Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies

2. Fair Trade and the Specialty Coffee Market: Growing Alliances, Shifting Rivalries

What’s Fair? 23 Rossi, B. 2006 Aid Policies and Recipient Strategies in Niger: Why Donors and Recipients Should Not Be Compartmentalized into Separate “Worlds of Knowledge.” In Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. D. Lewis and D. Mosse, eds. Pp. 27–50. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian. Sainsbury’s 2009 Sourcing with Integrity. http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/cr/index.asp?pageid=36, accessed October 21, 2009. Scott, J. C. 1976 The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Starbucks 2007 Starbucks Corporation Fiscal 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report. http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/csrreport/Starbucks_CSR_FY2007. pdf, accessed October 20, 2009. Stecklow, S., and E. White 2004 What Price Virtue? At Some Retailers, “Fair Trade” Carries a Very High Cost. Wall Street Journal, June 8. Stiglitz, J. 2002 Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. Taylor, P. L. 2005 In the Market but Not of It: Fair Trade Coffee and Forest Stewardship Council Certification as Market-Based Social Change. World Development 33: 129–147. Ten Thousand Villages 2007 Fair Trade Sales Increase around the World! http://www.tenthousandvillages. ca/cgiin/category.cgi?type=store&item=pageZAAAB45&template=fullpageen &category=news, accessed September 2, 2007. Tesco 2008 Tesco Corporate Information. http://www.tesco.com/corporateinfo/, accessed January 23, 2008. Thompson, E. P. 1971 The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century. Past and Present 5: 76–136. Tiffin, P. 2002 A Chocolate Coated Case for Alternative International Business. Development in Practice 12(3–4): 383–397. Woost, M. D. 1997 Alternative Vocabularies of Development? “Community” and “Participation” in Development Discourse in Sri Lanka. In Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives. R. D. Grillo and R. T. Stirrat, eds. Pp. 229–254. Oxford, UK: Berg. Ziegler, C. 2007 Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This page intentionally left blank 25 Part I Global Markets and Local Realities Regulating and Expanding Fair Trade The first set of contributions in our volume, juxtaposed with the claims of much fair trade discourse, offers ethnographic explorations of how fair trade operates on the ground in four vastly different commodity systems: coffee, bananas, tea, and cut flowers. As the first and still most extensively marketed fair trade commodity, coffee fixes in the minds of many consumers the image of fair trade as a production system based on smallscale independent farmers employing family labor. Julia Smith notes that this perception remains widespread despite a growing trend toward fair trade certification of coffee marketed by transnational corporations such as Kraft and General Mills, which source the vast majority of their products from large commercial farms operated with wage labor. Meanwhile, many of the original aims of the fair trade movement, including commitments to sustained relationships with small-scale producers, infrastructure and development investments in farming communities, and returns above the world market price, have now been adopted in the specialty coffee market dominated by smaller, often locally based brands. Although specialty roasters operate outside the formal fair trade certification system , they may purchase the coffee of small growers at a price several times higher than the prevailing fair trade price, which has declined in real terms over the past two decades. As a distinct market niche, then, fair trade has lost much of its original significance, according to Smith, while the higher prices paid by specialty roasters have led many small-scale growers to forgo fair trade certification and its burdensome requirements in favor of the less hierarchical specialty market. The St. Lucian banana growers featured in Mark Moberg’s chapter are in many ways emblematic of the small-scale household-based producers traditionally associated with fair trade. Fair trade’s claim to redefine the relationship between producers and consumers in equitable and reciprocal terms is belied by the nonnegotiable nature of the certification criteria to which Caribbean farmers must adhere. Throughout the region banana growers frequently express resentment at fair trade’s environmental 26 Part I requirements, which originate with European certifiers and are widely regarded as inappropriate and costly in an island context in which both land and labor are scarce. Compared with their conventional farming counterparts , however, fair trade banana producers have experienced measurable economic advantages in a region buffeted by neoliberal policies and trade wars in recent years, and for most farmers these material gains outweigh the costs of certification. Many...