Is Specialty Coffee Shortchanging Itself?

My thoughts recently have been a little ramshackle -- namely, my mind keeps bouncing between a bunch of topics and issues. Let me clarify.

I come from a background of training in history, city planning, and resource economics. My graduate work focused on systems-level logistics, food systems, and public policy choices, with a focus on the relationships between urban and rural geographies. All of this relates to how people interact with these environments and are impacted by policy. My work is that of Eric Hobsbawm, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jared Diamond, Karl Polanyi, Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Jane Jacobs, Paolo Solieri, Miguel Altieri, and Alice Waters, all rolled into one. 

This work and research has followed into my work in coffee -- I've been less interested in, say, the technical aspects of grinders, than I have been in the economic relationships and systems of specialty coffee. I want to understand the socioeconomic impacts of our business not only on farmers, importers/exporters, roasters, cafes, and coffee consumers, but how specialty coffee as an industry can work for and against these parties and goals. And right now, specialty coffee is at, without sounding too pedantic, at a crossroads.

We want to pay baristas more and professionalize the coffee worlld, but we are afraid to increase prices. We want to pay coffee farmers for quality, but we still attach ourselves to the C-market. We want to change the way we do business, but QSR-based business models are still all we have. (And unsaid, we acknowledge all this in conjunction with, at least in the United States, a several-decades long stagnation and depreciation of wages across the board, meaning the income our customer base operate with is less than and increasingly less than it was before, and harder to reach in the sense of the slice of the consumer pie who will take us seriously --  though SCAA profiling shows specialty coffee drinkers with a strong affinity for the product across income levels.)

We talk a lot about machinery but not about ecology. We hear talk about water filtration systems but not water sources. And topics on the need for agricultural solutions to scenarios like roya and global warming don't come from agroecology or botany but from the most expensive end of that platform -- genetic modification through laboratory testing. And the more I'm listening to online conversations and in person chatter, I'm wondering if we aren't really missing the wider picture here. And it's frustrating because a lot of these measures are hard to take on  in singularity -- they require both cooperative and structural changes to the way we do business. 

Specialty coffee is a number of things: a subset of the c-market. A values-based supply chain. A different way of drinking or thinking about coffee. But in a lot of times I've begun to feel as if specialty coffee writ-large only believes itself to be the first, and uses those other terms and concepts -- Third wave! Direct trade! Six item menus! -- as window dressing. The number of places that call working with their importer direct trade are legion; the number of those doing direct trade with pricing disconnected from the c-market fewer still. There are companies that spend a lot sending and training single staff members for competition but how many would benefit from investing that money into their staff? 

Specialty coffee can be something more than just a subset of the C-market of coffee. And we owe it to ourselves to figure out what that can be. For now I'm working on a couple of short papers -- based on a few research docs I submitted to the Yale Sustainable Food Conference, which I'll be attending -- that I will post here soon, but I need to ask, do these sound unreasonable? Or are these things that specialty coffee should and can work on?