i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

Juan del Río Coco (Figure 1). CLUSA agents spend the workweek at the regional sites
and conduct daily farm visits to the outlying communities. Thanks to the CLUSA
vehicles and project-supported fuel, I was fortunate to have access to some very remote
sectors during this initial period of fieldwork. I would later find that this was a luxury I
could not afford once on my own.
At our initial meeting, I discussed my intention to conduct ethnographic research
with small farmers who were growing organic coffee. I explained that I was interested in
farmers’ receptivity to these alternative programs and the impact they had on agrarian
communities. Shane mentioned that very little USAID funding goes to alternatives such
as organic agriculture: “USAID feels that conventional agriculture addresses immediate
needs of feeding hungry, impoverished regions. Organic agriculture takes more time,
more manual labor, and yields less. They tell me, ‘You can’t feed the world on organics.’
I disagree. We need to learn a new way to produce food without depleting our [natural]
resources.”
CLUSA’s strength, according to Shane, was the personal attention given by
technicians. He explained that other organizations inflate their numbers and claim to
spend US$300 per farmer. CLUSA spends US$6,000 per farmer, and their programs have
a much better retention rate. Executive Director Stanley Keane expressed a similar view.
He believed that responsible commerce would take the lead in international sustainable
development. He recommended that I read Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce in order
to better understand CLUSA’s direction in enabling small farmers to farm organically for
the export coffee market. With CLUSA’s help, farmers would learn how to grow high-
quality products without the need for chemical-based inputs. According to Stanley, the
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