Condiciones para la adaptación de los pequeños productores de café ante presiones económicas mediante procesos de “upgrading” en la cadena productiva

Livelihood analysis has been used successfully to illustrate how the behavior of families is the result of the interaction of its members in a world of restrictions and institutional opportunities on the local, regional, national, and global scales. Livelihood analysis proposes that families organize their assets and resources to effectively face the exogenous pressures and changes in their institutional or biophysical atmosphere. One of the main challenges of the livelihoods approach applied to rural communities is the understanding of how families link to market changes deriving from economic globalization. This paper argues that the response by families to external economic pressures is better understood through the analysis of their participation in the global commodity chains related to the requirement for upgrading in the chains and depending on the institutional environment in which families operate. An application is made to the case of coffee producers in Veracruz, Mexico, which illustrates a case of decoupling between the policies developed for small producers with their requirements to keep competitive in the coffee chain.