Green Hour: “Translatability, Valuation and Commensuration of Care in Peasant Coffee Production. When Territorial Care becomes Quality and Taste” (Dr. Tyanif Rico Rodriguez)

Coffee production in Colombia has been used as a government modernization strategy since the 19th century. Nariño’s region coffee has been an attractive product for the international market due to soil conditions, biodiversity, diversified peasant production systems, and care practices. The care, in these peasant worlds are not a human prerogative, on the contrary are a set of activities that are carried out from the local experiential knowledge and affective relations to sustain life in more than-human entanglements.

Climate change conditions, dependence on the international market, and the lack of institutional support generate vulnerabilities to local communities since their modes of production root in biodiversity and diversification. Consequently, the increasing demand for coffee incentives the advance of the agricultural frontier over the forest. Specialty-coffee classification systems hide behind values of quality and taste, what I called the excess as the complex social relations that create Campesino agriculture and territories where coffee is produced.

My current research shows how the politics and forms of organizing the common operate out of multiple displacements in peasant worlds, where territorial existence is affirmed in more than human entanglements. I focus on care as a territorial concept based on an affective and material analysis of peasant organizing strategies. A reading that brings together forms of resistance, territoriality, and the production of subjectivities that encompass agroecological practices in the context of agrobiodiversity in Mexico and Colombia. The care in my analysis is a multispecies territorial dimension, since it allows to describe the practices that produce territories and subjectivities from the situated experiences of peasant organizations and cultures.

In this talk I will discuss one of the key arguments of my book project on Territorial Care. I present the ambivalences of care through the uses that institutions and trading companies make of the notion and relations of care that sustain coffee production, translating them into tradable values and commodities for specialty markets. My claim is that the cupper has a role of translator between regimes of value: the capitalist market trade relations and the local caring territorial relations. The role of certifiers determines which practices and relations in local production are acceptable as sustainable and of good quality. These translations are important to understand how local relations are transformed into saleable notions that obscure local means of production and territorial relations of care. Behind the notions of quality in the specialty coffee evaluation of Nariño’s coffee are campesinos territorial relations of care.