E-BOOK
Brewing Justice
their products, offering them protection from the wild price swings of
commodities markets. Fair trade works with democratically organized
associations of farmers who have banded together to increase their power.
It eliminates many of the intermediaries who typically take a cut along
the path between the grower and the consumer, and it gives farmers ac-
cess to credit prior to the harvest. Fair trade emphasizes long-term trad-
ing relationships between buyers and sellers, arrangements in which con-
sumers may even have a chance to find out who grew the coffee, tea, or
bananas they purchase.
So fair trade is a different animal altogether. But what is the rela-
tionship between these two models of trade? Is one a direct response to
the other? Does fair trade operate completely outside the rules of the
global economy?
The fair-trade movement is struggling with its relationship to that
larger global market—with the extent to which it can simultaneously be
“in and against the market,” in the words of Michael Barratt Brown, a
pioneering writer on fair trade.
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Does fair trade operate within the logic
of market capitalism, or does it present a fundamental challenge to that
market? Fair trade is an alternative to the unequal economic relations
that abound in conventional trade, yet it must use many of the structures
of that market in order to function. As this alternative movement grows,
its successes have led to a kind of identity crisis that revolves around these
paradoxes.
This book is an attempt to chart this complex landscape. I examine
the origins and current reality of fair trade, both in the global South and
in the consumer North. I also dig into these disparate understandings of
the meaning of fair trade and explore some of the contradictions and
tensions that have emerged within the diverse, loosely organized fair-trade
movement.
But the book also focuses on a concrete case of fair trade in action:
members of a cooperative of indigenous coffee farmers in the southern
Mexican state of Oaxaca who sell their organic coffee on the interna-
tional fair-trade market. Over two years, I lived, worked, and talked with
these farmers, as well as with their neighbors who know a very differ-
ent coffee market—the conventional market represented by local coy-
otes, middlemen who often pay them less than it costs to produce their
coffee in the first place.
At the other end of the fair-trade chain, where consumers in North
America, Europe, and other wealthy regions buy and drink this coffee,
there is a struggle over the identity of the movement. Many small and
xiv
Preface
medium-sized businesses and nonprofit groups, including some of the
very first participants in fair trade, roast and sell nothing but fairly
traded coffee and other products. At the same time, some fair-trade ac-
tivists have celebrated announcements by a few of the largest corpo-
rate food behemoths—among them Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee,
and Starbucks—that in response to consumer pressure they will begin
to sell fair-trade-certified coffee, albeit as a tiny percentage of their to-
tal production.
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