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

significantly more government support in the neo-liberal era than the other local co-ops.
San Juan’s Liberal mayor is a member of the Corcasan co-op as well.
Corcasan has always been an organization of independent farmers. As mentioned,
the coffee crisis of the late 1990s forced many farmers to join cooperatives for access to
better markets and specialty coffee certifications. Corcasan began to incorporate small
farmers into their membership during this time. They are still run by a small minority of
large-scale farmers, but they are able to comply with Fair Trade standards that dictate that
half of the coffee exported under Fair Trade certification must be from small-scale
producers.
Corcasan was operating under the state Rural Development Institute (IDR) to
channel development funds from the IADB. The IDR project had enormous capacity to
expand and develop Corcasan’s productivity and publicity. Its goal was to increase
quality coffee production and improve marketing of co-ops’ coffee. The project funded
the design of a label and brand name for Corcasan’s coffee and the distribution of
Valencia orange saplings and coffee-drying boxes to farmers. It designed websites and
pamphlets for the co-op. It also paid for refurbishing farmers’ depulping machines and
supplied a state-of-the-art drum roaster for the co-op. IDR hosted a number of public
events through Corcasan in which participants had to sign an attendance sheet. The
attendance sheet documents the number of attendees in order to report back to funding
agencies. Some funds went to infrastructural improvements such as of road repairs and
the first satellite cyber café in San Juan, El Centro de Información y Desarrollo Local
(CIDEL).
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