Micro-mills for sustainable production and women empowerment: Evidence from Costa Rica's Tarrazu region

Abstract

By allowing producer households in Costa Rica to process their coffee and sell directly to specialty markets, micro-mills create opportunities to enhance the empowerment of women and sustainability of coffee production. The coffee commodity chain is commonly characterised as one that perpetuates low incomes for family producers and significant profits for retailers and commercial roasters around the world. As a commodity, coffee is associated with intensive productions systems, producer specialization in primary production and the relegation of women to traditional household roles. Responding to consistently low prices under this model, Tarrazu coffee households have embraced the innovation of family-owned micro-mills and are learning to exploit direct producer-buyer relations. In this paper, we evaluate the dynamics of the Costa Rican coffee sector by analysing the experiences of micro-mill households from the perspective of the diverse economies framework. This framework recognizes the value of non-market and non-financial social relations in addition to more traditional market returns, improves understanding of the diversity of economic and environmental practices that coffee households use and contributes to the emerging literature on gender-agriculture-sustainably nexus.