COS 47-3 - The paradox of organic farmers who eat conventionally. Reflections on contradictions and challenges faced by organic coffee producers in the South of Mexico

Abstract: Coffee, despite belonging to global value chains that move mainly from tropical countries (producers) toward the North (consumers), is mainly produced in agroforestal systems by smallholderson hotspots of biodiversity. Therefore, the coffee production system is, on the one hand, broadly acknowledged as an ideal agroforestal system in terms of ecological sustainability when it effectively integrates agricultural and conservation goals, and on the other hand, thanks to all the certifications and supportive buyers, it can also be more socially just. However, the smallholder families continue to face seasonal food scarcity every year, as has been broadly documented. Another vulnerability is on the rise in Southern Mexico, where the landscape is a mosaic of forest patches and agricultural crops of which coffee is the most prominent. Typically, the landscape also includes plots of milpa - a traditional agroecosystem of corn, beans, squash and other species.

In 2017, a Participatory Action Research (PAR) process on this topic was started with the organic coffee cooperative “Campesinos Ecológicos de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas” (CESMACH). CESMACH is a cooperative with 389 members who manage shade-grown coffee plots in the buffer zone of the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve. One of our many findings was that when coffee production is accompanied by beekeeping and milpa, families report fewer months of food insecurity. However, our experience clarified that there is an increasing tendency among CESMACH families to introduce chemical inputs into the milpa or to abandon staple crops altogether. In 2019, we found that only 10% and 30% of the families were producing enough corn and beans respectively to cover their consumption, and the tendency to abandon these crops is increasing. This creates a paradox: as producers lean more into organic coffee production, they are decreasing biodiversity in other patches of the local landscape and consuming more food products sourced from industrial farming operations that are driving ecological degradation wherever they are produced. In this work, we aim to present the environmental, social and even cultural externalities implicated in organic coffee production by smallholders. The foregoing implies that families are highly dependent on coffee exportation, which threatens their food security. They are left to consume conventional and cheap staple crops, very likely transgenic, and the cultural practice of milpa is being eroded. So, we wonder, is the organic coffee chain as sustainable and fair as it appears?