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A New World? 67 as a key to the industry’s salvation. This policy shift signals an implicit endorsement of social and environmental sustainability in place of the government’s earlier promotion of an industry involving a smaller number of larger, more “efficient” farms. Over the long term it remains to be seen whether the material benefits of fair trade will entice a new generation to enter farming after the present, aging generation has retired. For those who remain in the industry, however, there is general agreement that fair trade represents the most promising avenue for the survival of family farmers in a liberalized global market. On January 1, 2006, the last vestiges of the tariff-quota system were eliminated, a moment once predicted to be the death knell of the Caribbean banana industry. Ironically, by that point there were signs that the remaining farmers had weathered the worst of liberalization. Soon two of the largest supermarket chains in the United Kingdom, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, announced that they would exclusively carry fair trade bananas in their stores, with fruit to be sourced from the Windward Islands, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. The announcement anticipated the eventual conversion of all remaining growers in the Windwards to fair trade certification. Elsewhere (Moberg 2005) I have noted the limits to fair trade’s promises to transform the global market or to alter the position of commodity producers in it. Particularly in the realm of certification, Eastern Caribbean realities fall painfully short of fair trade’s claims to create a “new world” of transparency and mutual respect in the world economy. Farmers see little difference between the new standards to which they are held by FLO and the previous dictates of WIBDECO and European retailers to which they continue to be subject, all of which they characterize as arbitrary, costly, and authoritarian. Yet what distinguishes fair trade from these previous directives is that for the first time the benefits—both in producer prices and social premiums—have offset the costs of compliance . Whereas all previous mandates over production and postharvest handling were accompanied by a steady attrition of growers, the promised expansion of fair trade certification to the remaining growers has finally stanched the losses of the past two decades. It also prompted a modest but measurable return to cultivation among farmers who had dropped out of production over previous years. By early 2007, according to the WINFA, the number of commercially active banana farmers in the Windwards had reached 3,347 (FLO 2007), marking the first time since 1990 that the industry ’s productive base had grown instead of declined. No one anticipates that the industry will ever constitute more than a fraction of its size 68 Mark Moberg during the heyday of protected markets, a time that island residents nostalgically recall as “Green Gold.” For the farmers who remain, however, fair trade has become, in the words of one Mabouya Valley resident, “our last, best chance to survive here.” N o t e s 1. This research was funded by the University of South Alabama Research Council and National Science Foundation (grant BCS-0003965 and Supplement). To ensure a crosssection of active growers, farmers were interviewed as they delivered their fruit to the buying depot at La Caye, which services all valley farms. Three area residents, all having some experience with banana farming, were recruited as ethnographic interviewers. They also prepared a Kwéyòl version of the survey instrument, which was administered in that language in about 70 percent of all cases. The sample represented a third of all active growers in the valley, according to data maintained by St. Lucia’s Banana Emergency Recovery Unit (BERU). In the sample’s demographic characteristics and proportion of fair trade and conventional farmers, it closely approximates the parameters of the farming population as indicated in BERU’s database of all valley growers (St. Lucia 2002). 2. Fridell (2007:21) points out that neoliberal policies are in fact compatible with fair trade, an observation born out by the fact that fair trade is encouraged by the World Bank as a nonstatist, market-based, and voluntary approach to social justice. 3. Nurse and Sandiford (1995) provide a comprehensive discussion of marketing arrangements predating the WTO suit. An extensive literature has examined the development of the U.S.-EU trade dispute over European banana imports (Josling and Taylor 2003; Raynolds 2003; Wiley 2008), including the role played by campaign contributions in the decision of the...

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