Tad Mutersbaugh

University of Kentucky | UKY · Department of Geography

Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican cof...

The quest for gender economic equality is becoming a component of corporate and transnational institutional antipoverty initiatives in the Global South. Framed as “smart economics,” this approach explicitly ties women's empowerment to economic growth. On one hand, this framework employs a discursive construction that depicts women as attentive, fam...

Certification and accreditation provide one form of everywhere to privatization's everything, providing 'pipes and tubes' through which value – equated across space and stripped of risk – may be stabilized and realized. Inspired by Michael Watts' essay 'The Privatization of Everything?', this chapter locates academic assessment in the context of ef...

In the mid-1990s, fairtrade-organic registration data showed that only 9 % of Oaxaca, Mexico’s organic coffee ‘farm operators’ were women; by 2013 the female farmer rate had increased to 42 %. Our research investigates the impact of this significant increase in women’s coffee association participation among 210 members of two coffee producer associ...

Certification is a set of practices that includes the writing of standards, the inspection and labeling of products that meet those standards, and the accreditation and auditing of producers, inspectors, and agencies involved in certification. This entry will discuss the growth and expansion of certification and certified product consumption, and a...

Book review forum: Review of Ryan E. Galt's "Food Systems in an Unequal World: Pesticides, Vegteables, and Agrarian Capitalism in Costa Rica"

Notions such as terroir and “Slow Food,” which originated in Mediterranean Europe, have emerged as buzzwords around the globe, becoming commonplace across Europe and economically important in the United States and Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Given the increased global prominence of terroir and regulatory frameworks like geographical in...

Este libro es producto del proyecto “Sistemas Agroalimentarios Localizados en México. Identidad territorial, construcción de capital social e instituciones” apoyado por la Dirección General de Asuntos de Personal Académico (dgapa) de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y el Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT). Indudable...

This paper examines ‘protocols’—instructions that inform project recipients about how technology is to be used. Our case study of ‘heifer-care’ protocols associated with a microdairy scheme raises two questions. First, we ask how these protocols effect a disassembly of social relations within the village—‘poisoning’ them, as coop members put it. Se...

Cheelen Mahar's book on changing life strategies and worldviews among residents of Oaxaca's urban periphery provides a fascinating account of transformations across a thirty year span. This unusually long study period, beginning with interviews in the early 1970s and concluding with re-interviews of the same study participants in the 2000s, provide...

Data from Mesoamerican studies shows that the proportion of women registered as ‘farm operators’ in fairtrade–organic coffee producer unions has increased significantly. However, this increase is uneven across Mesoamerican communities and the prospects for improved gender equity rest on several questions that we explore in this study. First, what e...

Combining interdisciplinary research with case study analysis at scales ranging from the local to the global, Confronting the Coffee Crisis reveals the promise and the perils of efforts to create a more sustainable coffee industry Our morning cups of coffee connect us to a global industry and an export crisis in the tropics that is destroying livel...

Victor Montejo's fine book examines the contemporary renaissance of Mayan thought in Guatemala, crafting a full and nuanced evaluation of this broad and pluralistic social movement. The book examines three crosscutting themes that include Mayan identity construction, Mayan leadership in creating a politically and philosophically rich indigenous mov...

In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement...

Since the mid-1990s, the number and diversity of ‘quality-certified’ products has increased dramatically. This article examines labor practices and regulatory spaces within 3rd party quality certification and suggests that this distinct configuration be termed ‘just-in-space’ production. A privileging of space derives, on the one hand, from the cha...

Certification within organic agriculture exhibits flexibility with respect to practices used to demonstrate that a product meets published quality standards. This case study of Mexican certified-organic agriculture finds two forms. Indigenous smallholders of southern Mexico undertake a low-input, process-oriented organic farming in which certificat...

In this paper I argue that certified-organic inspection agents play a key role in reworking transnational organic-product certification standards to the unique conditions found within Mexican (Oaxacan) organic-coffee producer villages. First, I document the steps through which transnational product- certification norms, under the International Orga...

"As Durand and Landa note, common property studies bring a new perspective to migration analysis, shifting the focus to communal institutions and away from an exclusive focus on family-network processes. Though the privileging of family relations and networks has yielded tremendous benefits, it has tended towards an empirical and theoretical slight...

Cooperative rural development has been the subject of much scholarship, yet little attention has been paid to the importance of cooperative spatial strategies. In this study, the efforts of an Oaxacan (Mexican) rural producer cooperative to construct a co-op building appear to far exceed the structure's potential contribution to commodity productio...

The author argues that organic-coffee certification enacted under the rubric of transnational certification norms alters the logic and practice of economic management and governance in an Oaxacan (Mexican) peasant producers' union. As the title indicates, these changes are productive of social and economic tensions. An economic and ethnographic ana...

This article examines the politics of migration in an indigenous Oaxacan village (Mexico), and finds that the village acts, with measured success, to shape the timing and rhythm of migration. Villagers regard migration as necessary yet problematic. Migration provides income for village families yet undercuts traditions of community service and disr...

This ethnographic case study of a rural production co-op in the indigenous community of Santa Cruz (Oaxaca, Mexico) documents men's efforts to enlist women's participation in men's co-op projects. Over an eight-year period, men initiated a number of production projects, only to see them fail when women refused to participate. I use data from partic...

Research undertaken in the Oaxacan (Mexican) indigenous community of Santa Cruz indicates that gender differences in technology acquisition derive in part from locally unique gendered patterns of labor participation. Previous studies have identified constraints on women's adoption of technology which stem from women's relative resource poverty and...

Cooperative rural industrialization is an important objective for many rural communities, yet few have achieved success. Evidence from the Chinantec community of Santa Cruz situated in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, Mexico, suggests that village-level conflicts over resource access and intra-household cross-gender disputes over labor allocation are i...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Geography)--University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-266).