Fair Trade

Der vorliegende Band bündelt den gegenwärtigen Stand der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung im deutschsprachigen Raum zum Themenfeld des Fairen Handels. Dieser wurde - trotz eines gesteigerten Bedürfnisses nach ethisch verantwortungsvollem Konsum - bisher vorrangig in der Konsumforschung und kaum in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften diskutiert.

Neun Beiträge, verfasst von Autorinnen und Autoren ganz unterschiedlicher Fachdisziplinen, untersuchen den Fairen Handel und seine Alternativen als kulturelles Phänomen, analysieren seine Wertschöpfungsketten und diskutieren seine sozialen, ökonomischen und umweltrelevanten Auswirkungen kontrovers. Zudem liegt ein besonderer Fokus auf dem Globalen Süden, was die bisherige Forschung entscheidend erweitert.

n this reflection paper, Jan Orbie and Ferdi De Ville contribute their 5 cents to the debate on the impact of the corona crisis. They look at a specific policy domain, European Union (EU) trade policy, by engaging in ‘academic distancing’, namely through the lens of paradigm change theory. In doing so, they make an analytical distinction between three paradigms: neoliberalism, securitization, and deglobalization.
The resilience of the neoliberal free trade paradigm in the post-covid-19 era should not be underestimated, at least in the short term. The EU’s trade policy response has so far been compliant with free trade philosophy and this has not faced serious challenges yet. Ostensibly protectionist measures are explicitly framed as temporary and exceptional and have been accompanied by liberalizing proposals. In the medium and long term, paradigm change may happen. However, the authors warn that such shifts may not be as romantic as envisaged by deglobalization advocates, because also securitization looms as a realistic and dangerous alternative. While both deglobalization and securitization involve less trade, their political underpinnings are radically different.

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.

(Coauthors: Jack R. Kloppenburg, Jr., Mario B. Monroy) 
air trade is typically understood as an alternative market system that aims to right historically inequitable terms of trade between the geopolitical North and South and foster more direct producer/consumer linkages. We suggest that a more expansive application of the term “fair trade” to encompass agro‐food initiatives within the North and South has considerable analytic and practical utility. We profile five such initiatives in the United States and two in Mexico. The U.S. undertakings are best understood as “proto‐” fair trade projects that frame their work principally as an effort to preserve “family farming” rather than as an exercise to achieve fairness in the marketplace. The Mexican initiatives more explicitly embrace the certification‐criteria‐labeling model of international fair trade. Both, we conclude, hold potential to harness fair trade's “moral charge” to improve conditions for small producers and laborers in North and South experiencing most directly the negative effects of economic globalization.

This article examines the development of and contestation over the standards for certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. It charts fair trade’s rapid growth in the United States since the 1999 advent of formal certification, explores the controversies generated by the strategy of market mainstreaming in the sector, and focuses on five key issues that have generated particularly heated contention within the U.S. fair trade movement. It offers a theoretical framework based in the literatures on agrifood systems, social movements, and public-choice economics, for understanding the corporate response to alternative markets such as fair trade. The article suggests a typology of responses by social movement actors to this increased corporate participation, and assesses the relevance of the U.S. case for the future prospects of fair trade, both in other national contexts and as an international movement.

Recent years have seen a substantial increase in alternative agrifood initiatives that attempt to use the market to curtail the negative social and environmental effects of production and trade in a globalized food system. These alternatives pose a challenge to capital accumulation and the externalization of environmental costs by large agribusiness, trading and retail firms. Yet the success of these alternatives also makes them an inviting target for corporate participation. This article examines these dynamics through a case study of the two most significant such food system alternatives—organics and fair trade—focusing on corporate involvement in establishing and renegotiating the standards undergirding these initiatives. We compare the development of and contestation over the standards for both certified organic and certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. We provide a brief history of their parallel processes of rapid growth and market mainstreaming. We examine claims of cooptation by movement participants, as well as the divergences and similarities between the organic and fair trade cases. Analyzing these two cases provides useful insights into the strategic approaches that corporate firms have deployed to further capital accumulation and to defuse threats to their profit margins and to status quo production, pricing, labor, trading and retailing practices. It can also offer valuable lessons regarding the most effective means of responding to such counter-reforms and of protecting or reasserting the more transformative elements at the heart of these alternative systems.

The sociological literature on social movement organizations (SMOs) has come to recognize that under neoliberal globalization many SMOs have moved from an emphasis on the state as the locus of change toward a focus on corporations as targets. This shift has led some SMOs to turn to forms of market-based private regulatory action. The use of
one such tactic—voluntary, third-party product certification—has grown substantially, as SMOs seek ways to hold stateless firms accountable. This article explores the case of the international fair trade movement, which aims to change the inequitable terms of global trade in commodities for small farmers, artisans, and waged laborers. Drawing
from interviews with a range of fair trade participants, document analysis, and media coverage, the article describes fair trade’s growing relationship with multinational coffee firms, particularly Starbucks and Nestlé. It explores intramovement conflicts over the terms for and the effects of corporate participation in fair trade, and illuminates tensions
between conceptualizations of fair trade as movement, market, and system. The article makes two arguments. First, while fair trade has succeeded partially in reembedding market exchange within systems of social and moral relations, it has also proved susceptible to the power of corporate actors to disembed the alternative through a process of
movement co-optation. Second, it argues that co-optation takes a unique form in the context of social movements whose principal tools to achieve social change are certification and labeling: it occurs primarily on the terrain of standards, in the form of weakening or dilution.

In recent years, consumers in the United States have been confronted by no fewer than four competing fair-trade labels, each grounded in a separate certification system and widely differing standards. This fracturing is partly a response to the recent split by the U.S. certifier Fair Trade USA from the international fair trade system, but also illustrates longstanding divisions within the fair trade movement. This article explores the dynamics of competition among nonstate standards through content analyses of fair trade standards documents from the four U.S. fair-trade certifications for agrifood products (Fair Trade USA, Fairtrade America, Fair for Life, and the Small Producer Symbol). It analyzes the differences among them, asking what kinds of social and labor relations are facilitated by each, and identifies how closely they correspond with key fair trade principles. We make two primary arguments. First, we contend that the case of fair trade challenges the dominant conceptual model used to analyze competition among multiple private standards in a single arena, in which newer challengers lower the rigor of standards. Second, we argue that the current fractured U.S. certification landscape illuminates divisions among different interest groups over which principles—and which labor and production forms—should be privileged under the banner of fair trade.

El comercio justo es un mercado alternativo internacional en rápido crecimiento que busca promover una mayor justicia social para los pequeños productores y ofrecer mejores precios para sus productos. Este estudio de los productores de café en México es el primero en analizar detalladamente los beneficios sociales, económicos y medioambientales del comercio justo. Basado en un extensa investigación etnográfica en comunidades indígenas Zapotecas de la Sierra Juárez de Oaxaca, Cosechando Justicia explora vívidamente la vida de los socios de la cooperativa Michiza, cuyo café orgánico es vendido en el mercado internacional de comercio justo, comparándola con la de los productores de café convencional en la misma región. El libro introduce a los lectores en la cotidianidad de los hogares productores de café en esta región, y ofrece un análisis detallado de los impactos y los límites del comercio justo en la vida diaria de los campesinos y sus comunidades. Cosechando Justicia presenta un retrato claro y conciso de las dinámicas del mercado de comercio justo y sus relaciones con la economía global. Este estudio también explora los intrincados aspectos políticos del movimiento, particularmente las contradicciones y los retos que han surgido como resultado del incremento en la participación de empresas transnacionales bajo el símbolo de comercio justo. El libro concluye con recomendaciones enfocadas en fortalecer y proteger la integridad del comercio justo.

Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But what does a fair-trade label signify? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair-trade market, and compares them to conventional farming families in the same region. The book carries readers into the lives of coffee-producer households and communities, offering a nuanced analysis of fair trade’s effects on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the dynamics of the fair-trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair-trade leaders, the book also explores the movement’s fraught politics, especially the challenges posed by rapid growth and the increased role of transnational corporations. It concludes with recommendations to strengthen and protect the integrity of fair trade. This updated edition includes a substantial new chapter that assesses recent developments in both coffee-growing communities and movement politics, offering a guide to navigating the shifting landscape of fair-trade consumption.

Sustainability marketing trends have typically been led by smaller, more mission-driven firms, but are increasingly attracting larger, more profit-driven firms. Studying the strategies of firms that are moving away from these two poles (i.e., mission-driven but larger firms, and profit-driven firms that are more committed to sustainability) may help us to better understand the potential to resolve tensions between firm size and sustainability goals. We used this approach to analyze a case study of the U.S. fair trade coffee industry, employing the methods of data visualization and media content analysis. We identified three firms that account for the highest proportion of U.S. fair trade coffee purchases (Equal Exchange, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Starbucks) and analyzed their strategies, including reactions to recent changes in U.S. fair trade standards. We found an inverse relationship between firm size and demonstrated commitment to sustainability ideals, and the two larger firms were much less likely to acknowledge conflicts between size and sustainability in their public discourse. We conclude that similar efforts to increase sustainability marketing for other products and services should be more skeptical of approaches that rely on primarily on the participation of large, profit-driven firms.