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Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p37969"

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  • Hämäläinen, Mirja (2019)
    The coffee industry provides insights into the relationship between commodity trade and development, a topic that has been a part of developmental discussions for decades. This master's thesis is a case study on a niche inside global coffee business. Its topic is the Third Wave Coffee, a subculture formed around high quality coffee. In its essence the is creating a new kind of relationship with the coffee producers in the global South and the people selling and consuming coffee in the global North. The study's purpose is to portray the views that form the bases of ethics of trade in the subculture. The aim of the study is to understand the networks that tie the global North and South together in an age where consumers see the knowledge about the origin of a high-end product as a part of a quality experience but persistent inequality of power and resources still seem to be a permanent feature of commodity trade relations between the global South and North. The material consists of eight semi structured interviews from coffee professionals and from material of seven websites of organizations connected to the people interviewed. The material was analyzed with discourse analyses as a tool. Theoretical framework consists of cosmopolitanism, Bourdieusian Approach and commodity Fetishism and "double" commodity fetishism. The findings demonstrate that the coffee professionals in the North hold beliefs about how material quality of coffee and ethical trade are intertwined in a way that they secure one another. The professionals define the story about the coffee sold to the consumer and in the Third Wave this based greatly on this presumed link between quality and ethics, cosmopolitan values are often present in the discourses and "double" commodity fetishism is constructed when explaining the origin of coffee. Third Wave coffee professionals in the North are critical of certification schemes related to sustainability and trade ethics and offer personal relationships with the producers as an alternative for them. The effects of this model on the livelihoods and communities of the coffee producers in the global South are a subject of a further study.