A01=Lowell Gudmundson
agriculture
Author_Lowell Gudmundson
Category=JBCC4
Category=KND
Category=NHK
Category=WBXN
Central American history
coop farming
Costa Rican history
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_food-drink
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
food advertising
gourmet coffee
income inequality
Jose Figueres Ferrer
Juan Valdez
populism
Rafael Angel Calderon Guardia
Starbucks
tourism industry
Product details
- ISBN 9780807176252
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 139 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 20 Oct 2021
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Costa Rica After Coffee explores the political, social, and economic place occupied by the coffee industry in contemporary Costa Rican history. In this follow-up to the 1986 classic Costa Rica Before Coffee, Lowell Gudmundson delves deeply into archival sources, alongside the individual histories of key coffee-growing families, to explore the development of the co-op movement, the rise of the gourmet coffee market, and the societal transformations Costa Rica has undergone as a result of the coffee industry's powerful presence in the country.
While Costa Rican coffee farmers and co-ops experienced a golden age in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence and expansion of a gourmet coffee market in the 1990s drastically reduced harvest volumes. Meanwhile, urbanization and improved education among the Costa Rican population threatened the continuance of family coffee farms, because of the lack of both farmland and a successor generation of farmers. As the last few decades have seen a rise in tourism and other industries within the country, agricultural exports like coffee have ceased to occupy the same crucial space in the Costa Rican economy. Gudmundson argues that the fulfillment of promises of reform from the co-op era had the paradoxical effect of challenging the endurance of the coffee industry.
While Costa Rican coffee farmers and co-ops experienced a golden age in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence and expansion of a gourmet coffee market in the 1990s drastically reduced harvest volumes. Meanwhile, urbanization and improved education among the Costa Rican population threatened the continuance of family coffee farms, because of the lack of both farmland and a successor generation of farmers. As the last few decades have seen a rise in tourism and other industries within the country, agricultural exports like coffee have ceased to occupy the same crucial space in the Costa Rican economy. Gudmundson argues that the fulfillment of promises of reform from the co-op era had the paradoxical effect of challenging the endurance of the coffee industry.
Lowell Gudmundson is professor of history and Latin American studies at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Economic Boom; coauthor of Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism Before Liberal Reform; coeditor of Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place; and Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America.
