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Recommended Reading: Confronting the Coffee Crisis |
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Our customers and allies have helped Equal Exchange pioneer the Fair Trade movement, and as the impact of our work has grown, the studies of these efforts have grown with it. The newly published book Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America is provocative and innovative in its comprehensive approach to researching and covering the coffee system from field to cup.
Many of the book’s contributors have a close connection to Equal Exchange and our farmer partners. What we love about the book is that it is about what real people really do. So many academic studies are a compilation of government statistics and quotes by pundits. This book is a compendium of the actual work family farmers did in building their co-operatives, improving their farms, and caring for their families during a time of historic lows in world markets for coffee.
The book documents that when consumers vote with their dollars to support small-scale farmers, those farmers respond by strengthening their democratic co-operatives and improving the environmental health of their farms.
The book is available through MIT Press
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