Fair Trade from the Ground Up: New Markets for Social Justice

Introduction

3 O n a busy Saturday in the summer of 1993, a group of protesters organized by the US/Guatemala Labor Education Project (US/ GLEP) picketed in front of Starbucks’ recently opened 200th store in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square. They wanted Starbucks to stop purchasing coffee from plantations where workers were treated poorly and not paid fair wages. The company’s coffee buyer appeared on the scene and conversed earnestly with some of the protestors. Later that day he had tears in his eyes when he told me—the store’s manager—that the demonstrators were right: the Central American businessmen that the buyer dealt with had little regard for the workers who tended their plantations or for the smallholder farmers to whom they paid a pittance for unprocessed coffee cherries . But why had activists targeted Starbucks instead of the multinational corporations that control the vast majority of the coffee industry? It would be impossible for Starbucks to meet US/GLEP’s demand because the small company (remember, this was 1993) almost always purchased beans from brokers rather than directly from producers. There was no way to pinpoint where the coffee came from. Fast-forward to 2011. The former coffee buyer has been one of Starbucks’ senior vice presidents for quite some time, in various capacities, including vice president for social responsibility. As for me, after leaving the company Introduction Introduction 4 in 1996 to pursue my graduate education at the University of Washington, I thought about coffee mainly as a pleasurable caffeine source, although I was aware of “Fair Trade” coffee’s launch in the United States,1 that the activist group Global Exchange had—by threatening to demonstrate at stores across the country—successfully lobbied Starbucks to buy some of it, and that the company had established some preliminary sourcing guidelines in an attempt to address mounting concerns about workers and the environment . Then, in 2001, the founder of the US Fair Trade labeler TransFair USA (now Fair Trade USA) visited the University of Washington campus , accompanied by a Central American coffee farmer. This was my real introduction to Fair Trade as a way for smallholder farmers to organize democratically, capture more of the export value of their produce, and sell it in a market that guarantees a floor price. I was surprised to learn that, at the time, Fair Trade activists had done a much better job of organizing and certifying coffee farmer cooperatives than of creating a market for the coffee they produced. Less than half of it was being sold under Fair Trade terms. Under the mentorship of political scientist Margaret Levi, a posse of undergraduate honor students and I set out to learn why such a large gap existed, and what could be done to narrow or close it. Our research yielded suggestions about how to better integrate Fair Trade into the specialty coffee sector, chronicled winning strategies employed by student- and faithbased campaigns, and proposed ways to institutionalize Fair Trade coffee (i.e., make it the only option) in large public and corporate facilities (Levi and Linton 2003; Linton, Liou, and Shaw 2004). It set me on the path that has led to this book. Pragmatic and sociological questions motivate this work. Is the Fair Trade movement living up to the hopes of its early and current advocates? What strategies seem most likely to succeed in further expanding Fair Trade’s market share? How can a solidarity and social justice–based movement best negotiate growth that involved “mainstreaming” Fair Trade to include businesses such as Wal-Mart? Sociologists often distinguish Fair Trade as a transnational social movement that seeks to mobilize people in the global North on behalf of other people they will probably never meet. As such it is quite promising because it offers a ready (albeit not all-encompassing) solution to the problem of unequal relationships within networks of global trade (Keck and Sikkink 1998). But how does Fair Trade construct solidarity between farmers, activists, businesses, and consumers—or fail to do so? Introduction 5 Fair Trade is one of many connected “new” social movements based on NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and networks as opposed to trade unions or political parties. Along with organic farming, living wages, the preservation of indigenous cultures, animal rights, localized food sovereignty , and the protection of biodiversity, Fair Trade is part of a larger push for sustainability and against the exploitation of people...