Teleconnected vulnerabilities of Mexican and Vietnamese coffee systems

The case study of smallholder coffee producers’ vulnerability in Mexico and Vietnam was published in the journal Environmental Science and Policy in 2008. The authors Hallie Eakin, Alexanda Winkels and Jan Sendzimir explore cross-scale linkages and teleconnectons in the Mexican and Vietnamese coffee systems. This case study is an addition to the SES library and was entered in 2013 by Ashwina Mahanti at Arizona State University. 

The original case study illustrates that vulnerability in a globalized world is no longer merely a place based construct. Adaptive responses too, are not contained within the location in which they originate and can in fact mould the vulnerability of households in distant locations via the global market. The robustness framework provides a novel conceptual lens to study these interactions as processes that involve a change in infrastructure providers and infrastructure over time, thus shaping the incentives and interactions between resource users and infrastructure providers. The frameworks also allows for a dynamic analysis enabling the study of local-global feedbacks across systems over time.