A Large Cup of Capitalism To Go Please: A Geospatial Analysis of the Operations of Capital in Coffee Production

Following the increased frequency of climate related events and their impacts on food production, agrarian matters have made a return. They drove a critical discussion regarding the structure of the global agrifood system (GAS); referring to the interconnected network of activities, processes, actors and institutions involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural and food products on a global scale. The structure of the GAS has evolved in an asymmetrical way, emphasising inequalities along agricultural global value chains (GVC) - as expressed by the consequences of 2007-08 food price crisis for farmers communities. This reconfiguration of power and profit in the GAS seems to take its root in the withdrawal of States from agricultural and food production in the 1980s. While recent agrarian developments have been characterised as conjonctural, alternative explanations were raised by food regime analysis; an approach linking global flows of foods and structural dynamics of capital accumulation (allowing a periodisation of the GAS). This literature suggests the challenges faced by global agriculture are linked with the features of the contemporary food regime (beginning in the late 1980s), financialisation being considered a core feature and an explanation for trends such as land grabbing. However, I argue that, although financialisation sheds light on crucial dynamics involving new actors and strategies in the GAS, it is only one side of a same coin: that of the restructuring of productive forces in agricultural GVC. This paper aims to rethink the role of financialisation in the dynamics of the contemporary food regime. I show that the recent transformations of the GAS express the expansion of capitalist agriculture to frontier agrarian systems and geographies, impacting socio-economic structures and development pathways. In particular, I show that this expansion is driven by three operations of capital: the assetisation of agrarian processes, the reconfiguration of property regimes for control over production and the industrialisation of food production as a process of valuation. I apply this framework to the analysis of the coffee value chain following the lapse of the International Coffee Agreements in 1989. I replace the commodity chain in the context of the contemporary food regime to explain key trends such as the relations between international and farm-gate coffee prices, the concentration of certain segments of the GVC (especially the export and roasting sectors) and changes in global consumption patterns, and their relationship with new power relations between Arabicas and Robustas producing geographies.