Abstract
This article asserts the economic relevancy of human connectedness and community. It argues that if the goal of economics is to maximize human happiness, then approaches that directly address social phenomena and community building, rather than utility and income maximization by individual economic actors, are more promising and indeed “rational.” The fair trade movement, insofar as it supports community-based cooperatives, can play an important role in this process. However, the real story behind successful cooperatives is often more about the nature of the rural “peasant” community that supports it. Viewing economic decision making through the lens of the Mirembe Kawomera coffee cooperative in Uganda reveals a market that is socially embedded in a community rich in social capital, or more appropriately social productive power of labor, rather than one that constitutes a separate market sphere. When economic incentives encompass a more holistic set of costs and benefits, even those that may be less tangible, economic activity and strong community tend to be mutually reinforcing.
1. Introduction
A cluster of small rural villages surrounding Nabugoya Hill in Eastern Uganda is home to the Mirembe Kawomera coffee cooperative, which sells Delicious Peace, the first fair trade-certified Ugandan coffee to reach the U.S. market. Mirembe Kawomera buys coffee from over 700 Jewish, Muslim, and Christian farmer members. The existence of a Jewish community and its key leadership role in the founding of the coffee cooperative deserves some explanation. In the 1880s, British missionaries converted the powerful Bugandan chief Semei Kakungulu to Christianity. Kakungulu conquered much of Uganda for the British, but became disenchanted with the British when they limited his domain to a 20 mile square plot near the small city of Mbale.
Kakungulu broke with the British in 1913 when he became a Malachite Christian (similar to Messianic Judaism). After studying the Bible further, however, Kakungulu came to believe that the Judaism as described in the Hebrew Bible was a more authentic religion. In 1919, he circumcised himself and his sons and declared his community Jewish. After Kakungulu’s death (from malaria, in 1928), his followers split into two groups: one that reverted to Christianity and another, the Abayudaya, who became devout Jews. The Abayudaya tended to isolate themselves from Christians for fear of persecution. The period from 1971 to 1979 was especially full of turmoil. When Idi Amin came to power as president of Uganda, he declared a ban on Judaism. As a result of severe persecution, most of the Abayudaya converted to other religions, although about 300 continued to practice Judaism in private, at great personal risk. After the fall of Amin in 1979, when the Abayudaya began to rebuild the synagogue on Nabugoya Hill, local leaders tried to evict them, and several members of the Abayudaya community were jailed. The matter was finally resolved when one of Kakungulu’s grandsons, a Christian and a lawyer, wrote to the district administrator, explaining the legality of the Abayudaya claim to the land, which had been given to them by Kakungulu.
Today, most of the community lives around the Moses Synagogue on Nabugoya Hill and in various neighboring villages. Christian and Muslim neighbors once looked upon the Abayudaya with disdain and hatred, but relations have improved significantly and many now view members of the Abayudaya with respect and admiration. It should also be noted that the community has been growing at a steady rate, now numbering over a thousand. In 2003, J. J. Keki, a direct descendant of Kakungulu, led the effort to create a cooperative for coffee growers in the region, including not only the Jewish coffee growers, but Christian and Muslim coffee growers as well. The result was Mirembe Kawomera, Luganda for “Delicious Peace.” In partnership with Thanksgiving Coffee Company in Fort Bragg, California, the cooperative provided farmers access to fair trade certification and enabled these small farmers to earn sustainable livelihoods. 1 However, the cooperative’s success may be as much about the community behind the coffee as it is about the fair trade movement.
Within the tight-knit Nabugoya Hill community, economic activity and strong social ties are mutually reinforcing because community members respond to a holistic set of costs and benefits. For community members, rationality does not necessarily mean maximizing profits, income, or material goods. Mirembe Kawomera pursues the mission of supporting sustainable livelihoods for local farmers; the highly productive leader of the women’s craft cooperative refuses to tie compensation to productivity in the name of community sustainability; and the cooperative’s founder has adopted 15 AIDS orphans because his land can support them. This article illustrates that building community can be as rational as maximizing profits in that it is more likely to produce happiness or well-being.
The fair trade movement has been only partially successful in accomplishing its social justice goals, and it has been most successful not at the global bureaucratic level of negotiating with mega-firms such as Starbucks, but when fair trade certification directly supports well-functioning community-based cooperatives. Also, the cooperative movement itself has been successful only insofar as it has encouraged investment in socially connected communities. While the social science literature sheds light on the ways in which cooperatives promote social capital both within the local community and also between the local community and more affluent communities, it remains too focused on instrumentalist understandings of social capital (i.e., what economic or political goods social capital can help a community access) while virtually ignoring the value, as measured in human happiness, of community and sociability in its own right. Marx’s alternative notion of “the social productive power of labor” comes closer to capturing the real value of community, envisioning a future society “[w]hen the laborer co-operates systematically with others, strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.” 2
Adopting the perspective of the Nabugoya Hill community, this article critiques the mainstream individualist calculus of rationality. Drawing on both the subjective well-being (happiness) literature and the everyday lived experience of Nabugoya Hill community members, it suggests that more human connectedness and less materialism increases human welfare and satisfaction. The pervasiveness of a capitalist market ideology that privileges a particular type of rationality can make it difficult for economic activity through an alternative framework. For this reason, examples drawn from interviews in Nabugoya Hill offer transformative possibilities. Through the eyes of this community, a more holistic economic logic emerges as well as a rationality-of-justice approach that can perhaps even be meaningfully applied in a modern post-industrial capitalist society like the United States.
2. Fair Trade and Peasant Cooperatives
The fair trade movement seeks to provide “an alternative approach to conventional trade that aims to improve the livelihoods and well-being of small producers by improving their market access, strengthening their organizations, paying them a fair price with a fixed minimum, and providing continuity in trading relationships.” 3 It attempts to accomplish these goals mainly by working through cooperatives that buy the coffee directly from farmers eliminating a series of middlemen.
Fair trade coffee products offer farmers better prices and a higher percentage of the final retail price, which tends to be higher than mass market or even organic coffees prices. Fair trade importers guarantee a price almost twice that of conventional Arabica and more than three times that of conventional Robusta. With a fair trade price premium of $.59/lb. for Arabica and $.75/lb. for Robusta, the price advantage for small farmers in the fair trade market is indisputable. 4 The Michiza cooperative in the Rincon region of Mexico pays members $.68 per pound as opposed to $.23 per pound offered in the traditional market. 5 Incredibly, Mirembe Kawomera in Uganda pays its farmers $1.50 per pound for Robusta coffee, which is considered an inferior product to the Arabica grown by Michiza farmers. Mirembe Kawomera’s coffee sells for a retail price of $11.00 per pound, which is a relatively high price for Robusta on the world market. What explains this success?
The cooperative has found a marketing niche that enables it to sell its coffee not as a no-name commodity, but as a product that connects farmers with loyal consumers. Mirembe Kawomera claims to be selling not “just a cup of coffee,” but rather “a just cup of coffee.” This justice comes in the form of interfaith cooperation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians which appeals to religious organizations in the United States (synagogues, churches, and mosques) where the U.S. distributor, Thanksgiving Coffee, does much of its marketing. Thanksgiving Coffee, in addition to paying the fair trade premium and marketing the social justice aspects of the coffee, also paid the cooperative a $1 subsidy per pound for the first four years, and a $.25 per pound subsidy beginning in 2009 when coffee prices began to skyrocket. The idea has been to subsidize farmers with little experience producing high quality, organic coffee until they could compete without the subsidy. The subsidy has helped pay operating expenses and build vital infrastructure like storage facilities and husking machines that have decreased the environmental-based vulnerability of farmers. The Mirembe Kawomera cooperative itself makes no profit, but does take $0.12 per pound for operating costs in addition to the Thanksgiving subsidy. This relatively small cooperative itself does not have the infrastructural capacity to obtain fair trade certification or provide farmers with the training and support necessary to grow coffee for a specialty market. For this it relies on Gumutindo, a second-level cooperative comprised of 10 smaller cooperative members that pool their resources to obtain both an export license and fair trade certification. 6
Critics of the fair trade movement recognize that the cooperatives’ focus on trade and small scale cannot address the systemic exploitation within a global capitalist system of trade and production. Mirembe Kawomera, as a coffee buyer, does not change the relations of production. Members are not workers, but small landowners. Mirembe Kawomera’s contribution is in supporting peasants and their families so that they can remain in their communities rather than being forced to sell land and move into urban areas. The failure to appreciate the social justice significance of such a cooperative in terms of the relations of production stems fundamentally from a narrow conceptualization of “the peasant” both within Marxist and liberal modernizationist theory. Both continue to see peasants as backward or irrational, either standing in the way of revolutionary change or of “economic progress.” Yet, peasants fighting for access to small plots of land in order to maintain sustainable livelihoods currently constitute perhaps the most vibrant, radical, and truly transnational set of movements in the world today. 7
The stark dichotomy drawn in the political economy literature between the peasantry and the proletarian, rural and urban, agro-exporters and subsistence farming obscures more than it illuminates. The experience of rural coffee farmers in former post-colonial countries underscores a more nuanced and complex reality. For example, in the rural Mexican region known as the Rincon, home of the Michiza Cooperative, “subsistence agriculture plays a central role in the family economy, even though it is best known for its coffee production. In fact, history has recently gone into reverse in the Rincon, with subsistence increasing in importance and even reclaiming its former dominant position.” 8 Anthropologist Paola Sesia describes this retreat to subsistence production as a process of “recampesinizacion” or repeasantization. 9 In Zimbabwe in the early 1990s, 75 percent of households maintained dual homes in town and country. Some have referred to this phenomenon as semi-proletarianization, whereby petty commodity production and wage labor together sustain a household. 10 This phenomenon can be seen among rural Ugandan coffee farms, where a mix of coffee export crop earnings and subsistence agriculture sustain most households.
The emerging literature on semi-proletarianization and repeasantization is important not just because it challenges the idea of a linear economic trajectory of history common to both the Marxist and liberal economic traditions, but also because it refuses to theorize peasants as primitive and void of political agency. Indeed, participation in fair trade cooperatives has created multiple synergies for rural coffee farmers worldwide through formal educational processes as well as participatory experiences. In Mexico, the UCIRI and Michiza co-ops thrive under a participatory democracy governance model. According to one Michiza member, the co-op “generates a social conscience, and leads to other kinds of results, such as links with broader indigenous movements.” 11 Similarly, Mirembe Kawomera has promoted participatory democracy both in terms of democratic self-governance – Mirembe Kawomera’s Board of Directors which consists of six members (two Muslim, two Christian, and two Jewish, a man and a woman from each group) 12 – and in terms of the community’s organized support for the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), an alternative political party organized around the political participation of women and marginalized poor communities. In all of these cases traditional gender roles have been challenged as well, raising the status of women in the public sphere and encouraging their participation. 13
Moreover, the small farmers often challenge the hegemonic capitalist model that privileges profit over people and environmental sustainability. In sharp contrast to the narrow profit maximizing logic employed by large coffee plantations, they tend to approach economic decisions more holistically. In Mexico, indigenous peasants produce 64 percent of Mexican coffee, and according to Jaffee:
[i]n terms of strict productivity, these small farmers are very inefficient compared to large plantations. The largest five percent of Mexico’s coffee farms produce fully one-third of the national harvest. However, these small growers are quite effective by other measures, such as their ability to sustain vital local communities and ecosystems.
14
Given the extremely risky and unpredictable environment in which these small farmers operate, they have quite rationally adopted an approach more likely to sustain their livelihoods and communities in the long run than profit maximization. Biodiversity does not simply reflect good morals, but a good business sense when the ultimate goal is maximizing the likelihood of keeping the family farm and feeding the family from month to month.
Moreover, the evidence from peasant farmers’ experiences globally suggests that cash crop production for the global market and subsistence agriculture can be mutually reinforcing. Coffee acts as a shock absorber that protects subsistence as long as coffee production does not eliminate other crops, in which case “the relationship [changes] to one of dependence and vulnerability.” 15 Cooperatives have the potential to support small farmers in their efforts to secure sustainable livelihoods on the land, and given the right set of underlying socio-cultural conditions, cooperatives are not only community enhancing, but competitive in a globalized coffee market.
While price is often a major motivator for small farmers, the benefits of cooperative membership include less visible aspects. Gumutindo provides services such as eyeglasses so that farmers can better care for and assess their coffee quality. It provides drying mats to ensure a cleaner process as well as workshops on how to grow organic coffee. It also sends expert consultants out to each farm several times a year. Gumutindo, with its 10 member cooperatives, not only has a significant impact on the Nabagoya Hill community, but the entire Mbale district of rural Uganda. The Michiza cooperative also offers training to improve quality, yield, and organic methods. 16 Another of the most successful grassroots-organized cooperatives in Mexico, Unión de Comunidades Indigenas de la Región del Istmo (UCIRI), operating in the state of Oaxaca with more than 2,300 families, provides organic advisors and operates an independent agriculture school, Centro de Educación Campesina (CEC), offering a curriculum based on the realities of peasant life. 17 Other tangible benefits of membership include tri-annual payments (before, at harvest, and upon sale), which provide farmers with greater liquidity and lessened dependence on traditional and often exploitative credit sources. 18
But even tangible benefits tend to be viewed through a community lens by member farmers. Small farmers understand that access to capital and higher profits buy them and their communities extra breathing room, enabling families to stay on their farms and invest time in community building. Because most indigenous farmers do not view coffee through a profit-maximizing lens, even if they are losing money, they tend not to abandon coffee unless they cannot find a way to feed their families. The strongest indicator of success for Michiza, UCIRI, and Mirembe Kawomera members is that they send significantly more of their children to post-secondary education than do independent farmers. 19 What is more surprising is that the children of farmers, even those with higher levels of educational attainment, tend to stay in the community rather than leave in search of other opportunities. One reason could be projects like the clothing factory founded by UCIRI in nearby Ixtepec to provide jobs for the producers’ children in order to encourage them to stay in the community. 20
However, despite the achievements of fair trade cooperatives like these, fair trade has not managed to significantly transform the exploitative nature of world coffee trade as a whole. Considering, as Miller has, Marx’s claim that commodities are the bearers of social relations as well as Smith’s concept of the corruption of moral sentiment, helps to make sense of this. In the case of coffee, social distance in the context of today’s global economy tends to perpetuate class exploitation. 21 The very structure of the global trading system promotes distance: distance between consumers and producers in terms of the product chain, but also in terms of geography and social connections. According to Karl Polanyi’s path-breaking study of capitalist development, under modern capitalism the production of goods that had traditionally been situated in systems of social relations became “disembedded” from those systems. 22 Such a market economy tends to value price as a guide to rational economic decision making, often at the expense of values like human connectedness, culture, or environmental sustainability. Nowhere is this more evident than in the global market for high value crops like coffee, especially when produced on large corporate estates for a mass market.
Distance tends not only to be physical but relational, psychological, and symbolic. For example, in the Tanzania-U.S. coffee marketing chain, most of the monetary value tends to be generated through symbolic production, through branding, promotion, and advertising. 23 Farmers generally receive 1 percent-4 percent of the final sale price. At the higher end café market, where value becomes concentrated in both symbolic production and in-person service attributes, farmers often receive less than 1 percent of the final sale price. 24
An analysis of commodity chains underscores the processes through which each link tries to gain more power in the form of higher returns or lower costs. In 2001 when prices for farmers hit a low, “[w]hile millions of coffee families experienced severe deprivation and even famine, the ‘big five’ coffee corporations—which together control 69% of the world’s roasted- and instant-coffee market—reported record profits.” Starbucks posted a 41 percent jump in first quarter profits that same year. 25 Given the problems inherent in the mainstream coffee market with respect to supporting sustainable livelihoods and environmental practices, does the fair trade cooperative model offer a viable alternative? Certainly if social distance promotes both the corruption of moral sentiment and commodity fetishism, then movements that shorten social distance are instrumental in addressing class exploitation. Miller, for example, explains the anti-sweatshop movement as a direct result of purchasing which brings consumers into contact with those who produce. 26
The inequities in the mainstream coffee market ultimately reflect more than the exploitative behavior of monopolistic firms such as Starbucks. These inequities emerge out of a market society where economic transactions are systematically disembedded from social context. This process is best illustrated through Block’s notion of a continuum of “marketness” which categorizes exchanges based on the extent to which price is the dominant factor. 27 Marketness and social embeddedness can be thought of as opposite ends of the spectrum. 28 In the market for commodities such as coffee, sugar, and cocoa characterized by “high marketness,” opportunistic or instrumental behavior tends to win out over family and community ties. But the “evolutionary” process of such commodity markets is a product of conscious, commodity promoting state policy rather than the natural evolution suggested in liberal economic theory. 29 Thus, in order to denaturalize opportunistic “market behavior” as the status quo, it may be necessary to begin to think about market behavior as something that can fall anywhere along the spectrum from highly commodified to deeply socially embedded. For example, Delicious Peace coffee has been to an extent decommodified through the lessening of social-cultural distance between producer and consumer, even though the physical distance remains. Insofar as a customer base committed to supporting an interfaith community in Uganda has been cultivated through religious and progressive organizations in the United States, coffee sales reflect more social embeddedness than a typical commodity market.
While in global markets “traditional” social-cultural values have, to an extent, been replaced by an economic logic focused on economic efficiency in the form of price and productivity, this formulation sets up a stark dichotomy between what is economically logical and what is socially or culturally logical. This logic frames social justice advocates as economically irrational. An alternative logic might systematically point out the irrationality of narrowly defined market logic and the economic rationality of promoting sustainable livelihoods, strong communities, and environmentalism.
3. Theorizing Community
While scholars, especially in the social sciences, have begun to examine the benefits of social networking and human connectedness in systematic ways, still lacking is an understanding of the conditions under which economic actors will include the calculus of community into decision making. The following section focuses on the ways in which social capital functions both within local communities, but also between sometimes very distant communities, in order to secure tangible benefits for the materially poor. Following that is a critique of social capital literature that is wedded to the framework of methodological individualism and quantification to such a degree that it cannot conceive of community as intrinsically valuable rather than simply a means to materially measurable ends for individuals.
3.1. Social Capital and Religion
Nabugoya Hill, home to Mirembe Kawomera, exudes community spirit, or what academic researchers regard as social capital. One of the defining elements of this community is the combination of intense religiosity with interfaith integration and cooperation. Although often divisive, religion can provide a greater sense of community around a shared purpose. Some scholars have even suggested that the evolutionary function of religion is to bind human beings into cooperative groups. 30 Studies of African-American churches in the United States suggest that “research on social capital could benefit from an effort to learn from the community-building traditions in communities of color,” given that these churches have the highest rate of membership and participation among religious and other civic groups. 31 Others have shown that religious institutions offer benefits to poor communities by bringing individuals into the fold of congregations already endowed with social capital, and by attempting to empower poor communities, and not just their own congregants. 32 Moreover, it appears that “[r]eligious participation is less affected by socioeconomic position than almost any other form of social behavior,” which makes it a promising vehicle for building and reinforcing social capital in materially poor communities. 33
Yet one concern among scholars is that social capital based on religiosity, although a potentially potent force for collective action, can lead to damaging exclusionary practices. When does the strengthening of community within identity-based groups tend to weaken ties between groups? The scholarship has certainly demonstrated the ways in which community ties can be highly exclusionary. 34 But new research, focused on trust within and between communities, suggests that extensive networking ties within the community, especially those that “bridge major social categories such as religion” will foster more generalized social trust and are more, rather than less, likely to welcome outsiders. 35
Putnam has suggested that social entrepreneurs who act as brokers play a key role in building bridging social capital structures. 36 In Nabugoya Hill, J. J. Keki, a leader among the Abayudaya Jews, built broad-based community support for a coffee cooperative after having been elected to the local council by Muslims and Christians who make up the majority in his district. His vision has been “to make the cooperative a model of championing peace and development in the area. We also hope that others will emulate the principles of Mirembe and bring about peaceful coexistence in communities.” 37
Keki has helped to build social capital bridges both between the Abayudaya Jewish community and the Muslim and Christian communities in Nabugoya Hill, and also between the Abayudaya and the U.S. Jewish community. When poor communities act collectively and employ bridging forms of social capital with outside actors, they are more likely to secure the resources that are necessary for addressing poverty. In the United States, community organizing and development efforts have built affordable housing, fostered micro-enterprises, improved schools, and, more generally, helped to “reweave the social fabric of torn communities.” 38 The interfaith mission, already representing one form of social capital, has made accessible for the Abayudaya a social capital bridge that seldom is realized: one between poor and more affluent communities, in this case the U.S. Jewish community. The rural Ugandan community has benefitted in the form of new schools, a health clinic, new water sources, and many other tangible benefits. For the U.S. Jewish community, this relationship has cultivated a sense of common identity among progressive Jews, which has in turn sustained a commitment to alleviate poverty. This mutually reinforcing commitment to social justice among communities in possession of bridging forms of social capital has been well documented. 39 The U.S. Jewish community and the Abayudaya not only share a common identity as Jews and a commitment to poverty alleviation, but also a common commitment to interfaith cooperation, an idea bigger than either community. This makes Delicious Peace coffee more than a brilliant marketing ploy; it also constitutes a way of building and sustaining community development in Nabugoya Hill.
While there has been new interest in investigating the role that social capital plays in community development and combating poverty, and in “[m]aking use of social capital as an analytical construct [that] requires a shift from the individual to the community as the unit of analysis for strategies to combat poverty,” 40 researchers still characterize social capital as a set of resources that inhere in relationships and may not combat poverty directly but rather leverage investments in human capital and household financial resources. Underlying this notion of social capital, in sharp contrast with Marx’s notion of cooperation, remains a commitment to a methodology that privileges individualism. This approach systematically fails to capture community-level benefits, what Marx refers to as developing “the capacities of [the] species.” 41 For example, there might be no measured increase in a villager’s income, and yet there could be significant investment in a clean water source for the village as a whole. Where does this welfare increase get measured?
Mainstream approaches to social capital and development, insofar as they seek to leverage social capital in the name of promoting modernity and destroying traditionalism, fail to acknowledge the fact that the modern capitalist emphasis on individualism could actually be an impediment to the formation of social ties of the kind needed in materially poor communities to combat poverty. For example, geographical mobility that accompanies modern development efforts often leads to higher individual incomes but also more crime, less family stability, and less community. 42 Perhaps income or even individual assessments of happiness are not always the most appropriate measures of human welfare.
More importantly, the issue is not just one of emphasis between the individual level and the community level. The pursuit of individual-level benefits through a modern capitalist development model often negatively affects community-level outcomes in “traditional” societies. The “erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends” has been documented in most advanced capitalist countries. 43 The decline of these relations, which capitalist ideology claims as efficiency gains, constitutes massive losses when viewed from a ground-up societal perspective. Even Weber, a founder of the modern capitalist ethic, found distressing the change in the way people associate with each other in modern society. Whereas formerly their associations were communal, “based on subjective feelings of parties that they belong to each other, that they are implicated in each others total existence, human groups had become associative, resting on a rationally motivated adjustment or interest or a similarly motivated agreement.” For Weber, the problem was not so much self-interest as it was the emphasis on “rational calculation,” a rationality that scorns spontaneous affections. “The market is no respecter of persons.” 44 In the end, lack of attention to social justice in the form of community and cooperation is problematic even from a pure market efficiency perspective. As Polanyi claimed, “[w]ithout cooperation and distributive justice, a viable political and social context for a market economy cannot be sustained.” 45 This view still contrasts sharply with the way economics modeling has constructed the relationship between economic development and human well-being.
3.2. Bringing the Social Back In
While there has been a laudable shift over the past decade among social scientists toward taking the study of social interaction seriously as an analytical category, scholars remain focused on the “capital” aspect of “social capital.” The focus on capital, as in a source of investment, leads to an almost purely instrumentalist approach. That is, what is of value is not human connectedness itself, but rather the tangible benefits that social capital can generate. According to Krishna in his comprehensive study of democracy and development through the lens of social capital, “[s]ocial capital is an asset, a functioning propensity for mutually beneficial collective action, with which communities are endowed to diverse extents.” 46 This widely accepted definition suggests that social capital is useful insofar as it leads to beneficial collective action. Krishna elaborates on this definition by adding, “Citizens’ capacity for mutually beneficial collective action can be enhanced through purposive action.” 47
While public action often grows out of social capital rich communities, the question is one of priority. Should analysts and policymakers value strong community only insofar as it results in political victories, broadly defined? Krishna asserts, “High levels of social capital do not necessarily translate into better outcomes…unless there are agents present in the village who are capable and effective.” 48 Note the emphasis on outcomes separate from the existence of “high levels of social capital” which is a much better proxy for a socially thriving community. There is no sense in which this social aspect is understood to have intrinsic value. This type of instrumentalist view measures the value of social capital by the number of civic organizations or instances of mutually beneficial collective action. It tends to treat community as a means to an end but fails to recognize community as an end in itself. If human welfare is the goal, then living in a socially thriving community, where people stay and invest in the community rather than leaving for the city as soon as their individual “human capital” will allow, should hold intrinsic value.
Moreover, even what gets interpreted as politically instrumental may have intrinsic value. For example, the notion that purposive action can enhance the capacity for mutually beneficial collective action makes such action sound valuable because it enhances citizens’ ability to demand resources from the state or other powerful entities. But according to psychologists, the act of collective engagement in purposeful action “bigger than oneself” is precisely what seems to make people happy. 49 Marris posits that for humans, meaning is derived primarily from relationships with others. 50 According to Layard, the biggest source of happiness is “absorbing yourself in some goal outside yourself.” 51 One of the reasons why people join religious organizations is to form community around a higher ideal. But beyond a higher purpose, the notion of being a part of something social seems to contribute just as much to human satisfaction. As Layard writes, “[w]e like to have good relationships, not only as a means to other ends (rational calculus), but also for the direct satisfaction they provide.” 52 A conceptual reorganization that prioritizes the social aspects of life over the explicitly material ones would go a long way toward furthering our understanding of subjective well-being. Hanifan, the scholar who coined the term “social capital,” argued in 1916 that “if [a man] comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community.” 53
The problem is that without clear ways of quantifying a variable, social scientists tend not to value it. For economists in particular, the tendency is to mathematize, biasing the discipline toward subject matter that could be measured. 54 The celebrated mathematical economist Leontieff wrote an open letter to Science saying that “the king is naked, but few in academic economics recognize this…page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas…entirely arbitrary assumptions…irrelevant conclusions.” 55 In short, the scholarship on social capital has come a long way toward recognizing the potential benefits of social capital as a valuable tool especially for those living in material poverty, but it still fails to recognize that social needs are not the same as material living conditions. Even when extreme material deprivation exists, often it is the social deficits that are most devastating, as underscored by Wilson’s (1996) description of the deterioration of inner-city neighborhoods: “[T]he flight of jobs destroys businesses, social institutions, and youth socialization processes, leading to a condition that [can be]…characterize[d] as social isolation.” 56 There is a serious case to be made for bringing the social back in as an analytical outcome even if it does not lend itself to quantification.
4. The Nabugoya Hill Community and its Interfaith Coffee Cooperative
The Nabugoya Hill community has managed to support traditional livelihoods among small coffee farmers, avoiding a significant exodus to the cities, and maintaining a strong commitment to distinct cultures and traditions. This suggests a relatively high level of human satisfaction among villagers despite continuing material poverty. This is surprising given that in general the lowest per capita income countries report the lowest levels of happiness. 57 On the other hand, similar studies show that it is possible to be happy with almost no material wealth. For example, with per capital incomes well under $10,000, the Maasai and the Inughuit report some of the highest levels of happiness. What these peoples have in common is a tendency to reuse materials, maintain a close relationship to nature, and support tight-knit communities. 58 In each case, the calculus of community has become deeply embedded into villagers’ economic decision making, rather than the community changing to adopt “rational” modes of economic decision making.
In and around Nabugoya, Muslims, Jews, and Christians live intermingled with very few visible differences among them. 59 Certainly community-minded leaders have worked hard to employ strategies for community improvement that bring people together rather than promote resentment. That is, both conflicting and harmonious relations require encouragement through social, political, and economic infrastructures. But, it is much easier to promote harmonious relations when people know each other. A community can only get so big before individuals lose the ability to know others on a personal level. Some have referred to this as an extended society. According to Smith and later free-market advocates such as Hayek, the extended society with its emphasis on impersonal market interactions is what makes modern society so productive and efficient. 60 But the loss of interpersonal connectedness in our modern, hyper-individualized, market society also makes it possible to hide or externalize societal costs. Examples abound of unethical, unsafe, and environmentally damaging production processes like sweatshops, industrial meat and agricultural production, child labor, and the massive financial system crisis of 2008. If all of the costs, including the use of bio-fuels, global warming, health problems, degradation of societal values, loss of community, risk of financial losses, and reduction in levels of happiness, were added up, they likely would outweigh the benefits of producing in these particular ways.
One way to improve social scientists’ assessments of human satisfaction is to critically examine the way economics conceptualizes consumption. People consume goods because they get utility (happiness) from doing so; the consumer’s willingness to pay serves as a proxy for utility received. The individual consumer should only be willing to pay for a product if consuming it makes her happier. Since goods have positive utility, more consumption is always better than less. This constitutes the basic rationality assumption. Why would a rational person choose to consume less when they could afford more?
But more income or consumption does not necessarily make us happier. We are no happier today than we were 50 years ago, even though average incomes have more than doubled. 61 Scholars have explained this seeming paradox by pointing out that we earn more in order to buy more, but the more we buy, the more we want. And the more we want the more we have to work to afford. The cycle continues with consumption never quite satisfying desire. Layard refers to this as the hedonic treadmill. 62
Also, outside forces influence consumer desires through the process of commoditization: the tendency of commercial forces to colonize everyday action, converting more and more of life’s activities into purchase decisions. 63 For example, children can play together using found objects or bought toys. The United States tends toward the commercialized nature of play, using bought toys representing “high marketness.” In rural Uganda, children play soccer with rolled-up plastic bags. While it is difficult to determine relative levels of happiness between children in Nabugoya Hill and children in any given U.S. suburb, it is uncommon to hear conversations between parents and children in Nabugoya Hill in which the children are begging for a new toy. What we do know is that “[a]s a general matter, subjective well-being varies… inversely with material aspirations.” 64 Moreover, “[t]he increase in output itself makes for an escalation in human aspirations, and thus negates the expected positive impact on welfare.” 65 Also, people tend to evaluate their own well-being in comparison to the material wealth of others. 66 This calls into question even the idea of pursuing economic growth strategies, a given in development studies, as a means of securing economic welfare. Economists excel at a science that values the satisfaction that one individual consumer gets from consuming more of a particular market commodity, but fails to account for the ways in which satisfaction derives from relationships with others.
Moreover, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between consumption and community connectedness. Putnam’s data suggest that TV consumption has negatively impacted social capital in the United States. No one owns a television in Nabugoya Hill; as a result, community members spend a lot of time interacting with each other. Should these facts inform the calculation of utility derived from TV consumption? Moreover, this tension between individual “rationality” in consumption decisions and social connectedness appears to exist in multiple market arenas. Should rational consumers shop at the grocery store or the farmers’ market for their weekly produce? The grocery store offers lower price options and certainly greater variety and convenience. On the other hand, according to sociology survey data, people are on average 10 times more likely to have a conversation at their local farmers’ market than at their local grocery store. 67 This example seeks to get at not just the moral relevancy of justice and community, but the economic relevancy. If the goal of economics is to maximize happiness, then justice and community, rather than consumerism, might offer more promising and indeed “rational” paths.
Rural African communities appear not to have been significantly influenced by the ideology of hyper-individualistic rationality. Rebecca, a leader among the Abayudaya Jews in Nabugoya, and founding member of a women’s craft cooperative, offered an alternative framing of economic incentives and market processes when asked about how the cooperative operates. The cooperative produces hand-knit kippot (skull caps traditionally worn during Jewish prayer) as well as other items marketed mostly to U.S. Jews. 68 When asked how the cooperative distributed earnings, Rebecca said that it depended on total earnings and the percentage the group agreed to plow back into buying supplies. When asked specifically about incentives and whether the women were paid according to how many kippot they knit, Rebecca appeared visibly uncomfortable. Eventually she said that everyone earned the same. She also made clear that she knit much faster and produced many more kippot than most of the others. When asked again whether paying according to productivity would not provide an incentive for others to knit faster, Rebecca insisted it would not, and that the example set by those who knit faster provided that incentive. Why? Because the belief that their efforts were helping sustain the community is what incentivized the women’s work. Paying piecemeal would have promoted resentment, which would eventually undercut the commitment to community and destabilize the cooperative. The community possesses a fragile but valuable asset – a strong sense of belonging – that set the context for economic decision making, which served to strengthen community rather than weaken it. Rebecca fully understood the incentive mechanism at work here. Nor is this just one woman’s idiosyncratic insight. Psychologists who study incentives have shown repeatedly that external incentives reduce internal incentives to perform, so higher incomes do not necessarily constitute greater incentives to be productive. 69 Marx also attributed the “heightened efficiency of individual workers” not to any kind of economic incentive, but to the stimulation of “animal spirits” in the “social animal” that is man. 70
Rebecca’s perspective runs counter to what students of economics are taught, that there are trade-offs between efficiency and equity: you do not guarantee people pay regardless of productivity because they will not have an incentive to work. In standard economic analysis, there are of course times when justice and equity can be compatible with efficiency, but that compatibility relies on a strong belief in consumer sovereignty. That is, justice can be profitable if the consumer desires it. Dolphin-free tuna can actually increase profits if consumers desire to save dolphins and are willing to pay a few extra cents a can. If consumers desire sweat-free clothing, the market will meet that demand. The exponential growth of the organic food industry underscores this phenomenon at work. In this view of the world, consumer tastes are taken as given and the market simply responds to them.
But this model ignores the political and social environment in which tastes form. To a great extent, advertising and ideology fuel our desires. According to Princen, Maniates, and Conca (2002) we
…need to see consumption not just as an individual’s choice among goods, but as a stream of choices and decisions winding its way through the various stages of extraction, manufacture, and final use, embedded at every step in social relations of power and authority.
71
Alternatively, embeddedness in community can mitigate these influences. The degree of consumerism in a society has been shown to have a negative feedback effect on the degree of connectedness in communities, as Putnam’s television data suggest. In addition to luring people toward a solitary activity, television also promotes consumerism through advertising. Since consumerism can negatively affect community, and community has been shown to be foremost in the determination of happiness, the rationality assumption more is better may not be so rational.
The emerging field of sufficiency studies has demonstrated that when all the costs are truly accounted for, sufficiency as a guiding principle is often more efficient than efficiency.
72
The sufficiency principle holds that it is possible to have too much of a good thing, particularly in a complex and inter-connected world where cause and effect are often unpredictable until it becomes too late. In this sense, “[s]ufficiency is an idea, a principle, indeed an ethic for sustainability.”
73
For cooperatives like Mirembe Kawomera and Michiza, a calculus of community and sufficiency rather than pure profit seems to define the bottom line. Moreover, this calculus appears to be a superior model when it comes to most measures of quality of life. The following description of Michiza cooperative members’ motivation for joining underscores the point:
While some Michiza members in Yagavila and Teolasco were initially drawn to the organization by the higher prices it offers…[t]hose who have stuck with Michiza for several years do so because it makes them actors in a collective process, one that has deeper meaning than any simple measure of loss and profit.
74
Mirembe Kawomera seems to operate on a similar model. The mission of the cooperative is to create sustainable livelihoods for local farmers and their families. It is possible to see this at work on many levels, including the fact that money does not seem to be the primary motivation for working at the cooperative. The chief financial officer, Mohamed Kakaire, holds a degree in accounting and business from the University of Kampala. With these credentials, Mohamed could find work in Kampala earning three times the salary he is currently earning. He makes 800,000 Ugandan shillings per month, about $500. Moreover, he does not actually get paid every month because cash flow depends on harvest and final sale of the coffee. When asked why he chose to work for a rural village cooperative, Mohamed expressed a desire to be part of something meaningful. Like any good businessman, he believes in building the quality of his product, but he also believes in the hope that the product will bring sustainable livelihoods.
Saving subsistence farming has typically been framed within the dominant discourse as nostalgia, a degree of sentimentality that allows rational judgment and efficiency concerns to be thwarted to the ultimate detriment of the poor. But a holistic account of the human and environmental costs and volatility associated with growing full-sun coffee for export to the exclusion of subsistence crops suggests otherwise. Full-sun coffee requires more chemical inputs than traditional coffee. DDT, Malathion, and benzene hexachloride are banned in the United States, but used regularly on large commercial coffee plantations in the Third World. The coffee shows little residue, but the effects on the environment and plantation workers have been well-documented. 75 The only way one can describe coffee production on agro-industrial coffee farms as more efficient is by defining productivity as coffee beans produced per acre while refusing to account for long-term human welfare and considerable spill-over effects.
In contrast, Mirembe Kawomera encourages farmers to improve their coffee crops by planting shade-providing fruit trees and other edible and medicinal plants in part because coffee grows better in a diverse plant environment, but also because this strategy provides small farmers with a cushion against hard times in the coffee market. In this way, coffee farmers are both cash-crop exporters, something typically associated with neoliberal globalization, but also subsistence farmers, something usually considered incompatible with modern export agriculture.
Due to economies of scale, small plot farmers are often bought out by large international conglomerates that promote mono-crops, destroying eco-diversity and rural communities in the process. In the 1970s, new hybrid varieties of coffee were developed that could be grown in full sun. International aid organizations have subsidized technification in Latin America with at least $80 million in “aid” between 1978 and 2004. These efforts, rather than reducing rural poverty as they were intended to do, “encouraged unsustainable practices and have often dragged farmers into endless cycles of overproduction followed by precipitous price drops.” 76 Moreover, planting genetically altered, full-sun coffee requires clear-cutting and planting only coffee, which makes growing subsistence crops or other cash crops mutually exclusive with coffee production. Hence, small farmers find it much harder to ride out the times when world coffee prices plummet. In Mexico, even when prices are completely depressed, they harvest enough for the household because it is the main drink for adults and children alike. Although this is not the case in most of Africa where coffee is not a staple drink, and where in fact coffee processing tends to take place at the site of import, 77 fruit trees and other staples serve as an economic cushion against hard times.
Because of changes in the global coffee market in the post-1989 era of neoliberal globalization, small coffee farming communities have faced serious threats. Beginning in 1963, the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) operated as a sort of global coffee cartel that assigned quotas to both producing and consuming countries and managed to keep coffee prices relatively stable until it functionally collapsed in 1989. The ICA’s maintenance of a price floor for coffee meant that even when the market tanked, small plot farmers who had adopted new full-sun methods did not have to abandon their coffee plants in order to plant something they could eat. But the collapse of the ICA in combination with increased reliance on monocrops and technification dramatically increased price vulnerability among small farmers, often with severe consequences for communities and natural environments. Coffee retailers fared much better in this new environment than coffee growers. For example, in 1989 coffee producing nations earned approximately $10 billion in a $30 billion a year coffee market. By 2001, they earned less than $6 billion in an $80 billion market. 78 As a result, independent coffee farmers worldwide have had to move away from coffee production, which has led to extensive land clearing by large corporate farms.
The small farmer cooperatives and the fair trade movement that provides a market for their coffees around the world have not only allowed farmers to keep producing in traditional ways that are far less environmentally destructive than large agro-exporters, they have also incentivized organic production and increasingly sound environmental practices that represent improvements over even traditional practices. In Mexico and Uganda, organic production is becoming more closely linked to fair trade thanks to the resources provided through cooperatives like Gumutindo and Michiza. 79 The documented environmental synergies created by the Michiza cooperative’s introduction of organic techniques suggest the relative ease of incentivizing good environmental practices because when the costs of destructive practices cannot be externalized beyond the farm or village, the farmer or the community itself enjoys the benefits of sustainable farming. In the Rincon, organic methods are not only being transferred from fair trade to conventional coffee producers, they are being applied to other food crops. 80 Fair trade has also encouraged investment in an elaborate system of erosion-control infrastructure as well as soil conservancy, increasing filtration, enhancing bird habitat diversity, and keeping acidic coffee pulp out of local streams. 81 Coffee farms have in some places been the only refuge for endangered species that typically live in forests. In Puerto Rico, the forest was almost completely cut down, but now it is returning on the site of abandoned coffee plantations that have been replaced with small shade-coffee farms. 82
The beauty of coffee is that it actually does better when planted in amongst diverse plants. The symbolism of this is not lost on the Mirembe Kawomera cooperative’s founder, J. J. Keki, who points out that coffee thrives in a diverse environment, just as people do. Everyone in the Nabugoya community, Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike, seems to believe in, and act on, in their everyday lives, the notion of interfaith cooperation and peace. And it is not as if there are not important resources to potentially fight over. The Abayudaya community has been the beneficiary of a considerable amount of aid, from U.S. Jewish organizations in particular: water tap stands; communal electricity; an elementary school; a high school, where Jewish, Muslim and Christian teachers and administrators work collectively to educate teenagers of all faiths; a health clinic; and a guesthouse for outside visitors. Most of these donations have been directed at the Jewish community, but in no case has the Jewish community segregated itself by keeping the material benefits of aid to themselves. For example, the guesthouse which houses mostly observant Jews from the United States, buys chickens from Musa, a devout Muslim chicken farmer and part-time history teacher at Kakungulu High School. 83 He raises the chickens according to code (taught by Jewish community members) and sells them to the Abayudaya, who then kill the chickens according to the laws of kashrut. In much of the world, the laws of kashrut tend to maintain a certain degree of insularity, separating Jews from non-Jews. But despite the intense religiosity of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in this area, they see themselves as part of a broader community that includes neighbors of all faiths. As such, a community council with representation from all three religious groups makes decisions concerning community priorities and resource distribution for the residents of Nabugoya and the surrounding villages.
Under certain conditions, economic decision making can support and reinforce community values. Mirembe Kawomera formed in the context of an already well-functioning community that had long employed a transparently democratic model to prioritize and distribute resource needs. This basic infrastructure of justice facilitated the formation of the cooperative in the first place. Similarly, the cooperative has also promoted further investment in community development through a shared commitment to social justice.
Some might argue that connectedness makes sense in a traditional agricultural economy, but not in modern industrial society where hyper-individualistic behavior does make sense both in terms of incentives and ideologically. In terms of incentives, the fact that most Americans do not currently live in strongly-networked communities means that when they weigh the costs and benefits of economic decisions, they are likely to undervalue the role of community in their own happiness. In fact, scholars have shown quite convincingly that we are not very good judges of our own interests. We act as if buying more material goods will increase our happiness, but the evidence suggests the opposite. The problem is made more acute if our collective short-term consumption behavior works to destroy community cohesiveness in the long run. The evidence is building that there is an irrational, or at least self-defeating, aspect of hyper-individualism and consumerism in modern capitalist society.
On an ideological level, the problem with the language of economic liberalism is that the decision to contribute to the collective, as opposed to spending limited time on a more monetarily lucrative pursuit like working an extra shift, can only be understood as sacrifice. But people who engage in community-building seem to receive as much from the relationships they help build as they give. Through a narrow lens, it may look like people who think communally and limit their own consumption are acting irrationally. But when it is acknowledged that tastes and desires are shaped by prevailing ideas, advertising, and power structures, it is hard to go back to a calculus of rationality that treats consumption decisions one ipod at a time. 84
Scholars have made inroads rethinking assumptions about what makes people happy: more community, less consumerism. Societies that embrace a version of the market epitomized by neoliberal globalization do a better job of promoting goods than well-being, while societies that invest in sustainable community-building, even at the expense of traditional measures of productivity, can often support markets that reinforce social justice and a sense of well-being. Economists sometimes denigrate altruism, yet happiness is likely to increase the more people care about one another. 85
The Nabugoya community is by no means materially well off. Their mud-and-stick housing lacks insulation, electricity, and plumbing. They suffer from malaria and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But despite these challenges, there is a genuine sense of well-being, what some might dare call happiness, in the community. When asked, the people of Nabugoya Hill, to a person, attributed this well-being to the strength of their community and the way they work together. It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of the economic rationality of justice, embedded in communitarian values.
5. Conclusion
Naomi Klein, among other critics of global capitalism, has argued that the only way to fight the exploitation inherent in globalized markets is to create binding state regulations that will force mega-corporations to produce sustainably and pay living wages. 86 The way to do this in a world where the concentration of corporate power is expanding is not to argue against profit-maximization as a business goal, but instead to demonstrate that profits or economic benefits accurately calculated are likely to be maximized only in a socially embedded context that takes a holistic approach to costs and benefits. We need to broaden our definition of profit and rationality. The fact that profit, narrowly defined, has taken precedent over other socially valuable functions is quite unnatural and only the result of two centuries of ideological training. The fair trade market for some social justice advocates holds the promise of systemic transformation. Vandana Shiva argues that all trade should be fair not just some niche market. “We can’t be the marginals, this must be the mainstream. Ultimately – although this view runs counter to the dominant ideology of the times – we are first and foremost citizens, not merely consumers.” 87 Jaffee expresses a similar sentiment when he describes the fair trade movement as “one practical expression of a broad social movement that aims to place human needs and the environment above profit and corporate power. In Mexico it is about reordering markets to benefit the most disadvantaged ‘un Mercado donde todos quepamos,’ a market where we all fit.” 88
At its best, according to Jaffee, “fair trade is about reinserting noneconomic values –morality, decency, sustainability, community – into market transactions.” 89 But, it may be more transformative to insist on redefining what economic values are, instead of asserting the importance of “non-economic” values. If these “non-economic” values directly affect well-being, how are we to separate them from “economic” values? Despite their social welfare myopia, economists as a group tend to be considered quite rational, while people who downplay monetary return and consider things like decency, sustainability, or community are often considered irrational. Ultimately, those who are concerned with such issues are beginning to call for a more fundamental transformation of capitalist society and its “distinctive rationality.” 90
The World Bank has reported that social capital researchers have been more successful at documenting the beneficial impact of social capital than at deriving a policy prescription on how to invest in it. 91 This is a consequence of viewing social capital as capital, a purely instrumental means to an end. If scholars took seriously the intrinsic value of community, the policy prescription is straightforward: public policy should subsidize activities that promote community life, not because it increases income or material benefits, but because it improves the quality of lives directly. 92 Mirembe Kawomera is a testament to this very approach and it is redefining economic rationality in the process.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
In fact, the cooperative has tended to raise member incomes across the board. In addition, it has created approximately 50 new jobs, which have allowed farmers of all faiths to supplement farming incomes. The cooperative itself is a non-profit organization, which functions as a means to create sustainable livelihoods for poor farmers.
6
Gumutindo supports over 3,000 farmer members from ten co-ops, each of which is represented on the board of Gumutindo. End of year profits are distributed to member farmers as a proportion of the farmer’s production.
7
See for example Via Campesina, MST, Korean Farmers’, and the Biodynamic Farmers’ movement in India.
8
Jaffe 2007: 71.
11
Waridel 2002: 72; 
: 89.
12
All member farmers (60 percent Muslim, 30 percent Christian, 10 percent Jewish) vote for board members. Clearly, the make-up of the board does not represent members of each religious group equally based on the numbers of farmers from each group. However, the interfaith principle of equal weight given to each of the three religions seems to have broad-based community support. None of the farmers I spoke with complained about the distribution of board seats. Also, people do not necessary vote based on religious affiliation in the district, as evidenced by J. J. Keki’s election as local representative in a district where Muslims make up the vast majority of the population.
13
Jaffee 2007: 244; : 73-75.
18
Jaffee 2007: 111; : 139.
32
33
34
Warren, Thompson, and Saegert 2001: 7.
37
Interview with J. J. Keki, July 2008.
56
Warren, Thompson, and Saegert 2001: 3.
59
There are few significant wealth disparities among these groups. The social distances between classes are much smaller in East Africa than in Latin America because colonial administration “impeded the formation of national dominant classes” (Bunker 1987: 17). However, there are individuals like J. J. Keki, founder of Mirembe Kawomera and a direct descendant of a tribal chief, who inherited a larger than average parcel of land. But even here, the cooperative has served an income redistribution function rather than a means of enriching some at the expense of others. It operates according to the principles of concept of reciprocity, an economic principle more common in pre-market societies. As J. J. said to me when I asked him why he established an interfaith cooperative, rather than just a Jewish cooperative, “If we get rich and our neighbors don’t, it will breed resentment.”
68
Note that the women who belong to the cooperative are Jews, Muslims, and Christians who know a marketing niche when they see it.
69
Lane 2000: 173; Layard 2005: 159; .
77
It was odd that while staying in Nabagoya to conduct my research on a coffee co-op, I was served imported instant Nescafé.
83
Profits from the guesthouse are used to support a preschool and a high school that serves the community.
87
Shiva remarks at press conference, Fair and Sustainable Trade Symposium, 2003.