Presentation short abstract

Ethnography of transnational networks distributing Zapatista coffee from Chiapas shows how commodification reshapes land, labor, solidarity and ecological relations. The study examines how producers and activist circuits confront capitalist value regimes and craft resistant forms of economic life.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how agrifood commodification in southern Mexico is imbricated within broader dynamics of violent land dispossession, peoples’ displacements, and ecological degradation. Anchored in Marxian political ecology, it draws on ethnographic research of “rebel” coffee networks to interrogate how value is produced, extracted, and contested through labor and land relations, through choices over distribution and intermediaries, and forms of social reproduction. The empirical focus is a network of smallholder coffee producers in Chiapas and their allies from European social movements, whose transnational distribution channels challenge neoliberal commodity regimes.

The analysis reveals how capitalist agrifood frontiers rely on processes of abstraction, standardization, and enclosure to extract surplus value from land, labor, communities, and ecosystem conditions — often at the cost of ecological devastation and human life itself. At the same time, these networks generate alternative value regimes grounded in solidarities, ecological and community care, autonomous processes, and enduring resistance to commodification.

The paper investigates how value is materially and aesthetically constituted and politically contested in struggles over land and autonomy. By doing so, it highlights agrifood commodification as a form of dispossession and extractivism, comparable to mineral or resource frontiers. In a context of escalating polycrisis and violent dispossession, the paper argues that agrifood systems must be understood as critical terrain of capital accumulation as well as of racial and ecological violence. Recognizing these dynamics, it calls for political ecologies that center agrifood value-struggles as central to socio-environmental transformation and just futures.