The Good Life by Fischer Edward F

Author:Fischer, Edward F. [Fischer, Edward F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.4: New York Market Coffee Prices, 2009–2012

Note

*This chapter is based on collaborative research conducted with Bart Victor. The ideas presented here developed through conversations and joint writing with Victor, and portions of this chapter were previously published in Fischer and Victor 2013.

CHAPTER 6

Agency, Opportunity, and Frustrated Freedom*

The growth of the high-end, high-altitude coffee market has opened new opportunities for some Maya farmers and has increased the aspirational possibilities for many more. Working with rapidly changing and fickle foreign markets also presents new vulnerabilities for smallholding growers. Following the market height of mid-2011, commodity coffee prices dropped precipitously, reaching a low of just over $100 per hundredweight in late 2013, not enough for most farmers to cover production costs. Over this same period, farmers faced an epidemic of coffee rust fungus that threatened a significant portion of the country’s overall crop. Then, with equal rapidity, the coffee rust threat receded (after wiping out almost 20 percent of production) and droughts in Brazil led the New York C price to rise to $180 in February 2014.

Such market fluctuations can lead to disparities between levels of subjective agency and available opportunities. Comparative deficits of agency in relation to resources and opportunities produce what Amartya Sen calls “unfreedom,” an inability to achieve one’s capabilities. Bart Victor and I point to cases in which agency can exceed opportunity structures, thwarting aspirations and resulting in a condition we call “frustrated freedom.” Among the coffee farmers in our 2011 surveys we found relatively high levels of agency and some degree of frustrated freedom, but farmers’ aspiration combined with the expanding market opportunities at that time also resulted in high levels of subjective wellbeing.

Maya coffee farmers themselves talk about their aspirations, agency, and opportunities in ways that are broadly congruent with a capabilities approach to development. As laid out by Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others, this approach argues that improving the material conditions of the poor is a means to a greater end, namely the ability to live a life that they themselves value. Such “development as freedom” involves promoting the capabilities and agency required to deploy material resources in intentional and strategic ways to create the life that one envisions.

The expanding high-end coffee market has created new opportunity structures for smallholding Maya farmers, a venue to exercise their agency and pursue their aspirations. Unlike the previous generations of coffee oligarchs, they do not identify as cafetaleros, but as farmers, plying their trade with another product. Coffee is not the end, but a means to other ends, what they hope will be a better life. In our interviews, producers viewed coffee as a useful resource and a means to other ends, but not a panacea. As one middle-aged producer commented, “Growing coffee hasn’t allowed me to have all in my life that I wanted, but it moves me in that direction, and that is something.”

Coffee producers construct their aspirations in the difficult circumstances in which they find themselves. In this context of limited opportunities, most farmers see coffee as a beneficial, if imperfect, addition to household economic strategies.

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