Coffee commodity chains serve as a bidirectional link between producers and consumers worldwide, and they also interconnect local processes and those taking place in overseas markets. Historically, there has been an extraordinary diversity in the ways in which cultivation, harvesting, transport, processing, and export of coffee have been organized. Consumption patterns and especially consumer preferences have changed over time in ways that need to be taken into account but whose effect on coffee producers throughout the tropical world varies considerably in accordance with local situations and dynamics.

Coffee farmers' responses to changing external conditions have been far from uniform, and cannot be explained merely as passive reflections of world market trends and fluctuations. This chapter uses the development of Costa Rican coffee production and commercialization, together with brief references to other cases, as a starting point for comparative discussion of interactions between local agroecological, economic, and social conditions, on the one hand, and changes in the international market for this product, on the other.

Special attention is paid to the process by which producers of a given country – in this case Costa Rica – come to produce coffee with certain specific attributes that consumers abroad appreciate and for which they are willing to pay. The Costa Rican coffee commodity chain is compared, in passing, to other ones where “high-quality” coffee is produced and subsequently traded under various arrangements, but with substantial – though, of course, variable – smallholder participation at least in cultivation and sometimes in processing and/or transportation.