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Breaking the Chains: Coffee, Crisis, and Farmworker Struggle in Nicaragua

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  • Bradley R Wilson

    (Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University, 330 Brooks Hall, Morgantown, WV 26506-6300, USA)

Abstract
In the early 2000s the coffee crisis emerged as a central object of study for commodity chain scholars. In this paper I revisit the scene of the coffee crisis in Nicaragua to understand violent processes of devaluation and disinvestment that devastated the countryside for more than five years (2000–05). Employing a commodity disarticulations approach, I argue that conventional explanations of the coffee crisis as one of overproduction and devaluation generally failed to unravel the layered spatiality of dispossession that enables coffee chain formations. Digging below the surface text of the crisis narrative, I illustrate how the coffee crisis in the central highlands was exacerbated by an aggressive land grab by a consortium of agroindustrial capitalists called CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI that had dispossessed farmworkers of land rights and accumulated the spoils of the Sandinista-led agrarian reform over the previous decade. When CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI folded in 2000, an unemployed farmworkers movement surged to reclaim land promised to farmworkers in the popular revolution. Using this alternative reading of the crisis in Nicaragua, I aim to bring into focus the ongoing processes of dispossession that render coffee workers vulnerable to hunger, exploitation, and abuse.

Suggested Citation

  • Bradley R Wilson, 2013. "Breaking the Chains: Coffee, Crisis, and Farmworker Struggle in Nicaragua," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(11), pages 2592-2609, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:45:y:2013:i:11:p:2592-2609
    DOI: 10.1068/a46262
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Bacon, Christopher, 2005. "Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Can Fair Trade, Organic, and Specialty Coffees Reduce Small-Scale Farmer Vulnerability in Northern Nicaragua?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 497-511, March.
    2. Varangis, Panos & Siegel, Paul & Giovannucci, Daniele & Lewin, Bryan, 2003. "Dealing with the coffee crisis in Central America - impacts and strategies," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2993, The World Bank.
    3. Harvey, David, 2005. "The New Imperialism," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199278084.
    4. Sandy Brown, 2013. "One Hundred Years of Labor Control: Violence, Militancy, and the Fairtrade Banana Commodity Chain in Colombia," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(11), pages 2572-2591, November.
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    Cited by:

    1. Henry Wai-chung Yeung, 2015. "Regional development in the global economy: A dynamic perspective of strategic coupling in global production networks," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 7(1), pages 1-23, March.
    2. Eunyeong Song & Douglas R. Gress & Edo Andriesse, 2020. "Global Production Networks and (Distributional) Regional Development: The Cinnamon Industry in Karandeniya and Matale, Sri Lanka," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 15(2), pages 209-237, August.

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