typically are responsible for drying the coffee on the patio throughout the harvest season.
They turn the coffee on an hourly basis from around seven in the morning and at about 4:00 pm
pile it in rows and mounds to retain heat at night depending on where in the drying process it is.
Farmers have learned that the coffee is ready when its moisture level in the cherry is at 12%.
Investing in drying infrastructure is another key benefit COOPFAM has gained from
participating in Fair Trade. As discussed above, they have engaged in partnership with buyers
and certifiers to finance a revolving loan program for drying patios. Another investment in
drying infrastructure is large metal dryers, which help speed up the drying process. They are
especially useful when the harvest time is very rainy. Rain at harvest time can extend the process
and potentially jeopardize the quality of the coffee if fermentation occurs or mold or mildew
develops.

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The cooperative has worked in partnership with certifiers and buyers and has been able to
leverage government loans to invest in the processing mill (rebeneficio) where the dry and hulled
coffee is sorted and selected by a series of machines. The rebeneficio holds a series of machines
that use air, vibration, and even a very high tech optical scanner. Using these machines the
cooperative can sort lots of coffee to remove defects, and sort by size, color, and weight to group
the highest quality coffee together and further differentiate it in order to earn a price premium for
the best coffee.
Following this selection, small samples of coffee from different lots are set aside and
later roasted and brewed for the cupping lab where the cooperative’s trained Q-Grader tastes the
coffee and notes its quality and characteristics. The cupping lab was also a place where buyers
could test the quality of the coffee they were interested in purchasing. The cooperative use of the
cupping laboratory and rebeneficio are discussed at length in Chapter Six.

VI. Conclusion
All of these investments and benefits of Fair Trade contribute to COOPFAM’s economic
stability and the high price per pound of coffee the farmers earn. COOPFAM farmers have been
able to take advantage of these many benefits because farmers themselves and the cooperative
leaders had the educational background, capacity, and commitment to Fair Trade principles to
access the certification system. They used these assets to overcome the many obstacles to
entering the Fair Trade system that stymies other cooperatives and keep them from enjoying
these same benefits. The premium COOPFAM farmers earn for their coffee and other economic
factors associated with Fair Trade will be discussed in the following chapter.

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Table 6: COOPFAM programs and funding sources.
Fair Trade
Premium/negotiation
with local businesses

Buyers

Fair Trade
USA/FLO

Health care discounts
- Doctors
- Dentists
- Orthodontists

Minas
Olympica
program for at
risk youth

Drying patios SEBRAE cooperativism
revolving loan program
program

Women’s health education

Occupational
health and
safety training
and equipment

Cupping lab

PRONAF (Programa
Nacional de Fortalecimento
da Agricultura Familiar) loans for small producers and
a program to sell produce
and food to local schools

CEC (private school)
discounts

CEC
scholarships

Quality
competitions

Funcafé (Fundo de Defesa da
Economia Cafeeira) - loans
for small or medium coffee
producers

Vialão classes

Café Femenino

Government

Computer classes
Agricultural education
- Production techniques
- Quality improvement
- Organic production
Soil testing (Partners:
Certifiers)
GPS (required by organic
certifiers)
<——————————— Rebeneficio - processing plant —————————————>
Funded by: Fair Trade premium, buyer support, certifier grant, government loan
<———————————— Roasting and grinding facility———————————— >
Funded by: Fair Trade premium, buyer support, certifier grant, government loan
<——— New CEC building————>
Funded by: Certifier and buyers

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Chapter Six: The Price of Black Gold: Market Movements and What They Mean for Small
Farmers.
I. Introduction
In May 2009, I traveled with Renato to the town of Inconfidentes where seven coffee
farming families had recently become a part of COOPFAM. Inconfidentes is over a two-hour
drive away from Poço Fundo, and the experiences of the farmers there differed from those living
closer to the cooperative in many ways. I met and interviewed farmers from four of the seven
families in the cooperative, three of who are brothers José Donizete Marcílio, Wilsom de Freitas
Marcílio, and Antonio Claret Marcílio, as well as the president of the local association Maria
Sonia Pasete.
The three Marcílio brothers’ experiences with coffee production under the Fair Trade
system are illustrative of the essential economic benefits of the Fair Trade system and the
economic anxieties that are still present for farmers despite the certification system. Moving to
the Fair Trade system benefits farmers like the Marcílio brothers because it helps to protect them
from some of the price swings inherent in the free market for coffee. On the other hand, the
brothers still face economic obstacles such as long waiting periods to get paid for their coffee
and new pressures to produce higher quality coffee. The brothers lament the lack of strong state
intervention in the coffee market and the lack of subsidies formerly available to aid in purchasing
fertilizer and other agricultural inputs. They recognize the need for a new paradigm, such as Fair
Trade and organic coffee production that will allow them to sustain their families as coffee
farmers.
These farmers, like their compatriots in Poço Fundo and other areas, combine coffee
production with other livelihood strategies such as subsistence food production and dairy

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production. The three Marcílio brothers have lived on and farmed their land their whole lives,
like their father before them. They shared thirty hectares of land, and about twenty of those are
used in coffee production.
Like many farmers at COOPFAM, the brothers each have their coffee production but
help each other during labor intensive times such as the harvest. The Marcílio brothers and Dona
Sonia explain that they had trouble with the quality of their coffee because in their region it is
quite cold and rainy, which causes the coffee cherries to ripen unevenly. They explain that their
lives as coffee producers are difficult. The farmers just joined the cooperative in 2007, so the
2008 harvest was the first time that they sold their coffee through COOPFAM.

“It’s difficult, difficult, very bad there’s no money to spare, not to buy a car, not to get a tractor,
it was terribly hard and now it’s getting even more difficult. We’ll see if it will get better, ah
twenty years ago it was enough to remain, but now it’s just enough to eat, only for expenses, just
enough to maintain you can’t really buy anything.”
One of the brothers decided not to plant any new coffee plants ever again. He did not
have any more space, and it was not worth it because he would be planting it only to pay people
to help him because the money though coffee production was so little. Instead he plans to cut
back on his production, increase the proportion that is organic, and focus on increasing the
quality rather than quantity of his coffee to earn more per pound of coffee.
The two younger brothers, Wilsom and Antonio, had not yet received payment from the
cooperative for last year’s coffee. It still had not been sold to a buyer or left the cooperative for
export. On the other hand, Donizete’s coffee had sold, and he earned R$300.00/bag (60 kg). As a
result, Wilsom and Antonio resorted to selling some of their coffee locally on the spot. They
received R$200.00-R$240/bag for the coffee they sold on the spot. This kind of behavior is

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somewhat common for Fair Trade farmers and can cause problems for cooperatives. When the
C-price of coffee is very high farmers will opt to sell their coffee on the spot in order to get paid
immediately, even though they would earn more per pound if they had sold through the
cooperative. In some cases, this led to cooperatives being unable to meet their contract
obligations with roasters when their farmers sell their coffee outside of the cooperative, and the
cooperative’s supply is diminished (Cycon 2008; Harris 2005; Renard 2008). This has not been
the case for COOPFAM, which has not had any trouble meeting their contract obligations with
roasters and other buyers.
The brothers’ experience also illustrates that Fair Trade does not benefit all farmers
equally, even those in the same cooperative. Farmers often earn less for the coffee they sell on
the spot than they would earn if they were financially able to wait for payment at a later time.
This is particularly problematic for the poorest farmers who most need additional income for
their coffee but who also cannot afford to wait for a payment. Moreover, the distance from the
cooperative poses a number of challenges for the Marcílio brothers, including high transportation
costs, challenges with communication, and limits to the various benefits available to those
farmers living closer to Poço Fundo. Farmers like the brothers in Inconfidentes or Maria Raquel
Contim in Andradas live over two hours drive from Poço Fundo. As a result, high transportation
costs cut into their income and they do not have the same level of access to services available
near the cooperative. Furthermore, farmers in these more distant cities are members of smaller
associations that receive less gross social premium funds due to their smaller size, and have
fewer representatives on the cooperative’s board of directors.
Like nearly all the farmers interviewed, the brothers did appreciate the more stable prices
they earned through Fair Trade and organic production as compared to selling on the

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conventional market. The brothers and Dona Sonia debated the precise amount of variation in
income (somewhere between 30%-70%) from year to year.

II. Economic impacts
If Fair Trade is to be a solution to economic inequalities, it is important to understand the
extent to which it can make the market more equitable for the 1.6 million farmers and workers
involved in Fair Trade worldwide (FLO 2016). Anthropologists and other social scientists have
begun to explore the socioeconomic and environmental effects of Fair Trade on small-scale
farmers worldwide. Fair Trade is just one of the most recent market interventions aimed at
keeping coffee prices high and stable for farmers. Before third-party certification systems arose
in the 1990s governments served to intervene in the market for price stability in Brazil and on the
global stage. The literature on the economic effects of Fair Trade certification for coffee farmers
demonstrates that the system has had positive economic impacts for small farmers, especially
during the Coffee Crisis in the early 2000s. However, Fair Trade has not proved itself to be a
panacea for the economic challenges that continue to face small-scale coffee farmers.
Jaffee’s (2007) research comparing the social, economic, and environmental impacts of
Fair Trade versus conventional coffee production found that Fair Trade certified farmers fared
only slightly better economically than their conventional counterparts. The Fair Trade farmers
earned more money for their coffee but remained in debt. Bacon (2005) and Lyon (2006) also
reported that Fair Trade certified coffee farmers in Nicaragua and Guatemala, respectively,
earned more for their coffee than their conventional coffee-growing counterparts. However,
Bacon (2005) reported that the Nicaraguan Fair Trade certified coffee farmers were making
barely enough, or in some cases not enough money to cover their production costs. Moreover,

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long waiting periods between when Fair Trade coffee is harvested and when farmers are paid by
the cooperative have been cited as drawbacks to participation in cooperatives; whereas local
middlemen pay farmers on the spot for their coffee (Harris 2005; Jaffee 2007; Renard 2008).
When farmers sell their coffee to middlemen rather than fulfilling their obligation to the
cooperative, cooperatives may be unable to fulfill their existing contracts. It has been suggested
that this situation occurs more frequently when the market price of coffee is close to the Fair
Trade premium price (Harris 2005; Cycon 2008; Renard 2008). Moreover, farmers often do not
receive 100% of the Fair Trade price premium, which is a common misconception among Fair
Trade consumers. Instead, the premium is paid to the cooperative, which then distributes money
to cooperative members according to the volume of export-quality coffee they provided (Bacon
2005; Jaffee 2007).
My research took place in a different period from 2006-2013 when coffee prices had
risen considerably. In 2008, coffee prices had reached their highest level in more than a decade
after a period of increasing agricultural commodity prices that began in 2006 (FAO 2009). While
coffee prices leveled out for a few years, in May 2011, the C-Price of coffee had hit a 34-year
high, trading as high as US $3.09/lb. (FTRN 2013; Investing.com 2017). The C-Price of coffee
during my research fluctuated from a low of approximately $0.97/lb. to just over $3.09/lb. This
price range is significantly higher than the C-Price of coffee during the coffee crisis. Due to their
participation in Fair Trade, the farmers always receive at least the floor price of coffee sold as
Fair Trade and a $0.20 price premium above the C-Price when it rises above the Fair Trade floor
price.
My research indicates that farmers at COOPFAM are pleased with the economic benefits
provided by Fair Trade. The relatively high C-Price of coffee leading to a higher floor price for

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coffee certainly may have played a role in their satisfaction. COOPFAM has consistently been
able to sell all of their export-quality coffee at the Fair Trade premium price. However, not all
the coffee produced at the cooperative meets the high standards necessary for export. The coffee
that cannot be exported is sold for a significantly lower price within Brazil.
Some farmers at COOPFAM expressed discontent with their earnings in 2008 and 2009
because some of the money they received for their coffee was pre-financed. While this is
typically viewed as a positive benefit of Fair Trade, the strengthening of the dollar at that time as
compared to the Brazilian Real meant that the farmers could have earned more Reais per sack of
coffee if they would have sold it later rather than accepting the pre-financing when the value of
the dollar was lower.

A. Fair Trade Minimum Price and Premium
Fair Trade is often lauded for offering producers a price premium for their products to
help account for volatility in the free market. In the case of Fair Trade coffee, this includes floor
prices established for Fair Trade certified and dual certified Fair Trade and organic coffee. Over
the course of time, the floor price has increased. However, these increases have been criticized as
being too infrequent and not substantial enough.
In March of 2011, FLO increased the Fair Trade premium to address farmers and
activists critiques that the price was too low. The effort also was an attempt to incentivize
participation in organic production at a time when the C-Price of coffee was soaring to historic
highs. Before the shift, the floor price for washed Arabic coffee went from $1.25/lb. to $1.40/lb.
also, from $1.20/lb. to $1.35/lb. for Arabica Naturals (like those produced at COOPFAM).

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Moreover, the organic differential increased from 20 cents/lb. to 30 cents/lb., and the Fairtrade
Social Development Premium increased from 10 cents/lb. to 20 cents/lb. (FLO 2011b).
Before Fair Trade and organic certification farmers at COOPFAM earned much less for
their coffee. Luis Carlos explained that he used to earn US$80.00/60kg sack of coffee before Fair
Trade, but in 2009 earned more in the range of US$200.00/sack for dual certified organic and
Fair Trade coffee. The price that COOPFAM farmers received for their coffee varied
considerably over the course of the research period due to the quality of coffee they produced
and global economic factors like fluctuating commodity markets and the changing value of the
dollar. In 2009, Luis Adauto Oliviera, COOPFAM’s president at the time, said that farmers
selling their coffee from the 2008 and 2009 harvests earned between $R500,00 - $R550,00 per
60kg sack of dual organic and Fair Trade certified coffee. They earned $R300,00 - $R330,00 per
60kg sack of Fair Trade certified coffee, and $R220,00 - R$230,00 per 60kg sack of residual
coffee sold domestically that did not meet the minimum export quality standards. The much
lower domestic prices, illustrate that investments in quality are essential to gain access to the
higher prices provided by Fair Trade and organic coffee markets.
A 2007 study done at COOPFAM and a neighboring cooperative in Poço Fundo found
that organic and Fair Trade coffee production provided farmers with 48% higher price premiums
per 60 kg bag than conventional coffee (Nordlund and Egelyng 2008). One of the common
critiques of more environmentally sustainable practices in coffee is that yield declines without
traditional inputs and as such farmers earn less for their coffee. The 2007 study found that
average production of organic and Fair Trade certified coffee was 25 bags per hectare versus 30
bags per hectare for conventional production. However, Fair Trade and organic producers still

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had 23% more income for their coffee from the 2006 harvest because of the price differential
(Nordlund and Egelyng 2008).
In the 2008 harvest, Luis Adauto Oliviera explained that the cooperative had 38 shipping
containers of export quality coffee to sell. 2008 was a bumper crop year for coffee at COOPFAM
with production amounts of around 20,000 sacks, or approximately 1,200,000 kilograms of
export quality green coffee beans. The cooperative sells 100% of their export quality coffee as
Fair Trade certified, About 20-30% of total production does not meet export quality standards
and is sold for a lower price on the domestic market. Of the 38 shipping containers of coffee
from the 2008 harvest, 22 containers or 58% were Fair Trade certified, and 16 containers or 42%
were dual organic, and Fair Trade certified.
Companies that buy COOPFAM’s Fair Trade and organic coffee often pay a quality
premium on top of the standard Fair Trade and organic premiums. In 2009, many companies that
purchased COOPFAM coffee (from the 2008 and 2009 harvests) paid upwards of $2.00/lb., well
above the minimum price for Fair Trade and organic coffee at the time. Some studies have
indicated that quality premiums for coffee may be more valuable, at least regarding the price per
pound of coffee, than the premiums from different certifications like organic and Fair Trade
(Giovanucci 2007; Liu 2008; OECD 2003).
In 2008, the cooperative failed to sell all its export quality coffee at the Fair Trade
premium price due to especially high production and slightly sluggish sales. The cooperative
held onto this coffee rather than selling it at a rate below the Fair Trade premium price,
something other cooperatives have done in similar situations. Luis Adauto Oliviera, upon his
returned from the Specialty Coffee Association of America Expo in Atlanta in the spring of

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2009, expressed dismay at other cooperatives that decided to sell their coffee below the Fair
Trade price.

B. Investing in Quality
You’ve got to spend money to make money. That old cliché rings true in the case
of COOPFAM. In 2007, COOPFAM purchased an old Danone yogurt facility at the edge
of town. They repurposed the offices for the cooperative administration and break room,
and renovated the old milk warehouse into a new secondary processing mill, or
rebeneficio, for their coffee. A combination of funds from the cooperative’s social
development premium, grants from Fair Trade certifiers like Fair Trade USA, and loans
from Banco do Brazil, and funds from Walmart supported this investment. The
rebeneficio would soon house six machines dedicated to the selection and segregation of
high-quality coffee beans.
Coffee production and processing at COOPFAM is science-based and
technologically intensive. As discussed in Chapter Five, the cooperative invests in
training and technology to ensure the inherent coffee quality of the coffee beans on the
bush, and protect them from degradation on the drying patio. In this next phase, the
cooperative’s capital investment in the machines in the rebeneficio ensures that all of
those efforts pay off by sorting out impurities and segregating inferior coffee beans from
superior ones.
My first visit to the rebeneficio in 2009 started after enjoying a tiny cup of extra
hot and extra sweet coffee with the cooperative’s secretaries as we waited for the Luis
Adauto, to arrive. Cooperative business often starts on the late side since the leaders of

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the organization are also full-time farmers who rise early to first tend to their families,
farms, and livestock before heading into town. On this day, we headed to the rebeneficio
around a quarter to 9:00 am.
The remodeled old milk warehouse holds six massive machines to process and
sort the coffee by quality. When a farmer has a sufficient amount of dried and hulled
coffee beans, they take it to this warehouse, the cooperative’s rebeneficio. Farmers
segregate their own organic versus conventional coffee on their farms and their drying
patios called terreiros. Many farmers also separate the coffee they produce that comes
from different areas of their farm since quality can be improved or hindered by factors
such as altitude, soil quality or rainfall. The farmers direct the staff of the rebeneficio to
process one lot of coffee at a time. If they are processing organic coffee they have to run
one 60kg bag of coffee through the machines to clean them, this bag of coffee then must
be sold as Fair Trade only and not organic. Next all of the bags of coffee in a particular
lot are poured into a hopper, powered by pneumatic pressure, which feeds the green
beans into the first of the six sorting machines.
The first machine uses forced air to sift out the impurities like dirt, rocks, leaves
and sticks out of the lots of coffee beans. From there the now clean lot of coffee moves to
the second machine that uses vibration to separate the coffee beans by screen size and
then shake them out the proper shoots labeled by size. For coffee, size does matter. The
largest beans, those between screen sizes 16-18 are export-quality. Those below screen
size 15 will be separated out and used for sale within Brazil. From here the particular lot
of coffee is split in two, one with the larger export quality beans for the international
specialty coffee market, and the other with the smaller beans for the domestic market.

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The larger export quality beans continue their journey through the rebeneficio.
The third machine in the rebeneficio sorts the coffee beans by weight. Weighing the
beans helps to sort out those beans that are broken or too light because they are not
mature enough. The beans that still meet the quality standards are sent on to the final, and
most high-tech sorting machine. The fourth machine uses a fiber optic eye and ultraviolet
spectroscopy to “see” the color and chemical composition of the coffee. This machine
separates the beans by various qualities. Bad beans that have quality defects such as
mildew, spots, or are black are sorted out, and the best beans are set aside to fetch a
higher price. Our tour guide, and the rebeneficio’s manager, Marcel mentioned that
certain companies like Fox Coffee only take the very best quality coffee. So they can
separate out this superior coffee into micro-lots for their most discerning clients.
The segregated coffee of any one lot, or a micro-lot, is then poured into a big
hopper to be weighed by the fifth machine and poured into perfect 60kg coffee sacks. A
sample from each export quality lot is taken and placed in a small metal container so that
coffee can be tasted by the cooperative’s Q-Grader and by buyers that visit the
cooperative. The next step for the 60kg bags of coffee is much lower tech than the
previous ones. Each sack of coffee is sewn shut with a vintage sewing machine from
1976. Electricity powers all the machines in the rebeneficio and the tubes that transport
the coffee are pneumatic. Large “lungs” are used as exhausts, and a big compressor in the
back of the rebeneficio is the last machine that keeps the whole process moving along.
The walls of the cupping lab are lined with metal cans full of export-quality
coffee samples. The cupping lab is where science meets art in the determination of coffee
quality. Much like wine tasting, coffee cupping is a ritual where technique, natural

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ability, and experience pay off. Maikel Garrone Nery is COOPFAM’s coffee Q-Grader.
He completed training to learn how to properly roast, grind, and brew small batches of
coffee to “cup” and categorize by color, smell, and taste. Coffee beans from one of the
many sample cans are roasted just prior to cupping since oxidation causes the coffee
beans to lose their peak freshness once they are roasted. Accurate cupping requires a light
roast and a rough grind. The coffee grounds are placed into small cups on the table.
Filtered water is boiled and poured over the coffee, and the grounds sink to the bottom of
the cup. After about ten minutes Maikel removes the foam from each cup and uses a
spoon to slurp the coffee. Slurping aerates the coffee to maximize its attributes. The
coffee then is swished around in the mouth and over the tongue, and then spit out into
the spittoon.
My first time cupping coffee was during this visit in early 2009, and it is not
something that you can be bashful about. You must aerate the coffee to taste its flavor
variations, so slurping is necessary. While I could taste strong notes such as chocolate or
wine, experts like Maikel and many coffee buyers who visit the cooperative can detect
more subtle flavors and have the background knowledge to know whether a flavor is
desirable or if it is indicative of a defect like fermentation. No machine can measure this
level of detail. It is the human resource investment that the cooperative makes that
differentiates their coffee down to this fine level — an investment that pays off for
COOPFAM when farmers sell their lots of superior coffee above the Fair Trade and
organic floor price. Some farmers at COOPFAM have even received awards for their
coffee quality. Since the cooperative can segregate coffee by quality, micro-lots of

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exceptionally good coffee fetch a much higher price than a typical lot of export quality
coffee.

C. Pre-financing
In the literature on Fair Trade coffee production access to pre-finance for coffee
production is often cited as one of the most significant benefits for participating farmers. Under
the principles of Fair Trade coffee buyers are required to offer pre-financing to the farmers and
cooperatives. However, at times the cooperative either does not request pre-financing or buyers
do not provide it to them. Third party organizations like Root Capital help small coffee buyers
keep up their obligation to provide pre-financing by working with them to provide loans. At
COOPFAM one of the buyers, who uses Root Capital’s services is Thanksgiving Coffee. In
2009, the then president of COOPFAM, Adauto Oliviera, told Ben Corey-Moran from
Thanksgiving Coffee that pre-financing was the biggest challenge they were facing that season.
Adauto further explained that some buyers were more flexible than others. For example, Adauto
could negotiate with some buyers for things like pre-financing, like Taylors of Harrogate who
offered to pre-finance several containers worth of coffee each year, while other buyers, even very
large ones like Dunkin Donuts would not offer pre-financing. The price they offered was their
bottom line, and there was no negotiating.
Pre-financing has been characterized as a benefit of Fair Trade that does not have any
obvious drawbacks for farmers or cooperatives. However, that is a simplistic explanation that
does not consider that pre-financed resources can be impacted by outside factors like global
economic changes over time, like currency values or commodity prices. In 2008, at the
beginning of the pre-finance period, the value of the US Dollar was low. By the spring of 2009,

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the value of the dollar had risen significantly, and those farmers that had been paid for their
coffee through pre-financing earned much less than their peers who waited for payment, once
their earnings in dollars were converted to Brazilian Reais. So although the farmers might have
both earned US$2.00/lb. of coffee those farmers paid later earned more Reais/lb. because of the
currency fluctuation over this time period. Farmers found this hard to understand because of the
global economic factors that were impacting the amount of money they took home. Moreover,
commodity prices often have an inverse relationship with the value of the dollar, for example,
when the dollar is high the value of commodities, such as coffee fall (Kowalski 2016). This can
be problematic for the farmers if they sell coffee at a time when the C-Price is high, but then the
dollar plummets by the time they receive their payment.

D. The C-Price of Coffee
Another global economic factor that impacts how much money farmers earn per pound of
coffee is the global commodity price or C-Price of coffee. The Fair Trade system provides a
floor for coffee prices but not a ceiling. Instead, Fair Trade certified farmers are supposed to earn
$0.20/lb. above the C-Price whenever the C-Price is higher than the Fair Trade floor price.
Despite floor prices and above C-Price premiums, market volatility still impacts Fair
Trade certified farmers, and their cooperatives in several ways. As mentioned earlier in this
chapter, sometimes farmers, like the Marcelío brothers, will opt to sell some of their coffee on
the spot when the C-Price is high. They do this to get paid immediately for their coffee rather
than waiting for payment to come through the cooperative after their coffee is sold to a buyer. So
while the price they ultimately receive may be lower, the shorter time to wait for payment may
be worth the decreased price. While this is not always a threat to the Fair Trade system, it can

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impact cooperatives if their supplies of quality coffee fall below the amount that their buyers
demand.
In 2009, the cooperative did not have any trouble meeting their contracts. The 2008
harvest was a bumper crop, which meant that the cooperative had several containers of
conventional Fair Trade coffee that had not yet been sold. The cooperative actively encouraged
farmers to get their organic certification at that time because the market for dual certified coffee
was stronger that the conventional Fair Trade market. In Brazil, the market for dual certified
organic and Fair Trade coffee was particularly strong because in 2009 there were only two
cooperatives with dual certification, COOPFAM and Coopervitae. Beyond problems with prefinancing, I discovered throughout my research period that other remuneration difficulties
occurred. Many farmers disclosed their frustrations with the cooperative. Many of their
complaints were tied to financial issues. Many farmers felt they had to wait a long time to get
paid for their coffee. This happens because the cooperative does not have enough liquid cash to
pay everyone on the spot. This lack of liquidity causes hardships for the farmers and makes
many angry. I spoke with farmers who waited many months and a few who waited almost a year
for full payment. This dissatisfaction prodded some farmers to organize against the cooperative
president. Moreover, a group of farmers were not happy with the way the Fair Trade premium
was spent. They felt more money should be going into social programs rather than infrastructure
programs like improving the rebeneficio and roasting and grinding facility. Several farmers
mentioned to me that they felt there was some favoritism in whose coffee was sold first and for
the best price. One example concerned a Japanese firm who bought only the president’s brother’s
coffee, which angered other farmers. Still, others complained their receipts were wrong and felt
they were still owed more money for their coffee than they received.

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E. Growing Competition in the Brazilian Market
In 2008, TransFair USA listed six coffee cooperatives in Brazil with Fair Trade
certification. Four of these – COOPFAM, Coopervitae, Coorpol, and Santana da Vargem – were
located in Sul de Minas. The other two were Coocafé, which has producers in both Minas Gerais
and Espírito Santo, and PRONOVA in Espírito Santo. COOPFAM was the first to receive Fair
Trade certification in 1997, followed by Santana da Vargem in 2003, Coocafé in 2005, and
Coorpol, Coopervitae, and PRONOVA all in 2006 (TransFair USA 2009). Today, there are ten
coffee cooperatives and sixteen associations certified with FLO (FLOCERT 2017). Moreover,
there are now two Fair Trade cooperatives in Poço Fundo, COOPFAM and COOCAMINAS.
This number of Fair Trade certified coffee cooperatives is in the mid-range for Latin America.
With the largest number of FLO certified coffee cooperatives in Peru (130) and smallest number
in Ecuador (1). See Table 7.

Table 7: Number of Fair Trade coffee producer organizations in Latin America.
Source: FLOCERT 2017
Country
Brazil
Bolivia
Columbia
Costa Rica
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Nicaragua
Peru

Number of Fair Trade Certified Coffee Producer Organizations
26
9
82
10
1
2
16
32
41
30
130

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In September of 2011, Fair Trade USA and FLO jointly announced that Fair Trade USA
was resigning its membership in FLO in December of that year. The split came about because of
Fair Trade USA’s decision to start certifying coffee plantations as Fair Trade certified,
something with which FLO did not agree. Since Fair Trade USA has the Fair Trade trademark
used in the United States on certified Fair Trade products, FLO quickly moved to form Fair
Trade North America to have an alternative Fair Trade trademark that still represented FLO’s
values of only certifying coffee produced by small-scale farmers. The first pilot coffee
plantations to receive certification from Fair Trade USA are located in Brazil and Columbia. At
the 2013 Specialty Coffee Association of America Event, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
confirmed to a small group of representatives from Brazilian Fair Trade certified cooperatives,
that they would begin purchasing Fair Trade coffee from these pilot plantations but would not
yet market it as Fair Trade certified. Farmers at this meeting expressed fear and a great deal of
uncertainty about this decision, especially since one of the pilot plantations would be in Minas
Gerais, Brazil, a state where many Fair Trade certified cooperatives, including COOPFAM, are
located. The cooperative members said that they felt powerless in the Fair Trade network
because they feared that the Fair Trade bodies, and their buyers, would eventually allow coffee
plantations to fully participate, and thus diminish small farmers' market share. In addition to the
potential market loss, the Brazilian farmers are especially worried that consumers will begin to
make the assumption that all Brazilian Fair Trade coffee was produced on plantations and would
choose not to purchase Fair Trade coffee from Brazil if they did not support the certification of

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plantations. Today, market and farm-level implications of this split and certification remain
unclear.
To buffer the farmers and cooperative from growing competition, COOPFAM has
diversified its business operations. Although there are many more producer organizations
certified now, COOPFAM is still the only Fair Trade certified cooperative in Brazil that is also a
coffee trader and exporter. The cooperative administrators and staff run all of the export
operations, and those additional savings remains in the cooperative rather than being paid to an
outside exporter. In 2010, COOPFAM further diversified their businesses by opening up their
roasting and packaging facility to roast, package and sell coffee within Brazil. In addition to
local sales, COOPFAM’s locally roasted Café Familiar was served at the 2014 World Cup, and
was purchased by the Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social e Combate à Fome for consumption
within their building in 2015.

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Chapter Seven: Summary and Conclusion

I. Summary and Conclusion
In this dissertation, I examined a series of research questions related to the fairness of the
Fair Trade system. Since fair is a subjective term, I defined a fair system in the introduction of
this dissertation as one that has measurable positive social, economic, or environmental benefits
for farmers. Furthermore, these impacts should be equitably shared regardless of factors such as
gender, race, age, marital status, or ability. These positive impacts must also outweigh potential
negative aspects of the system such as additional labor burdens to meet the standards. A fair
system also allows for constructive discourse and democratic change of the systems by all actors
in it. Finally, all of the actors engaged with the system must perceive it as fair.
To address how “fair” farmers at COOPFAM think Fair Trade is, I explored the
economic, social and environmental benefits that farmers at COOPFAM identify. I looked at
how conceptions of “fairness” were constructed and contested by both men and women in the
home, on the farm, and at the cooperative levels. And, what changes, if any, would they like to
see to make Fair Trade more equitable. I analyzed the gendered social and economic impacts of
Fair Trade coffee production at the household, farm, and cooperative levels. I explored how well
the gender-based principles of Fair Trade organizations translate to the social reality of coffee
farmers. And I examined whether or not women and men exert differential control over
resources and labor arrangements, and whether control over labor and resources has changed
since the cooperative became Fair Trade-certified. I conducted the gendered analysis to see
whether or not the identified gendered impacts of Fair Trade differentially affect men and
women’s discourses of “fairness” and perceptions of Fair Trade.

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It was necessary to take a nuanced look at the various pros and cons of the Fair Trade
system, to analyze its fairness. Much of the existing social science literature on the Fair Trade
system is highly critical of its impacts. While some of those same critiques are relevant for the
farmers and cooperative generally at COOPFAM, there are also significant benefits that the
farmers themselves identify about participating in these systems. These advantages, while
sometimes identified in the literature on Fair Trade, can become lost in the meta-analysis of the
Fair Trade system. Here, I attempt to put the benefits of the system into context with the critiques
levied by academics, activists, and farmers themselves.
It is also important to reiterate that the production system at COOPFAM is quite different
from other Fair Trade production systems in the literature. Farmers at COOPFAM produce much
more coffee per hectare of land than their peers in other Latin American Fair Trade coffee
cooperatives. This has largely to do with the fact that the coffee in Brazil is grown in full
sunlight, rather than shade-grown. Moreover, the farmers at COOPFAM engage in a very active
form of organic and Fair Trade production where they add tons of natural fertilizers to their
groves to enhance production. This is in contrast to many Fair Trade and organic coffee systems
where coffee production is de facto organic because input such as pesticides and fertilizers are
simply not used in the coffee groves. In addition to higher yields, farm size in coffee production
is somewhat bigger for COOPFAM farmers than other Fair Trade certified farmers noted in the
literature. Finally, the processing system employed in Brazil in general and COOPFAM
specifically is natural or dry processing; where coffee is dried in its cherry. This process only
works well in drier climates with large amounts of sun during the harvest. It also requires a
tremendous amount of work on the coffee drying patios to ensure that the cherries do not
ferment. This system is very different from the wet or washed processing that is common in

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Mexico and Central America. In this system, the outside four layers of the coffee cherry are
removed and washed off the beans. They are still dried on patios but because much of the
moisture is removed with the fruit, the beans dry much faster.
The speciation of coffee by quality, production methods, and moral value has been a
dominant paradigm in the coffee market for several decades. Twenty years ago, Roseberry
(1996) wrote of the Rise of Yuppie Coffee and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,
since then the consumer demands of coffee drinkers have continued to become more and more
differentiated through increasing use of certification systems, differentiation by points of origin,
production and processing methods, and quality standards. As discussed in Chapter Five,
meeting only one of the three standards presented here — Fair Trade, organic or quality — is not
sufficient for the farmers to gain the degree of market access they need to sustain their families
through coffee production. To address my research question on how “fair” Fair Trade coffee is, it
was necessary to look not only at the Fair Trade standards but also to examine the growing
quality exigencies of the export market. My research illustrates the challenge of teasing apart the
standards and requirements of each of these three production paradigms and ranking their
importance for farmers. Farmers gain access to the market and the non-economic benefits of Fair
Trade and organic production through certification, but they cannot sell their coffee at the Fair
Trade price unless it is high enough quality for the export market.
The increasing focus on producing very high-quality coffee with one or more
certifications to meet consumer demands has had gendered impacts regarding farming family
labor. Farmers generally must spend more time and resources to tend to their coffee on the farm,
the drying patio, and in the rebeneficio to meet quality and environmental standards. In farming
families with at least one able-bodied adult man and woman this increased labor has gender-

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specific impacts on both partners. For men, more labor is expended to care for the soil, fertilize
the coffee plants, manage weeds without the use of herbicides, and selectively harvest the coffee.
For women, in this family dynamic, their time working in the fields during the harvest is
curtailed due to the work needed on the terreiro to properly dry the coffee by turning it on an
hourly basis each day, over the three to four months of the harvest cycle. These women
undertake this additional work, along with their other regular domestic, food production and care
taking activities. For farmers and families that do not fit a traditional family structure, the
increased workload is borne by a man or woman farmer alone. Or he or she must employ outside
workers to complete all the required tasks to produce high-quality, certified coffee. If it is not
possible to do all of the work needed for high-quality coffee production the farmer’s portion of
coffee that can be sold on the export market is diminished. This increased workload can make it
especially challenging for poorer farmers, particularly single women or widows, to reap the
economic benefits offered by the Fair Trade, organic and specialty coffee systems. Making these
systems much less fair for families, without several able-bodied adults who can share in the
increased work load.
The quality exigencies of the market can also increase the costs of production for the
cooperative and farmers. For example, there are increased demands on the cooperative to provide
quality training, and on farmers to continuously hone their production methods and practices.
Moreover, there are financial expenses borne by farmers associated with buying organic inputs to
nourish the plants, and costs incurred by the cooperative to provide high-tech sorting machinery
and skilled coffee Q-Graders in the rebeneficio. On the other hand, many of the farmers see these
activities as an investment; they appreciate the training and the increasing professionalization of

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their craft. They also enjoy the higher prices they earn for their coffee because of the price
premium for high-quality coffee.
The professionalization of coffee production at COOPFAM has occurred in within the
cooperative offices, on the farms and on the terreiros. This professionalization of production is
gendered across these spaces, with most of the benefits of professionalization going to men in the
cooperative. At COOPFAM most of the cooperative administrators and association directors are
men. During the research period, only three women were board members (two for the association
in Poço Fundo, and one on the cooperative board) involved with the professional business
operations of the cooperative, as a Fair Trade coffee selling, roasting, and exporting entity. Due
to the division on labor on farms, men typically work with the cooperative’s agronomists or other
technicians who help them improve their production system. As such, the professionalization of
coffee production on the farms has largely benefitted men. There is an exception to this though
on the terreiro, which at COOPFAM, is a feminine sphere. The cooperative has invested a large
amount of resources on training farmers how to tend to coffee on their drying patios. The
training programs that they hold are targeted to the women of COOPFAM because they are
usually the ones to tend to the coffee on the terreiros. Unfortunately, this means that most
women at COOPFAM only have one realm within coffee production where they can become
professionalized. The cooperative and those organizations who support the professionalization of
Fair Trade farming should redouble their efforts to ensure that these valuable sets of skills are
offered to women and that women’s participation is both encouraged and enabled by offering
transportation and childcare to women at COOPFAM so that they can participate.
Myriad outside factors inform the effects of certification systems such as Fair Trade and
organic. These defining factors include the historical contexts, which shaped the local

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agricultural landscape, global economic factors like currency values and commodity markets,
and the shared values of environmental stewardship and democracy that the founders of
COOPFAM instilled into the cooperative’s organizational culture. The farmers at COOPFAM
are proud of the work they do to protect the environment and provide a quality product. This
pride increases their satisfaction with their work and increases their likelihood to keep investing
in quality and environmental protection.
Another aspect of fairness that this dissertation explores includes the numerous power
dynamics in play at the local, national, and international levels in the Fair Trade and organic
coffee systems. Actions at each of these levels impact the lives small-scale coffee farmers at
COOPFAM. Due to my use of a feminist political ecology approach, I found it necessary to
explore the historical, political, economic, and environmental context that shape the daily lives of
farming families.
In Chapters Three and Six, I examined how global coffee markets have been managed to
influence both the price and supply of coffee and increase demand through marketing efforts.
Fair Trade and organic coffee production could be characterized as the next generation of global
coffee valorization schemes that combines both the price setting aspect formerly controlled by
the State, and marketing efforts often led by businesses. As described in Chapter Three, Brazil
has a very long history of intervening in the market to influence the price of coffee. This history
begins with the use of slaves to produce coffee in the late eighteenth century and evolution to the
colonato system and sharecropping after slavery’s abolition, and finally the move to wage labor
and increasing smallholder production in the 1960s. In addition to supporting various labor
schemes, Brazil on its own or in partnership with other nations has engaged in various
valorization schemes to control the supply of coffee on the market and set prices for the

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commodity. Traditional valorization schemes on the global level also influenced the price of
coffee on until 1989, when the International Coffee Agreement collapsed. Since then, coffee
producers and their advocates have sought out alternative paradigm such as Fair Trade to set
minimum prices for coffee and create a differentiated market for coffee produced on small-scale
farms.
As Fair Trade continues to evolve and new initiatives develop it will be critical to explore
how these new developments impact Fair Trade producers at COOPFAM. For example, at the
time of this study it was unclear what effects Fair Trade USA’s certification of coffee plantations
at Fair Trade would have in the marketplace for Brazilian Fair Trade coffee. As discussed in
Chapters Two and Six, Fair Trade coffee producers all over the world, perhaps especially those
in Brazil had numerous anxieties about this new certification paradigm. Farmer and cooperative
administrators at COOPFAM and their peers in other Brazilian Fair Trade cooperatives worry
that their regular buyers like Green Mountain Coffee Roasters would begin to buy more and
more Fair Trade coffee from the pilot plantations and the smaller Brazilian producers would lose
market share. They are also concerned that consumers in the US will hear about the Brazilian
Fair Trade certified plantations and begin to associate all Brazilian Fair Trade coffee with the
plantations. They thought that this could lead to consumers deciding to purchase Fair Trade
coffee from other countries if they disagreed with the certification of plantations. However, one
possible silver lining for these farmers is FLO’s efforts to establish an alternative Fair Trade
trademark, Fair Trade North America. Future studies at COOPFAM or other Brazilian Fair Trade
coffee cooperatives should explore the effects of these changes on the small-scale farmers as
well as the impacts on the farmworkers on the newly certified cooperatives.

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My research at COOPFAM shows that Fair Trade and organic certification offer farmers
a better price than the commodity price their coffee would fetch on the free market. While
farmers earn more for their certified coffee, Chapter Four shows us that coffee production alone
is still not enough to sustain farming families. However, farmers at COOPFAM have a level of
income and food security not reported elsewhere in the literature on Fair Trade coffee growers.
To achieve this security, families engage in diverse livelihood strategies including producing
food for their own consumption, growing agricultural products including non-export quality
coffee for the local market, and coupling coffee production with off-farm paid labor. Moreover,
farmers at COOPFAM earn a high price per pound of coffee due intelligent investments in labor
and resources expended to produce large quantities of very high-quality coffee. These efforts
ensure the livelihood of COOPFAM families.
In comparison, the farmers at COOPFAM generally earn more than their Fair Tradecertified peers in other countries. This relates to the fact that COOPFAM farmers produce much
more coffee per hectare of land, than their peers in other Latin American countries. Furthermore,
they earn quality premiums for their coffee on a regular basis that far exceed the Fair Trade and
organic premiums on their own. However, Fair Trade is not equally fair for all farmers at
COOPFAM. Farmers like the Marcílio brothers discussed in Chapter Six, who live far away
from the cooperative headquarters, are not able to take advantage of many of the local benefits
COOPFAM offers to farmers who live near Poço Fundo. These farmers do not interact with
other actors in the supply chain as frequently, as such their ideas and needs are not expressed
directly to coffee buyers or certifiers when they visit. Another factor that makes Fair Trade less
fair is related to farmers’ marital status. Farmers who are single or widowed have a harder time
producing large quantities of high-quality coffee. This applies in particular to single women and

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widows. Moreover, women at COOPFAM, regardless of marital status, have a triple burden of
work. This includes coffee production, subsistence production, and unremunerated care for
family, home, and community.
In this dissertation, I identify the assets that COOPFAM leveraged to gain access to the
Fair Trade and organic systems. The literature on these systems shows that there are numerous
barriers to participation that farmers and cooperatives must first overcome to access the benefits.
COOPFAM had to overcome obstacles to certification that broadly fit into three categories:
capacity related barriers; barriers related to democratic decision-making; and barriers
encountered in meeting Fair Trade standards. The assets they employed include the cooperative’s
origin via the Comissão Pastoral da Terra movement, and working with nongovernmental and
governmental entities to strengthen the organization. In addition, the farmers’ shared values of
environmental stewardship provided the cultural foundation upon which the cooperative was
built. Farmers’ willingness to learn organic production practices stemmed from their love for
agriculture and the environment, all of which helped push them to invest in these practices even
though they are more labor intensive than conventional production.
In addition to the gendered division of labor on the coffee farms and in the homes, there
are gendered differences in who gets to make certain types of decisions in the home, on the farm
and in the cooperative. Women are less likely than men to participate in cooperative activities
like meetings and trainings. There is a small group of women, many of who participate in the
MOBI group, who are an exception to this and do often participate in cooperative activities.
Many women explain that they cannot attend these meetings because they lack transportation or
childcare. As such, men in the cooperative take part in more of the official democratic decision
making at these cooperative functions. In addition to their presence at these official meeting men

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also generally have more contact with cooperative administrators because they deliver the coffee
to the cooperative after it is processed. They also typically list the male farmers on the
cooperative member register when a married couple joins, however there are exceptions to this
rule. This also does not mean that women who are not listed on the registrar cannot vote or hold
leadership positions within the cooperative, since the cooperative and association in Poço
Fundo’s last three female board members were not listed on this registrar. Farming families
suggest that they make financial decisions together in most cases, but when probed more deeply
men tend to make decisions on how to spend resources on the farm while women make more
decisions about how resources should be spent within the home. All of these factors suggest that
women have less access to decision making mechanisms regarding the cooperative and coffee
production activities on the farm at COOPFAM.
In the end, the farmers, cooperative and surrounding community have been able to take
advantage of many social and economic benefits as a direct result of Fair Trade participation; or
as a consequence of the increased access to networks opened up by the Fair Trade and organic
systems. These benefits ranged from increased educational opportunities for farmers and their
children, medical and dental programs that reduced costs for farmers, and investments on farms
such as revolving loans to build drying patios to improve coffee quality.
My research also highlights some of the financial benefits to participation in these
systems. Some of these benefits are discussed in the literature and are also identified in this
dissertation. These include the minimum floor price for Fair Trade coffee and organic premium,
the social development premium, and pre-financing from purchasers. However, additional
economic benefits, not often discussed in the literature, are very apparent at COOPFAM. These
include price premiums associated with the high-quality standards that are necessary to gain

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market access. These quality premiums are encouraged and subsidized through training programs
supported by cooperatives, Fair Trade organizations, non-governmental organizations, and even
governmental bodies. COOPFAM sought out and provided continuing education for farmers.
This openness to intellectual and technical improvement in coffee production has paid off.
Moreover, COOPFAM and individual farmers made wise investments in technology. They
leveraged their limited resources and successfully secured funds from diverse and unique
funding agencies including coffee buyers, banks, and Fair Trade certification organizations. They
wisely invested this capital in intensive projects such as the roasting and packaging facility.
Finally, investment in human resources such as a Q-Grader (Quality Grader) for the cooperative
and agronomists on staff to help farmers meet the requisite environmental and quality standards
secures their strength in a marketplace with ever higher quality standards and complicated
environmental rules.
My analysis shows that one of the most important aspects of Fair Trade is that it provides
farmers and COOPFAM an economic safety net within which they can experiment with
emerging production systems, technological innovations, and new certifications. This
experimentation allows them to test out new systems to see if they will garner more economic
security. It also allows them to safely fail in some of their experiments without jeopardizing their
livelihoods.
One example that did fail was the Café Femenino program. It illustrates a central tension
that occurs when certification systems scale up to apply global standards to producers with very
different production systems and cultures. I argue that certification systems that are set up in a
very specific context are difficult to apply broadly. In doing so they may miss the mark, in this
case, they excluded some of the most vulnerable women in the cooperative.

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The economic benefits of higher prices can be both tempered or expanded by global
economic factors such as commodity prices, currency values, and a changing global Fair Trade
system. Farmers face increasing competition from a growing number of Brazilian Fair Trade
cooperatives as well as increasing Fair Trade participation in other countries. In addition to this,
there is a large amount of anxiety among Fair Trade farmers in Brazil as a result of the recent
certification of Brazilian coffee plantations. All of these factors impact the fairness of Fair Trade
for the farmers and remain largely outside of their control. However, being the first Fair Trade
certified coffee cooperative in Brazil and one of the only ones there with organic certification is a
profound advantage for COOPFAM.
This analysis of Fair Trade and organic coffee’s impact is significant because it is
unlikely that Brazil or various actors on the global stage will move to a large amount of
intervention in the coffee market anytime soon. Systems such as Fair Trade can buffet against
many free market forces that have decimated agricultural commodity prices and left farming
families vulnerable. However, this dissertation also demonstrates that these systems work best
when they are implemented in concert with governmental programs that provide a social safety
net, such as universal healthcare and education, and rural development programs that provide
resources to farmers and access to internal markets. In addition to this, it is clear that commodity
production alone is rarely enough to sustain families. To sustain themselves, small-scale farmers
must turn to additional livelihood strategies while continuously working to improve the quality
of their product.
The complexity of the Fair Trade system may, in the end, be what allows it to work for
farmers in the long term. It is not a panacea that by itself can lift farmers out of poverty. Instead,
it is one part of a complex production system that allows small-scale farmers to access global

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coffee markets and leverage social resources offered by other actors in the Fair Trade supply
chain. In the case of COOPFAM, Fair Trade coffee production is one of the fairest options
available to them. However, it is not equally beneficial to all farmers or members of their
families. It is my hope that by highlighting both the benefits and challenges of the system that
actors all along the Fair Trade supply chain can learn what works well for farmers like those at
COOPFAM, and what should still be improved to make Fair Trade truly fair.

II. How To Make Fair Trade Fairer?
I argue that Fair Trade has been a successful system for farming families at COOPFAM.
However, there are also changes that can be made to the system to make it fairer. In Chapter Six,
I discussed some of the global market factors like fluctuating commodity prices and currency
values that impact the take home income of Fair Trade farmers. While Fair Trade provides a
buffer against the most volatile market swings, these predictable and unpredictable swings do in
fact still affect farmers. A constellation of sustainable development paradigms, including microfinance, and complementary certifications such as organic, used in conjunction with Fair Trade,
can supplement its positive impacts on farmers (Stenzel 2013b). To take this recommendation
further, micro-finance organizations working with Fair Trade cooperatives could help protect
farmers from market fluctuations or currency swings by providing insurance for the farmers they
provide loans to. Coffee buyers could also work with farmers to provide this insurance and
perhaps share in any losses that farmers now absorb. In this way, the market risk that remains in
the Fair Trade system is shared across the supply chain, instead of being borne by the farmers
who have the smallest margins in their incomes.

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Some activists and scholars have suggested that further differentiation or levels of Fair
Trade might be beneficial, particularly for informed consumers who could select Fair Trade or
something stronger like “Fair Trade Gold” (Jaffee 2007:254). However, we must critically
evaluate how different levels of Fair Trade address consumers’ desires and the needs of farmers.
Others have suggested that newly emerging Fair Trade certifications like Fair For All and Small
Producers Symbol, and sister programs like Direct Trade might be less institutionalized and more
beneficial for farmers (Stenzel 2013a). For the farmers at COOPFAM, the proliferation of
standards is a double-edged sword. Take organic standards for example. COOPFAM farmers
have organic certification under Brazilian, North American, European, and Japanese standards.
The farmers often complained about the challenges of keeping these standards straight and the
fact that the transition times for the standards created in more temperate climates of North
America, Europe, and Japan did not take into account the faster rates of decomposition in the
sub-tropical regions of Brazil where coffee is grown. Rather than more differentiation, the
farmers at COOPFAM thought that more harmonization of the organic standards, in this case,
would help them.
In conjunction with harmonization, having a greater degree of flexibility within standards
would better serve farmers in different cultures and using different production systems. This is
especially true for newer certification systems. Emerging certification systems could exist in a
pilot phase for a period while their administrators discover how cultural differences affect
production practices, and how these might be different from those of producers they are more
familiar with. Through a participatory process, farmers, cooperatives, and certifiers could work
on a set of standards that work in the local context. Of course, some cornerstone standards should
remain the same across different locales, but others could have a degree of flexibility. In the case

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of Café Femenino, the women at COOPFAM and the Café Femenino staff might have been able
to negotiate a set of standards that would have truly empowered the women. This might have
included adjustments to the 100% women-produced standard that focused more on women being
empowered to make 100% of the decisions on how their coffee should be cultivated and
processed, and less on the physical labor of applying inputs and picking coffee. In effect, this
change would give women more power over their labor instead of adding an unsustainable
amount of work to their daily lives.
Furthermore, those setting Fair Trade and related standards should carefully review how
their standards affect the most vulnerable farmers. Vulnerable farmers like unmarried women,
widows, the ill, and elderly, would benefit from additional assistance from various actors in the
Fair Trade system. Fair Trade certifiers could run programs or provide additional financial
resources earmarked for different vulnerable populations within cooperatives. However, these
farmers are sometimes invisible to coffee buyers or certification representative (excluding
auditors) when they visit cooperatives. In the case of COOPFAM, farmers who were doing well,
who had model farms, were often those asked to host foreign visitors. Some of the poorer
farmers at COOPFAM complained that they never received foreign visitors and these visitors
needed to see poorer farmers as well as wealthier ones. At least in the case of COOPFAM, the
cooperative should refrain from only taking buyers and certification representatives to showcase
farms. It is critical to talk with the most vulnerable farmers to learn how to make Fair Trade
work better for them. Until we do this, the system will remain fairer for some farmers and not as
fair for others.

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