Producing the Local Through the Global: the Paradoxical Mixture of Agricultural Localization of Laotian Coffee in Taiwan

• Main Authors: SZU-AN CHEN, 陳思安
• Other Authors: Po-Yi Hung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ry3qf4

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 地理環境資源學研究所 === 107 === Because of the distrust of the industrial food production and the resistance against global food supply system, alternative agro-food systems have emerged worldwide since 2000. Alternative agro-food systems emphasize local production and consumption. “Being local” has gradually symbolized the “high-quality” food produced in a specific area with closed boundary. Meanwhile, this image of “bounded local” has been enhanced through the official endorsement, such as certification of origin. In addition, the effect of“local food system ” also happened in the third coffee wave which started in 2000. Gradually, consumers changed their consuming habits. People came to realize the benefit of single-origin coffee. Explained by Erna Knutsen, single-origin coffee is the premium coffee – or “specialty coffee” – made from exceptional beans that grown only in ideal coffee-producing climate areas. Single-origin coffee features a distinctive flavor, which is the result of the unique characteristics of the soil that produces it. The fact that consumers gradually started to favor specialty coffee more than commercial formula beans shows how local, specialty products become an essential element in the coffee production system. Furthermore, recently as more consumers chose to shop for specialty coffee, they not only choose their product base on the taste and smell, but they would pay attention to the appearance and production process. (Taguchi, 2012). However, from production to sales, the process of so-called local food production and consumption involves multi-scalar connections and politics, which complicate the practices and meanings of “being local.” This research uses the coffee produced in Laos and its consumption in Taiwan as the case to investigate the issue. I argue that the production of “local” Laotian coffee has been multi-scalar processes assembling elements from colonial legacy to cross-regional transfer of modern processing technologies. Yet , on the consumption side, the multi-scalar processes have been muted in order to purify a “local” Laotian coffee with images of “primitiveness” and “nature.” As a result, “local” has never been the antonym of "global ". The production and marketing processes of Laotian coffee manifest the multi-scalar political economic operations from production to consumption.