Quality revolutions, solidarity networks, and sustainability innovations: Following Fair Trade coffee from Nicaragua to Califor

Nicaraguan smallholder cooperative leaders working in partnership with a California-based small-scaleroasting company pioneered an alternative approach to confronting the post-1999 coffee crisis. They builtcoffee tasting laboratories and integrated grassroots organizing efforts to create a national smallholdercooperative association that dramatically improved the quality, consistency, and prices from of the coffeethey exported. Cooperative leaders used this development project to gain a more significant share of politicaleconomic power in a domestic coffee industry historically dominated by colonial powers, and corporate anddomestic elites. This alli.ance between the artisanal small-scale roasting companies and cooperative leadersalso proved that smallholders selling into fair trade markets could consistently produce and export highquality coffee. This case study unfolds into Nicaragua's northern mountains, northern California's coastalcities and the commodity trade and solidarity networks that connect them. Beyond following the coffee beanfrom mountainside farmers, through artisan specialty coffee roasters, and into the hands of Bay Area coffeedrinkers, the article recovers the history of political and technological revolutions and the transnationalsolidarity networks that contributed to sustainability innovations within the coffee value chain. Although thetangible benefits of fair trade coffee to farmers and landscapes have not lived up to the lofty proclamations ofits advocates, farmers generally receive higher prices for their coffee and are frequently more secure in theirland titles. This political ecology of coffee and solidarity suggests theoretical questions about the role ofclassic revolutions, and Polanyian double movements in the efforts to practice the alternative values andprinciples that motivate many of today's sustainability innovations.