The Fight Over Food: Producers, Consumers, and Activists Challenge the Global Food System

5. Resistance, Redistribution, and Power in the Fair Trade Banana Initiative

The Fair Trade movement critiques the conventional agrifood system by connecting producers in the global South with consumers in the global North through alternative trade channels that are more equitable than those typical of conventional trade networks (Murray and Raynolds ; Raynolds ; Renard ). Worldwide, sales of Fair Trade–labeled products (including commodities like coffee, tea, sugar, honey, and bananas) are increasing .For example,they rose by more than  percent between  and . The Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (flo), the umbrella organization that sets Fair Trade standards and provides oversight to the Fair Trade network,currently works with  certified producer groups who represent some nine hundred thousand families of small farmers and workers in the South (flo ).In recognition of its work,flo was recently awarded the prestigious International Prize for Development from the King Baudouin Foundation in Belgium. Accomplishments such as these draw attention to the work of Fair Trade organizations and invite inquiry into whether such work is actually a “good deal” for the farmers it purports to assist. Potential Fair Trade advocates,as well as those with less enthusiasm,want to know if and why they should buy Fair Trade–labeled products and wonder how oppositional the Fair Trade movement is. There are no simple, straightforward answers to these questions. As Murray, Raynolds, and Taylor note, summary conclusions about Fair Trade initiatives may fail to capture the subtleties of the promises and obstacles embedded in the movement: “Both celebratory and less sanguine accounts of Fair Trade abound in popular and scholarly literature.Yet the questions underpinning the assessments 5 resistance, redistribution, and power in the fair trade banana initiative Aimee Shreck An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Agriculture and Human Values , no.  (): –. of Fair Trade are often more complex and the answers more ambiguous, than many of these accounts recognize” (, ). This line of inquiry is not restricted to Fair Trade initiatives.Rather,as the other chapters in this volume demonstrate, questions are increasingly being asked about the broader potential of other alternatives and countermovements (e.g., community food security coalitions and community-supported agriculture) that have emerged to confront the globalizing tendencies of the conventional agrifood system.1 For example,in her analysis of local food system initiatives in Iowa, Hinrichs asks,“What is the transformative potential of the current efforts to promote production and consumption of foods earmarked by locality or region?” (, ). In doing so, she addresses how localization efforts that grow out of opposition to homogenization, industrialization , and concentration in the global food system can arguably be characterized as liberatory and/or reactionary. Allen et al. ask related questions in their examination of thirty-seven alternative agrifood initiatives in California, each of which works in its own way to challenge the existing food system and build alternatives. Their research assesses whether and how the initiatives are oppositional or alternative. In their words, they are concerned with understanding the degree to which these alternatives “seek to create a new structural configuration . . . and to what degree . . . their efforts [are] limited to incremental erosion at the edges of the political-economic structures” (Allen et al. , ). Johnston’s research, which questions and identifies the counterhegemonic characteristics of a community food security initiative in Canada,is similarly framed around a concern with the wider implications of local food system initiatives that skeptics might be tempted to write off as examples of “bourgeois piggery” (see previous chapter). This case study of Fair Trade also addresses such questions of agency, resistance, and transformative potential by drawing attention to the multiple levels at which Fair Trade operates. I consider the ways in which the Fair Trade movement encourages actors to engage in different forms of social action to clarify the movement’s counterhegemonic potentials, where they are being realized, and where they are not. I suggest that the movement is most successful in enabling consumers and producers to commit acts of resistance and in facilitating the redistribution of resources from the North to the South. Up to now, though, Fair Trade alternatives appear to hold only a theoretical potential to provoke more transformative change in the agrifood 122 the fight over food 1. McMichael (b,) describes a“plethora of alternatives—including community supported and sustainable agriculture, community food security coalitions, organic food, principles of biodiversity , vegetarianism, fair trade movements, eco-feminism.” system. The chapter concludes with a suggestion that a reconceptualization of the model upon which Fair Trade initiatives are built and...