3 - Defining the Goal of a Sustainable Coffee Sector

Summary

Chapter 3 is concerned with defining what success in market-driven regulatory governance would look like: improving sustainability. It opens by contrasting various definitions of sustainable agriculture; some of which rely on price manipulation, while others focus on productive choices alone. It then applies these concepts to the coffee sector; first pointing out the issue of low and volatile world prices, and then turning to the agronomic and farm management decisions a boundedly rational coffee producer needs to make, alongside their likely economic consequences. It concludes that the most rational behavior is to maximize yields and switch away from biodiversity-friendly shade production to intensified monocropping, while minimizing input costs such as wages. This leads to the sustainability challenges that plague the industry. Building on the historical emergence of sustainability as a concept, the chapter then traces the development of the sector’s sustainability discourse alongside the emergence of private sustainability standards.