Book Nomination: Grounds for Agreement

“That simple act of sipping your coffee connects you to peasant farmers in Columbia and Indonesia, to dock workers in Sao Paulo and Mombassa, New Orleans and San Francisco, and to many others in between.”

Two recurring problems have plagued us throughout this course: what exactly is a commodity chain and why do most commodity histories end sometime before or during the 20^th-century? John M. Talbot’s recent book Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain solves both of these problems, but probably not in a way that will be palatable to casual readers.

Talbot is a lecturer in sociology at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and has published extensively on coffee and commodity chains. Published in 2004, Grounds is his most recent work. While this book is not for the faint of heart, and is quite technical in places, it does a fantastic job of defining and outlining the current debates surrounding the use of commodity chains in present day historical and sociological research.

Talbot’s plan, laid out across eight chapters, includes both academic and practical concerns. He is interested both in defining and finding solutions to the problems presented in the book, e.g., producer inequality in the coffee commodity chain. But before getting there, the reader must survive the highly technical, reference-laden first chapter wherein the author “reviews the literature on commodity chains and international commodity agreements.”

One of the problems we have been having with commodity chains throughout the course is how to talk about/visualize them. Are they chains, implying two-dimensional linkages between producers and consumers with intervening nodes, or are they webs of interrelated pieces moving seemingly independently but affecting the shape of the whole? For Talbot, the answer is, “they are interwoven,” and that, “it is impossible to analyze the commodity chain as an independent, self-contained unit, without considering the whole world economy of which it is a part.”

For Talbot, commodity chains are an intermediate step between nation-states and world-systems within world-systems theory, an analytical viewpoint that allows researchers and authors to talk about systems more complex than any given nation-state without having to encompass the whole, which Talbot argues, arises from the interplay amongst various commodity chains and cannot therefore be seen ahead of time.

The idea that “all participants in the chain are struggling to improve their positions” is another intriguing insight provided by Talbot. He attributes the change in commodity chains over time to the self-interested behavior of its various members. A practical example from class might be the considerable amount of time we have spent discussing the role of so-called “middlemen,” i.e., agents who reside at the middle of the chain and influence both ends.

For Talbot, all parties involved in commodity chains are rational actors. In the particular case of coffee, producers—usually third world farmers—are responding to global demand (read: prices) by overplanting leading to a recurring cycle of booms and busts that hurt the producing end of the commodity chain more than the consuming end due to the machinations of transnational corporations and state actors who have the ability to absorb losses.

Consumers, likewise, are not simply responding to misinformation produced and fed to them by middlemen, but are under the influence of multi-billion dollar advertising campaigns financed by transnational corporations as well as enticement strategies deployed by major distributors, like supermarkets, who tend to use coffee as a “loss-leader” product, i.e., a product that they take a loss on in order to get people in the door.

But for Talbot, producer-consumer inequality is not an inevitable, static condition of commodity chains. The process of “forward integration,” where participants in the commodity chain attempt to exert control or influence on members further along the chain “toward the final consumption end,” is another aspect of commodity chains that Talbot uses to illustrate his point that commodity chains are constantly in flux, and power amongst and between members can be balanced.

Historically, producers and exporters of coffee are at a disadvantage. They are beholden to a commodity chain controlled by powerful behemoths in the shape of global empires and transnational corporations. These larger forces attract not only the lion’s share of the profit, but historians’ attention as well.

Most of the historical analysis of coffee in Grounds takes place after WWII (c. 1945) and provides us with the second missing piece of our puzzle: what happens to commodities during the 20^th-century? This is where I would stop for a moment and qualify my nomination of Talbot’s book. I see it as a complimentary source to another, perhaps more “historical” source that might take the edge of Talbot’s analytical approach; a little sugar for Talbot’s bitter grounds.

On the origins of coffee, Talbot notes that most of the coffee crop in Latin America originated from a few Javanese seeds that were cultivated by the Dutch. This establishes coffee’s inextricable link to colonialism. Talbot evokes Mintz, citing that coffee was quickly adopted by industrializing nations in an attempt to create a “sober working class” and careful, scrutinizing accountants.

It was because of this demand for coffee that Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, the last country in the Western hemisphere to do so. Slaves were needed to labor on coffee plantations. Interestingly, the colono system, which replaced slave labor, involved the mass migration of Europeans to Brazil to work on plantations, the only time in history that this has happened. Brazil is influential in Talbot’s work because it remains the largest exporter of coffee to the United States and its “production is more mechanized than any other producing country.”

Aside from the story of coffee in Brazil, Talbot spends some time talking about the rise of transnational corporations in the United States. By 1945, the only global corporation selling coffee was Nestle. Companies in the United States—Maxwell House, Folgers, et al.—enjoyed supremacy only in their respective areas of the country. The story that Talbot elaborates involves attempts by these regional companies to expand their influence into the territories of their competitors, e.g., Proctor & Gamble’s attack on the eastern market belonging to General Foods in the 1970s.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am compelled to share the less fortunate aspects of Talbot’s book in the context of a course like this one. First, as I mentioned in the preamble, Grounds is highly technical, and is probably aimed at an academic audience. Anyone interested in the history of coffee, per se, might be disappointed by the fact that Talbot’s historical account does not begin until post-WWII. His is a story of warring corporations and the collateral damage they do on nation-states that get in their way.

Second, at the time of writing this review/nomination, the paperback version of this book cost $34.95 on Amazon, however, this is not so discouraging considering that many used copies are available for practically nothing.

Finally, I am doubtful whether this work could stand on its own two legs in a class like this. I would recommend pairing this with another “coffee book” that fills in more of the history of coffee prior to 1945. This could have an impact on the price list, and might place undue emphasis on coffee over other commodities discussed in the course.

With all of that on the table, I would still nominate this book on the basis of its technical discussion of commodity chains alone. If desired, the introduction and first several chapters of the book could be assigned with the rest left to the curiosity of the student without any significant loss of impact. This would make Grounds a book suitable to be read near the opening of the semester, as to allow for more fruitful discourse in the classes that follow.
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Talbot, John. Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain.  London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004.