Brewing the Right Cup of Coffee
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- Published on Wednesday, 06 April 2016 23:45
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1243 .... April 7, 2016
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Brewing the Right Cup of Coffee
Gavin Fridell interviewed by Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete
Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities exported by the global South (seconded only by oil and illegal drugs), generating billions of dollars in corporate profit each year. And yet, despite the expansion and increased visibility of fair-trade coffee, the majority of the world's coffee families live in relative poverty. Gavin Fridell's recent book, Coffee (Polity, 2014), not only charts coffee's long and tortuous history of exploitation and colonialism, but endeavours to expose the culprit for such vast inequality.
Central to the book's arguments are Fridell's rejection of the contemporary fixation on "market-driven projects" as a solution to the problems of poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction associated with this tropical bean.... He builds this critique by asserting that the state and the market are inseparable and that "coffee statecraft," both good and bad, has been and continues to be central to the everyday operations of the coffee industry. Thus, even in an industry constrained by extreme market volatility and corporate oligarchy, Fridell asserts that the quest for more socially and ecologically just forms of coffee production cannot be resolved solely through market adjustments, but rather requires a greater push for "better coffee statecraft," guided by the history of gains and losses in the highly imperfect global coffee market.
