Shade-grown coffee is key for biodiversity conservation and human livelihoods in Latin America. While peasant coffee farmers often diversify beyond coffee, and organize in cooperatives to get better prices and reduce economic vulnerabilities, migrant farmworkers are one of the most vulnerable and marginalized actors in the coffee production chain. About 30% of coffee is produced in labor-intensive systems, which depend on hired wage labor throughout the year. Away from home, farmworkers face food and labor inequalities. This work discusses biodiversity conservation narratives and practices in the context of the human experience in the coffee plantation system, and asks whether biodiversity conservation can improve the livelihood of migrant farmworkers or whether it further normalizes and obscures social inequalities. Through ethnographic research, I examine the tensions that arise when conservation practices and narratives embodied in an organic shade-grown coffee plantation system in Mexico meet the everyday-lived-experience of migrant farmworkers.
Results/Conclusions
I draw attention to the ways in which conservation narratives adopted in organic shade-grown coffee plantations have material and symbolic effects on farmworkers everyday-lived-experience, and argue that they contribute to farmworkers’ vulnerability and marginalization. At the same time, I recognize farmworkers as individuals with agency, and discuss the role of their peasant identity in the process of subtle resistance to unfair working conditions. The relevance of this work lies on exposing the social intricacies of coffee production and biodiversity conservation within labor-intensive systems, and questioning shade-grown organic coffee as a fair and just imaginary, as we transition to more sustainable and environmentally just food systems.