Fulbright Scholar Spencer Ross Gets First Taste of Qualitative Research in South America
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Assoc. Prof. of Marketing Spencer Ross inspects coffee cherries on a farm in Colombia, where he spent four months earlier this year as a Fulbright Scholar, studying inequities in the specialty coffee value system.
07/25/2024
By Ed Brennen
“What’s this one?” Ross asked, pointing to a small sapling.
“That’s Ombligon,” the farmer said.
Ross, a coffee connoisseur who was in Colombia earlier this year as a Fulbright Scholar studying inequity in the $24 billion specialty coffee industry, had never heard of Ombligon. A quick Google search on his phone revealed that it is a rare arabica variety that was popular at the 2023 World Barista Championship.
“Who told you to plant this?” Ross asked the farmer, who said he’d been given the seeds from a roaster in Europe.
To Ross, this was an example of an inequity faced by specialty coffee farmers, who make just $800 a year on average in Colombia: They use their valuable land, at their own financial risk, to cater to the ever-changing tastes of consumers in faraway countries.
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Because of Colombia's mountainous terrain, coffee farming there is done by hand more than in places like Brazil, where machinery can be used in production, Spencer Ross says.
“Consumer taste functions as a modern form of colonialism, imposing a standard on the way farmers are supposed to grow their products and determining the value of their coffee,” says Ross, who has researched the coffee industry throughout his career.
The conversation with the farmer also was an example, Ross says, of the value of spending four months conducting qualitative research on the ground in Colombia, the third-largest coffee producer in the world (after Brazil and Vietnam). Ross recorded 45 hours of interviews with 35 “actors in the value chain” — farmers, roasters, cafe owners and government officials — and took more than 1,500 photos.
“I could not have done this over Zoom. I needed to see what the farms were like to be inspired and ask those follow-up questions that allow for themes to emerge,” says Ross, who conducted his research with Assoc. Prof. Andrés Barrios Fajardo from his host institution, the Universidad de Los Andes.
Recipients of Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards are selected by the Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. The awards support international research by faculty with exemplary records of academic and professional achievement, service and leadership potential.
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Spencer Ross is interested in returning to Colombia to continue his research through the Fulbright Specialist Program, which enables shorter trips of 2 to 6 weeks.
Q. Why did you want to focus on specialty coffee for your Fulbright?
A. Because of the craft and the human component, specialty coffee prides itself on personal relationships — “We’ve got baristas who will make you a nice drink,” and “We've got importers who have these relationships with these farms.” So, specialty coffee consumers feel as though they are doing better for farmers. But there are plenty of specialty roasters and other actors who are not making things more equitable across the value chain, although they will claim to consumers that they are. Because it’s specialty coffee and not a commodity coffee like, say, Folgers, those claims hold up a little bit better among consumers. It’s a case study of pitting luxury, in the form of coffee consumption, up against the realities of the commodity itself, because when you get on to the farms, a lot of the farmers don't see consumption in the same way. They have different clients with different needs, and their biggest concern is cash flow.
Image by Spencer Ross
Spencer Ross examines ripe coffee cherries on a tree in Colombia.
Q. You talk about the need for farmers to become “price makers” instead of “price takers.” Why is that important?
A. Coffee is rooted in colonial history, smuggled by Dutch traders in 1616 out of Yemen, and the industry has a long history where the people who grow the coffee are oftentimes not in a position to be demanding a particular price. The analogy I like to use is, say you go to a farmers’ market and a pound of blueberries costs $6.99. You don't say, “Well, I feel like giving you $4 a pound,” because in countries like the U.S., we see a price and we don’t haggle. For coffee producers, a difference in power dynamic still exists in ways that mirror what had happened during colonialism. The challenge is getting farmers in a position to advocate for themselves in some way.
Q. How do you do that?
A. Some of that is through educating the farmer on what the value of their coffee is worth and what they should be willing to accept for it. Some of it is basic business education. For some of the farmers, social media has been an invaluable tool to have agency in their storytelling and to represent themselves directly to potential buyers of specialty coffee. The challenge for me is identifying how farmers can rebalance postcolonial power dynamics without myself contributing to or reinforcing those dynamics as someone from a consumption-dominant countr.y.
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Spencer Ross shows his UML pride while visiting a coffee producer outside of Neiva, Colombia.
Q. In a perfect world, what would an equitable specialty coffee value system look like?
A. The answer to that question is not one that most people want, and that is to have some sort of structural component to make things more equitable. The industry had this at one point with the International Coffee Agreement, which collapsed in the mid-1980s. It managed export controls on a country-by-country basis and helped determine the price controls within these countries, so things were more equitable for farmers. But the downside is that it didn't allow for the competition that farmers have now. If the ICA had not collapsed, I don't know that the specialty coffee industry would have taken hold. On the other hand, having no market structure has led to inequity in the way that money flows from consumers to producers. There’s this paradox of equity in the face of marketplace choice, and it’s one I’m still trying to figure out how to resolve. After being there for four months and talking with all these people, I have more information, but less of an answer to give. It's easy for us in consumer-dominant countries to say, “Here's what we think the solution would be.” But that's not the way that the people on the ground necessarily see it, and having that understanding makes it much more complex.
Q. What’s next with this research?
A. I’ve presented some of the early thematic work in the Sustainable and Equitable Coffee Markets Research Group and at the AMA Marketing & Public Policy Conference. We have at least three themes turning into very strong papers, and I’m thinking of writing a book. I’m also thinking of ways that I can incorporate the work into potential courses at UMass Lowell. This was my first foray into qualitative research, and now that I’m going through the interviews and coding them, I’m realizing that analyzing qualitative data is a bit more challenging than I anticipated, especially with half my data in Spanish. But coming from a survey and experimental tradition, I enjoyed being able to go in-depth with the interviews. I realize that this is the type of work that I was meant to do.