2015 Winner: The Social, Economic and Political Impacts of Direct Trade Coffee Production in Santa Barbara, Honduras

Project Information
The Social, Economic and Political Impacts of Direct Trade Coffee Production in Santa Barbara, Honduras
Social Sciences
Anthropology
This paper deals with the strenuous conundrum experienced by farmers in Honduras who desire to sell their specialty coffee at a higher-than-market-value price. With environmental factors and the natural risk of farming contributing to a lack of stability in developing countries, the question becomes whether Global Northern companies should assume that burden for their producers as they form businesses and cafes that rely on resource extraction from Global Southern locations. This North-South dynamic can be seen as mimetic to the top-down colonial relations that spawned the global coffee trade nearly five hundred years ago, and the "relationships" along the supply chain are thrown into an arena of consumer activism and inequalities that perpetuate this power differential. I explore Fair Trade and Direct Trade alternatives to the commercial trade of coffee, studying a new wave of businesses that are interested in simplifying this commodity chain and delivering justice to farmers, identifying the inevitable paradoxes that entails along the way.
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Students
  • Katherine Suzanne Slocum (Kresge)
Mentors