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Collective Action by and for Small Producers in the Kenyan Coffee Supply Chain: A Critical Business Ethics Analysis

In this article, we employ critical business ethics (Eastman, 2013) to examine the empirical, normative, and experiential dimensions of small-scale coffee production in Kenya. We begin with an ethnographic narrative of the experience of a smallholder growing coffee in Kenya that draws on the experience of one of the authors. We then describe empirical results relating to the potential of collective organization to increase prices received by Kenyan smallholders. We then consider alternative normative interpretations of the ethnography and the quantitative results. We conclude with a psychological discussion of relations between unequal parties in the supply chain that links the ethnographic, quantitative, and normative material of the earlier sections. In wealthy nations, agricultural production has become a small sector in terms of employment. In the United States, less than 1% of the labor force works in agriculture (World Factbook, 2013). By contrast, very large numbers of people in Sub-Saharan Africa are engaged full-time or part-time in agricultural production; in Kenya, the focus of this article, 75% of the labor force consists of agricultural workers (World Factbook, 2013). Many of them are independent or semi-independent producers who work their own land and sell what they produce. A central aim of this paper is to examine the life situations and the economic prospects of one such group of producers, low-income coffee growers in Kenya. Currently, the agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa is not only very large but also largely impoverished. In Kenya, agriculture accounts for only 25% of gross domestic product (World Factbook, 2013), even as it accounts for 75% of the labor force.