| This dissertation presents an analysis of the structure of international inequality, as seen through the lens provided by coffee, the most important agricultural export of the Third World. Since the early 18th Century, the coffee trade has linked South and North, and coffee exporting was the link through which many Third World countries were incorporated into the world economy. Third World states attempted to use their "resource power" in the post-World War II period to change the structure of the world economy and their positions in it, a struggle which has come to be symbolized by OPEC. This dissertation demonstrates that the International Coffee Agreements were equally important symbols of, and models for, this struggle.;Over most of the period considered here, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the ICAs, and collective action by producing states, resulted in about half of the income generated by coffee sales in the developed countries being returned to the countries where the coffee was produced. This income permitted a number of countries heavily dependent on coffee to undertake development programs which were moderately successful, at least through the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, this multilateral, negotiated, political regulation actually stabilized the market, reducing the risks borne by coffee growers and producing states, as well as by coffee importers and roasters and the banks which financed them. But by the end of the 1980s, globalization, the consolidation of TNC control over the developed country markets and the spread of coffee production and consumption to new countries, combined with the rise of neoliberalism and the inability of the ICAs to adapt to the changing circumstances, caused the collapse of the regulatory regime. Prices crashed, spreading devastation through the producing countries. In the last few years, the new free market has become increasingly unstable, due to more frosts in Brazil and persistent shortages; and a new producers' cartel, the ACPC, has arisen and attempted to reregulate the market. This dissertation proposes a framework for analysis of tropical commodity chains, within which all of these developments can be understood, and which can also be used to project the possible future evolution of the coffee commodity chain. |
