Emergence of a Public Sphere through the Connections of a Co-op Representative : A Case Study of a Coffee Farmers' Cooperative in Lao PDR

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  • 農業協同組合幹部の「つながり」から生起する公共性 : ラオス人民民主共和国のコーヒー農業協同組合の事例から
  • ノウギョウ キョウドウ クミアイ カンブ ノ 「 ツナガリ 」 カラ セイキ スル コウキョウセイ : ラオス ジンミン ミンシュ キョウワコク ノ コーヒー ノウギョウ キョウドウ クミアイ ノ ジレイ カラ

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Abstract

<p>In discussions of farmers' societies in Asia, analysis has been made of the politics of farmers toward state power in terms of such livelihood strategies as everyday resistance. Meanwhile, farmers' lives nowadays are heavily influenced by commercialization. Therefore, we must form an analytical method to describe that phenomenon, exploring how monetary power affects their lives. Using that perspective, this paper focuses on the activities of a coffee farmers' cooperative in Lao PDR and examines the way in which it forms relationships with the government and among the market actors. An NGO-led cooperative, known as the Jhai coffee farmer's cooperative (JCFC) , was launched in 2005, 20 years after the bankruptcy of an earlier cooperative introduced by the government in the 1980's. An American consultant supported the organization of 11 producer groups based in the village, establishing an organization for them to receive fair trade certification. An English-speaking Lao, a supporter of the NGO, became manager of the cooperative and played a significant but monopolistic role in the trade with foreign buyers. Due to his monopolistic management, JCFC was driven to bankruptcy and absorbed into the new government-led cooperative in 2009. However, even though JCFC went bankrupt, the farmers' representatives were eager to reestablish their own cooperative to be able to continue to sell their products to foreign buyers. For that reason, a Japanese fair-trade company started a program of financial support to reestablish the JCFC, and has been importing its coffee since 2010. Although the coffee trading with the company has got back on track, the number of JCFC members selling their coffee to the company decreased in 2012. The main reason for that was a change in the networks for purchasing the coffee beans, owing to the highly dependent nature of local societal relationships. For example, at KP village, where 53 families belonged to a producers' group, the group representative originally signed contracts with 16 members for a fixed amount of sales at a meeting held the first year. However, only one member was left selling coffee to the company in the third year of the trading. A JCFC representative said that the person had bought the coffee cherries (i.e., the coffee beans) from the KP village farmers, after which he processed all of them himself because he felt the farmers could not meet JCFC's standards. Actually, the standards had become a source of controversy the year before. One member of the KP village group sold his coffee to a middleman after his coffee had been rejected by the JCFC for not meeting its criteria. That demonstrates that the cooperative representatives did not trust the ordinary members' skills in processing coffee. Thus, the 'connection' between the cooperative representatives and the farmers became reorganized into the equivalent of the connection between the middlemen and the farmers. Ironically, such a connection was precisely what the cooperative had tried to eliminate when the JCFC was first established. Elsewhere, ST village also faced difficulties with its group members, but for a different reason from the problem faced by KP village. JCFC issued a regulation stating that members must sell a fixed amount of coffee according to a consensus reached in the group meeting, with advance payments made to help farmers who were having difficulty making ends meet. At the village, where five families belonged to a producers' group in 2010, some members violated that regulation regarding advance payments. They sold all of their coffee to the middleman, without leaving anything for the company despite having had received advance payments for their coffee. Therefore, the group representative excluded those farmers from the group. On the other hand, a rumor started to spread among the villagers that the group</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>

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