Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Based on a study of the high-end (‘Third Wave’) coffee market in the USA and on research conducted with Maya farmers in Guatemala, this article examines how economic gains are extracted by translating values across symbolic and material worlds. Drawing on anthropological understandings of value and the analytic tools of convention theory, I show how roasters, baristas and marketers have developed a new lexicon of quality for coffee, one tied to narratives of provenance and exclusivity that creates much of the value added in the Third Wave market. Based on fieldwork with Maya smallholders, I show how the conventions of the Third Wave coffee market—the ways that it defines and rewards quality—have unintended consequences for smallholding producers in places like Guatemala. These coffees tend to be grown at higher altitudes than standard beans, and it happens that Maya farmers in the highlands of Guatemala occupy some of the best land in the world for growing coffee. Indeed, their control of this terroir has brought an economic boom to a number of Maya communities in recent years. Yet, I show how the quality conventions of the Third Wave market disadvantage smallholding coffee farmers, who are heavily invested in land and the material means of production but who lack the social and cultural capital needed to extract surplus symbolic value from their crops. In this unintentional way, the quest for artisanal quality in the coffee market perpetuates classic dependency patterns of global capital accumulation across these value worlds.