Capitalist Development or Super‐exploitation? Exploring Divergent Patterns of Surplus Appropriation along Coffee Commodity Chains

ABSTRACT In 1997, John Talbot reported that the liberalization of the global coffee trade had led to diverging trends in retail and wholesale prices, resulting in a shift of surplus value from farmers to downstream firms. This trend has persisted over subsequent decades amid expanded production, intensified farming, greater consumer product differentiation and deepening farmer poverty. This article investigates these seemingly contradictory processes based on the hypothesis of dual commodity chains for mild and non‐mild coffee types, given their distinct production systems, labour processes and consumption formats. In the study, surplus value appropriated at each node of the respective chains is isolated and expressed in constant local purchasing power terms from 1990 to 2019. Results indicate processes of downstream surplus transfer from farmers in both chains. For non‐mild coffee, surplus is passed on to consumers, coinciding with expanded production. By contrast, mild coffee shows a surplus transfer of double the magnitude, appropriated at downstream nodes, alongside a slight decline in global output. This pattern is interpreted as the super‐exploitation of mild coffee farming labour by transnational merchant capital, driven by the unique characteristics of mild coffee farmers as petty commodity producers.