Coffee tourism and community development in Guatemala

Agritourism, a key segment of the rural tourism sector that incorporates both a working farm environment and a commercial tourism component, is well studied in the European and North American contexts. However, there is a lack of comparable data for developing countries. This paper explores the development of coffee tourism by a Guatemalan coffee cooperative. It highlights two significant findings regarding the benefits and limitations of agritourism initiatives in less developed countries. First, it details how the development of the coffee tour helped to strengthen the cooperative's organizational capacity in several specific ways, including the introduction of a diversified managerial structure, extensive training opportunities, and new professional positions. However, it also demonstrates that the coffee tour would have been very difficult to initiate without the substantial external support the cooperative received. Second, the paper explores the content of the coffee tour itself, which moves beyond a narrow focus on agriculture to affirm indigenous identity and culture. The coffee tour echoes the themes of the larger identity economy that has grown exponentially in the past decades (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Although the tour emphasizes community traditions and history, its benefits are not evenly distributed among residents; while cooperative members receive the benefits, the potential costs, both tangible and intangible, associated with an influx of tourists are borne by the community as a whole. This poses a challenge to the common deployment of concepts like community and local in tourism development and research.