Costa Rica Before Coffee centers on the decade of the 1840s, when the impact of coffee and export agriculture began to revolutionize Costa Rican society. Lowell Gudmundson focuses on the nature of the society prior to the coffee boom, but he also makes observations on the entire sweep of Costa Rican history, from earliest colonial times to the present, and in his final chapter compares the country's development and agrarian structures with those of other Latin American nations. These wide-ranging applications follow inevitably, since the author convincingly portrays the 1840s as they key decade in any interpretation of Costa Rican history.Gudmundson synthesizes and questions the existing historical literature on Costa Rica, relegating much of it to the realm of myth. He attacks what he calls the rural democratic myth (or rural egalitarian model) of Costa Rica's past, a myth that he argues has pervaded the country's historiography and politics and has had a huge impact on its image abroad and on its citizens' self-image. The rural democratic myth paints a rather idyllic picture of the country's past. It holds that prior to the coffee boom, the vast majority of Costa Rica's population was made up of peasants who owned small farms and were largely self-sufficient. These peasants enjoyed a high degree of social and economic quality; there were no important social distinctions and little division of labor. According to the myth, the primary source of this relatively egalitarian social order was the period of colonial rule, which ended in 1821. The new developments wrought by coffee and agrarian capitalism are seen as destructive of this rural democracy and as leading directly to unprecedented social problems that arose as a result of division of labor, rapid population growth, and widespread class antagonism.Gudmundson rejects virtually all of the components of this rural egalitarian model for pre-coffee society and reinterprets the early impact of coffee. He uses an array of sources, including census records, notary archives, and probate inventories, many of them previously unknown or unused, to analyze the country's social hierarchy, the division of labor, the distribution of wealth, various forms of private and communal land tenure, differentiation between cities and villages, household and family structure, and the elite before and after the rise of coffee. His powerful conclusion is that rather than reflecting the complexities of Costa Rican history, the rural egalitarian model is largely a construct of coffee culture itself, used to support the order that supplanted the colonial regime. Gudmundson ultimately reveals that the conceptual framework of the rural democratic myth has been limiting both to is supporters and to its opponents. Costa Rica Before Coffee proposes an alternative to the myth, on that emphasizes the complexity of agrarian history and breaks important new ground.

A reshaping of traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national identity The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity chronicles the development of the Tarrazú Valley, a historically remote—although internationally celebrated—coffee-growing region. Carmen Kordick’s work traces the development of this region from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century to consider the nation-building process from the margins, while also questioning traditional scholarly works that have reproduced, rather than deconstructed, Costa Rica’s exceptionalist national mythology, which hail Costa Rica as Central America’s “white,” democratic, nonviolent, and egalitarian republic. In this compelling political, economic, and lived history, Kordick suggests that Costa Rica’s exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology emerged during the Cold War, as revolution, civil war, military dictatorship, and state violence plagued much of Central America. From the vantage point of Costa Rica’s premier coffee-producing region, she examines local, national, and transnational processes. This deeply textured narrative details the inauguration of coffee capitalism, which heightened existing class divisions; a successful armed revolt against the national government, which forged the current political regime; and the onset of massive out-migration to the United States. Kordick’s research incorporates more than one hundred oral histories and thousands of archival sources gathered in both Costa Rica and the United States to produce a human history of Costa Rica’s past. Her work on the recent past profiles the experiences of migrants in the United States, mostly in New Jersey, where many undocumented Costa Ricans find low-paid work in the restaurant and landscaping sectors. The result is a fine-grained examination of Tarrazú’s development from the 1820s to the present that reshapes traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national past.

Costa Rica After Coffee explores the political, social, and economic place occupied by the coffee industry in contemporary Costa Rican history. In this follow-up to the 1986 classic Costa Rica Before Coffee, Lowell Gudmundson delves deeply into archival sources, alongside the individual histories of key coffee-growing families, to explore the development of the co-op movement, the rise of the gourmet coffee market, and the societal transformations Costa Rica has undergone as a result of the coffee industry’s powerful presence in the country. While Costa Rican coffee farmers and co-ops experienced a golden age in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence and expansion of a gourmet coffee market in the 1990s drastically reduced harvest volumes. Meanwhile, urbanization and improved education among the Costa Rican population threatened the continuance of family coffee farms, because of the lack of both farmland and a successor generation of farmers. As the last few decades have seen a rise in tourism and other industries within the country, agricultural exports like coffee have ceased to occupy the same crucial space in the Costa Rican economy. Gudmundson argues that the fulfillment of promises of reform from the co-op era had the paradoxical effect of challenging the endurance of the coffee industry.

A critical account of the politics of aid-giving.

In the revolutionary years between 1979 and 1992, it would have been difficult to find three political systems as different as El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, yet they found a common destination in democracy and free markets. Paige shows that the divergent political histories and the convergent outcome were shaped by one commodity: coffee.

Dr. Melissa Vogt considers the influence of Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade in coffee farming communities of Costa Rica from 2009-2019. Sustainability certifications schemes are working amongst a range of sustainability efforts, unique by their intra market location. The intentions of each certification scheme must be clarified prior to evaluation and their influence considered amongst contextually specific historic and contemporary considerations, and alongside the range of sustainability efforts. The advantages and disadvantages, opportunities for improvement and how alternative mechanisms might improve upon or complement sustainability certification schemes are explained. An epilogue considers how prioritisation of coffee as a cash crop may align with sustainability. The influence on biodiversity, community health and income, and the possible implication of reduced coffee crop density for consumers, the market and farming landscapes is considered. How sustainability standards might better encourage more ambitious sustainability in farming landscapes is for future consideration.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. Yet the increasingly urgent dilemma of how to achieve equitable economic development in a world of ecosystem decline and climate change presents new challenges, testing Costa Rica’s ability to remain a leader in innovative environmental governance. This book explores these challenges, how Costa Rica is responding to them, and the lessons this holds for current and future trends regarding environmental governance and sustainable development. It provides the first comprehensive assessment of successes and challenges as they play out in a variety of sectors, including agricultural development, biodiversity conservation, water management, resource extraction, and climate change policy. By framing Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory,” the contributors in this volume examine the lessons learned and offer a path for the future of sustainable development research and policy in Central America and beyond.