Sick explores contemporary issues of gender, empowerment, access to resources, and Fair Trade as she examines how Costa Rican coffee-producing households cope with the complexities of a globalizing world economy. Using a commodity approach, she integrates household, regional, and global processes. "Farmers of the Golden Bean" challenges previous assumptions about the nature of economic change and the sustainability of household producers in the global economy.

For centuries, new technologies and expanding networks of production and consumption have been changing the face of rural economies in significant ways. Millions of rural dwellers have found survival increasingly difficult and have fled to urban centres. Others have remained: some retrenching, struggling to just subsist, others attempting to innovatively redefine their place within new rural economies.

For the past 30 years, rural economies have largely been ignored by policy makers, but recent growing concerns about food security, environmental degradation, climate change, continued...