The global coffee industry touches millions of lives around the world. In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, small farmers grow coffee to be sold to international markets. At the opposite end of the supply chain, coffee roasters purchase green coffee beans, roast them, and sell those beans to consumers in major markets like the United States, Jahpan, and Europe. In between, mills, exporters, importers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other public and private institutions influence how coffee is grown, processed, shipped, sold, and regulated.
The coffee industry supports people’s livelihoods around the world, but like other agricultural industries, it is fraught with social, economic, environmental, and political challenges. Most of these challenges manifest in coffee-producing countries. For example, traditional coffee forests in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia are losing their biodiversity due to pressures to expand coffee production and establish more sun coffee plantations—farming systems characterized by intensive agricultural practices, like heavy pesticide and fertilizer use, mechanization, and the destruction of rainforest canopies. Climate change is threatening the ability of growers to experience consistent harvests due to changing precipitation and temperature patterns. Moreover, many coffee growers and pickers continue to receive low wages due to volatile commodity market prices, inconsistent demand, and limited regulation of market dynamics.
Over the past twenty years, a variety of public and private initiatives have tried to address the challenges confronting the global coffee sector. These include Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) like Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, and Smithsonian Bird Friendly direct trade sourcing models that claim to provide higher price premiums to growers and more social, economically, and environmentally responsible sourcing practices and recently, efforts led by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) like Conservation International (CI) and the Global Coffee Platform (GCP) to build multi-stakeholder initiatives that leverage resources and help facilitate supply chain sustainability for the entire coffee sector.
Generally speaking, these initiatives are market-based approaches to sustainability that emerged alongside neoliberal economic policies in the early 1990s. In the coffee sector specifically, neoliberalism forced market deregulation and the dissolution of state oversight in coffee-producing countries around the world, opening the door for private stakeholders to take a leading role in governing supply chain dynamics through marketbased approaches to supply chain sustainability. Today, the majority of VSS and other private sustainability initiatives in the coffee sector—as well as other global commodity chains like bananas and chocolate represent market-based approaches to supply chain governance, a common affect of neoliberalism’s hollowing out of state regulation.
As these market-based initiatives have taken hold in the industry, “sustainability” has become a mobilizing buzzword in the global coffee industry. A 2016 report commissioned by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), the GCP, and the Sustainable Coffee Challenge (SCC) revealed that in 2015, for example, the global coffee industry spent an estimated $350 million U.S. dollars (USD) on sustainability initiatives in coffee-producing regions. These programs provided trainings related to climate smart agriculture and coffee lands regeneration, infrastructure development, financial management, and access to social programs like education and healthcare. In 2017, the SCA hosted its first sustainability conference, AVANCE, in Guatemala. This event brought together actors from across the industry to evaluate existing sustainability initiatives across the supply chain and discuss how these efforts could be scaled up to further address the human-environment challenges confronting the industry.
These efforts exemplify the sustainability efforts undertaken by major industry associations and companies; yet, a quick perusal of small specialty coffee business’ websites reveals that sustainability has also become a key a concern among smaller players in the industry. BeanFruit Coffee Company in Pearl, Mississippi states on their website, for example, “we understand that there are farms that don’t meet the criteria of other [sustainability] certifications but provide their workers with many benefits including fair wages. Our focus is sustainability not certifications.” Similarly, Corvus Coffee Roasters in Denver, Colorado writes, “the search for excellent coffee is the search for farmers who consistently produce quality coffee because of a strength in their character. We build relationships with these men and women, visit their farms, and invest in their success […]”
Countless small and medium-sized specialty coffee businesses promote similar messages and initiatives on their websites and packaging materials. They market business practices that improve grower livelihoods, protect areas of biodiversity in coffee producing regions, and produce higher quality, artisanal coffees. They advertise donations to non-profits, infrastructure investments in coffee-producing countries, seasonal purchasing of coffee beans, and long-standing relationships with growers in countries around the world. In the case of direct trade business models and firm-led development projects, many companies also subvert the accountability structures of certifications like Fairtrade and take the responsibility of finding solutions to social, economic, and environmental concerns into their own hands.
While corporations like Starbucks have highly visible sustainability commitments and have been researched and critiqued extensively, significantly less is known about the sustainability discourses and practices of smaller specialty coffee businesses. Because there is no centralized governance entity in the specialty coffee sector that regulates businesses practices, businesses are often able to develop, advertise, and pursue any number of social responsibility causes. While some of these efforts result in positive outcomes for some coffee producers, the paucity of regulations and guidelines means that small companies’ private initiatives may result in unintended consequences across the supply chain and derail coordinated industry-wide efforts to address lingering human-environment challenges. As efforts grow in the industry to integrate private firm-led initiatives and leverage resources like the estimated $350 million invested in sustainability in 2015, it is critically important to understand the role small businesses may play in moving the industry towards greater supply chain sustainability. This is especially true in the United States’ coffee market where small specialty coffee businesses with less than 3 locations dominate the specialty sector—accounting for 55% of all specialty coffee businesses.
In this qualitative research study, I build on existing scholarship about sustainability in the coffee sector and corporate social responsibility, examining how small specialty coffee roasting and importing companies in the United States represent themselves as bearers of morality and social good through discourses of partnership, responsibility, and sustainability. I consider how small companies’ social responsibility practices may contribute to industry wide calls to make coffee the first sustainable agricultural commodity in the world. Based on open-ended interviews with specialty coffee professionals and experts, and analyses of secondary materials, I illustrate how sustainability discourses create symbolic capital for coffee companies, yet fail to systematically address the human-environment challenges that persist in the industry. Through this critique, I “demystify such virtuous language” and elucidate the potential limitations of market-based solutions to social, economic, and environmental injustices. Building on this critique and institutional analyses of supply chain management, I also consider alternative avenues to achieve supply-chain sustainability, including greater institutional oversight, shared governance, and the emergence of multi-stakeholder initiatives that integrate public and private interests towards common sustainability goals.
While this research is fundamentally grounded in the specialty coffee sector, lessons from this research apply to other global commodities like bananas, cocoa and tequila. In these industries, too, private, market-based standard setting continues to regulate social, economic, and environmental market outcomes. These initiatives strive to fill in the regulatory shortfalls of state governance, yet as this research reveals, they often fail to systematically address social, economic, and environmental injustices. Thus, this research reiterates the limitations of private standard setting initiatives in global commodity chains, with an emphasis on small and medium sized enterprises. Moreover, I consider the evolution of institutions and governance in global commodity chains and the emerging movement towards multi-stakeholder initiatives and collective action. I argue that the specialty coffee sector may be approaching a turning point where networked governance structures may help mitigate the unintended consequences of private sustainability initiatives and bring centralized governance back into the process of regulating supply chain dynamics for social, economic, and environmental sustainability. I argue that by moving away from market-based standard-setting processes and towards networked governance, institutional regulation, and collective action; evolving institutional ecosystems to include regulatory trade associations and multi-stakeholder initiatives may help facilitate new trade environments and values that are better equipped to address the diverse human-environment challenges routinely confronted within global commodity chains.
Mr. Rows Namoura Coffee 
Virtuous Discourse in the Specialty Coffee Sector: How Social Responsibility Practices Fragment Pursuits for a Supply Chain
The global coffee industry touches millions of lives around the world. In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, small farmers grow coffee to be sold to international markets. At the opposite end of the supply chain, coffee roasters purchase green coffee beans, roast them, and sell those beans to consumers in major markets like the United States, Jahpan, and Europe. In between, mills, exporters, importers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other public and private institutions influence how coffee is grown, processed, shipped, sold, and regulated.
The coffee industry supports people’s livelihoods around the world, but like other agricultural industries, it is fraught with social, economic, environmental, and political challenges. Most of these challenges manifest in coffee-producing countries. For example, traditional coffee forests in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia are losing their biodiversity due to pressures to expand coffee production and establish more sun coffee plantations—farming systems characterized by intensive agricultural practices, like heavy pesticide and fertilizer use, mechanization, and the destruction of rainforest canopies. Climate change is threatening the ability of growers to experience consistent harvests due to changing precipitation and temperature patterns. Moreover, many coffee growers and pickers continue to receive low wages due to volatile commodity market prices, inconsistent demand, and limited regulation of market dynamics.
Over the past twenty years, a variety of public and private initiatives have tried to address the challenges confronting the global coffee sector. These include Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) like Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, and Smithsonian Bird Friendly direct trade sourcing models that claim to provide higher price premiums to growers and more social, economically, and environmentally responsible sourcing practices and recently, efforts led by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) like Conservation International (CI) and the Global Coffee Platform (GCP) to build multi-stakeholder initiatives that leverage resources and help facilitate supply chain sustainability for the entire coffee sector.
Generally speaking, these initiatives are market-based approaches to sustainability that emerged alongside neoliberal economic policies in the early 1990s. In the coffee sector specifically, neoliberalism forced market deregulation and the dissolution of state oversight in coffee-producing countries around the world, opening the door for private stakeholders to take a leading role in governing supply chain dynamics through marketbased approaches to supply chain sustainability. Today, the majority of VSS and other private sustainability initiatives in the coffee sector—as well as other global commodity chains like bananas and chocolate represent market-based approaches to supply chain governance, a common affect of neoliberalism’s hollowing out of state regulation.
As these market-based initiatives have taken hold in the industry, “sustainability” has become a mobilizing buzzword in the global coffee industry. A 2016 report commissioned by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), the GCP, and the Sustainable Coffee Challenge (SCC) revealed that in 2015, for example, the global coffee industry spent an estimated $350 million U.S. dollars (USD) on sustainability initiatives in coffee-producing regions. These programs provided trainings related to climate smart agriculture and coffee lands regeneration, infrastructure development, financial management, and access to social programs like education and healthcare. In 2017, the SCA hosted its first sustainability conference, AVANCE, in Guatemala. This event brought together actors from across the industry to evaluate existing sustainability initiatives across the supply chain and discuss how these efforts could be scaled up to further address the human-environment challenges confronting the industry.
These efforts exemplify the sustainability efforts undertaken by major industry associations and companies; yet, a quick perusal of small specialty coffee business’ websites reveals that sustainability has also become a key a concern among smaller players in the industry. BeanFruit Coffee Company in Pearl, Mississippi states on their website, for example, “we understand that there are farms that don’t meet the criteria of other [sustainability] certifications but provide their workers with many benefits including fair wages. Our focus is sustainability not certifications.” Similarly, Corvus Coffee Roasters in Denver, Colorado writes, “the search for excellent coffee is the search for farmers who consistently produce quality coffee because of a strength in their character. We build relationships with these men and women, visit their farms, and invest in their success […]”
Countless small and medium-sized specialty coffee businesses promote similar messages and initiatives on their websites and packaging materials. They market business practices that improve grower livelihoods, protect areas of biodiversity in coffee producing regions, and produce higher quality, artisanal coffees. They advertise donations to non-profits, infrastructure investments in coffee-producing countries, seasonal purchasing of coffee beans, and long-standing relationships with growers in countries around the world. In the case of direct trade business models and firm-led development projects, many companies also subvert the accountability structures of certifications like Fairtrade and take the responsibility of finding solutions to social, economic, and environmental concerns into their own hands.
While corporations like Starbucks have highly visible sustainability commitments and have been researched and critiqued extensively, significantly less is known about the sustainability discourses and practices of smaller specialty coffee businesses. Because there is no centralized governance entity in the specialty coffee sector that regulates businesses practices, businesses are often able to develop, advertise, and pursue any number of social responsibility causes. While some of these efforts result in positive outcomes for some coffee producers, the paucity of regulations and guidelines means that small companies’ private initiatives may result in unintended consequences across the supply chain and derail coordinated industry-wide efforts to address lingering human-environment challenges. As efforts grow in the industry to integrate private firm-led initiatives and leverage resources like the estimated $350 million invested in sustainability in 2015, it is critically important to understand the role small businesses may play in moving the industry towards greater supply chain sustainability. This is especially true in the United States’ coffee market where small specialty coffee businesses with less than 3 locations dominate the specialty sector—accounting for 55% of all specialty coffee businesses.
In this qualitative research study, I build on existing scholarship about sustainability in the coffee sector and corporate social responsibility, examining how small specialty coffee roasting and importing companies in the United States represent themselves as bearers of morality and social good through discourses of partnership, responsibility, and sustainability. I consider how small companies’ social responsibility practices may contribute to industry wide calls to make coffee the first sustainable agricultural commodity in the world. Based on open-ended interviews with specialty coffee professionals and experts, and analyses of secondary materials, I illustrate how sustainability discourses create symbolic capital for coffee companies, yet fail to systematically address the human-environment challenges that persist in the industry. Through this critique, I “demystify such virtuous language” and elucidate the potential limitations of market-based solutions to social, economic, and environmental injustices. Building on this critique and institutional analyses of supply chain management, I also consider alternative avenues to achieve supply-chain sustainability, including greater institutional oversight, shared governance, and the emergence of multi-stakeholder initiatives that integrate public and private interests towards common sustainability goals.
While this research is fundamentally grounded in the specialty coffee sector, lessons from this research apply to other global commodities like bananas, cocoa and tequila. In these industries, too, private, market-based standard setting continues to regulate social, economic, and environmental market outcomes. These initiatives strive to fill in the regulatory shortfalls of state governance, yet as this research reveals, they often fail to systematically address social, economic, and environmental injustices. Thus, this research reiterates the limitations of private standard setting initiatives in global commodity chains, with an emphasis on small and medium sized enterprises. Moreover, I consider the evolution of institutions and governance in global commodity chains and the emerging movement towards multi-stakeholder initiatives and collective action. I argue that the specialty coffee sector may be approaching a turning point where networked governance structures may help mitigate the unintended consequences of private sustainability initiatives and bring centralized governance back into the process of regulating supply chain dynamics for social, economic, and environmental sustainability. I argue that by moving away from market-based standard-setting processes and towards networked governance, institutional regulation, and collective action; evolving institutional ecosystems to include regulatory trade associations and multi-stakeholder initiatives may help facilitate new trade environments and values that are better equipped to address the diverse human-environment challenges routinely confronted within global commodity chains.
Jane H. Motsinger (2018) Virtuous Discourse in the Specialty Coffee Sector: How social Responsibility Practices Fragment Pursuits for a Supply Chain
Share this: