At QUE ONDA, our approach to sourcing green coffee is rooted in something simple but often forgotten in this industry: real relationships. We know that you can’t build a sustainable coffee system on extractive economics, quick profits, or the idea that growth alone is a sign of progress. Instead, a fair and resilient future depends on models that centre equity, environmental health, and community well-being.

This is where our work connects deeply with the principles of degrowth a movement that challenges the idea that more is always better, and instead asks what kind of world we could build if we prioritised people and the planet over endless accumulation.

Degrowth isn’t merely about cutting back or consuming less. It’s about reshaping the systems that structure our lives. Systems that currently link human worth to productivity and progress to expansion. Under capitalism, economic stagnation rarely leads to balance. Instead, it produces harsher competition, growing inequality, and a society where scarcity is engineered to keep people divided and dependent.
You see this clearly in coffee.

Large corporations consolidate power, dictate market conditions, and push prices down. Producers especially smallholders face climate instability, unpredictable pricing, and chronic financial insecurity. Those who plant, harvest, and process coffee shoulder almost all the risk, while those at the top capture the reward. This isn’t an accident. It’s the logic of extraction functioning exactly as designed.

Mutual Aid as the Foundation of a Just Coffee Economy

In a society built around competition, supporting one another becomes harder, sometimes impossible. Mutual aid offers an alternative. It’s not charity, branding, or a marketing strategy; it is communities choosing to look after each other without waiting for permission from markets, investors, or institutions.

When we speak about sustainability in coffee, we are not referring to certification badges or polished greenwashed language. Real sustainability demands a redistribution of power: who holds it, who doesn’t, and why. As long as profit remains the organising principle of production and trade, we will keep addressing symptoms rather than causes.

If we are serious about equality, ecological balance, and mutual aid, then we must be willing to question our relationship with class, money, and markets themselves.

From Coffee to a Degrowth Future

Many mainstream sustainability models hesitate to address the root of the problem: economic systems built on extraction. Frameworks like the “Doughnut Economics” offer important contributions but still stop short of confronting the deeper issues—such as private property, reliance on markets, and profit-driven decision-making.

But we cannot afford solutions that avoid naming the cause of the damage.

As climate pressures grow and corporate consolidation accelerates, we need systems based on cooperation rather than competition, wellbeing rather than profit, and ecological harmony rather than endless extraction.

The future of coffee we believe in is one where producers have real control over their land, their labour, and their livelihoods—not a future where they remain vulnerable to the whims of global markets.

Looking to the Past to Shape What Comes Next

The idea that capitalism can simply slow down, embrace low growth, and naturally evolve into a fair and stable system is wishful thinking. Historically, stagnation under capitalism has led to deeper exploitation, ecological aggression, and what we now call “disaster capitalism”.

If meaningful change is our aim, we need both a theory and a practice that address the roots of inequality and ecological collapse. This includes the critiques of capitalism made by thinkers like Karl Marx—not to recreate past systems, but to understand why exploitation persists and how we might build something fundamentally different.

A Call for Radical Change

Some people hesitate to connect Marxist ideas with the degrowth movement due to the environmental failures of past socialist states. But the shortcomings of the Soviet model do not invalidate Marx’s core insights into class struggle, labour exploitation, and capitalism’s inherent instability.

If we genuinely want a just and sustainable future, we must be bold enough to rethink the entire system, not just soften its edges.

At QUE ONDA, our commitment to equitable coffee sourcing is one small contribution to a much wider movement. By standing with producers, questioning exploitative structures, and building relationships grounded in solidarity, we are helping shape a future where coffee and life is no longer defined by extraction, accumulation, and inequality.

Degrowth isn’t about retreating from the world. It is about choosing a world that is freer, fairer, and more humane. A world where supporting one another is a norm.

Thanks for reading and for caring about a fairer coffee future!

Ewelina Wojtas - Founder

Degrowth, Mutual Aid, and the Future of Coffee