Beyond the commodity: gendered socionatures, value, and commoning in Mexican coffee plots

Abstract

Increasingly, women are the producers of many agricultural commodities around the world and feminist scholars astutely argue that women subsidize global agricultural production because the exchange value attributed to their products in commodity chains does not fairly compensate them. Although this is the case with women’s smallholder coffee in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, in this paper we seek to move beyond an analysis of value and exploitation based on the commodity (in this case, coffee) to explore more fully women’s production practices. Drawing on debates over the question of value production in socionatures, we suggest that as women cultivate coffee, they also create socionatural spaces in which they produce and valorise a host of things and relations. Literature on diverse economies, Latin American theorizations of lo común (the common), and feminist political ecology help us examine how women also generate a multiplicity of values that exceeds their fraught relationship with global commodity chains. This perspective enables us to expand the way we understand women producers, seeing them simultaneously as subjects exploited by value extraction through the commodity chain to political actors engaging with other forms of valuing and promoting life.

Keywords:

• Commodity chains
• coffee
• commoning
• feminisation of agriculture
• social reproduction
• value

Acknowledgments

We extend our deepest thanks to farmer-members of participating coffee producer organizations. This work benefitted from support by the Weissberg Family Foundation, National Science Foundation (Cultural Anthropology and Geography and Spatial Science Programs), National Geographic Society, University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, and Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicas at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca. Much thanks to Arenys Santiago and Candelaria Gómez for invaluable research assistance and project management.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

National Science Foundation under Grant number 1563779; The National Geographic Society under Grant number HJ009R17; and The Weissberg Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Holly Worthen

Holly Worthen, a Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicas at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico, researches gender, indigeneity, and the politics of development and migration in Latin America.

Tad Mutersbaugh

Tad Mutersbaugh, a Professor of Geography, researches certified commodity production, labour, cooperatives, and conservation in Latin America.

Sarah Lyon

Sarah Lyon, a Professor of Anthropology and the author of Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair Trade Markets and co-editor of Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies, researches questions of ethical markets, fairtrade-organic production, gender, and economic development in Latin America and North America.