Fair Trade

This paper explores how the fair trade coffee market translates consumer action and shopping habits into the promotion of human rights in distant locales. This process does not occur through direct producer–consumer contact. Instead, it is channeled through two interrelated avenues. First, the fair trade certification system which requires producer groups to be democratic, transparent, and accountable and second, the relationships between producers and coffee roasters and importers, who, in this specific commodity chain, act as conduits for consumer actions and intentions. These two facets of the fair trade consumer market promote and protect the secure organizational space that is necessary for producer initiated community development. This freedom to identify and fulfill economic and social development goals through cooperation also reaffirms existing cultural traditions of service and mutual aid among producers. These key components of human rights compliance are critically important in countries such as Guatemala with its history of violent repression, structural inequality, and cultural discrimination against indigenous populations and community organizers. The analysis emerges from ongoing ethnographic research on a group of indigenous, fair trade coffee producers in Guatemala and their relationships with outside buyers and certifiers.

An important step in promoting sustainable consumption is to find out how consumers understand the concept of sustainability. In this paper, we report on a study among Norwegian consumers in which we explored their understanding of sustainability at two levels. First, we investigated consumers' understanding of the general sustainability concept; specifically, we studied how important the following five sustainability dimensions are in consumers' conception of sustainability: the environmental, social, economic, temporal and the developmental dimension. Second, we investigated how consumers' understanding of sustainability manifests itself in consumption decisions: We studied consumers' opinions about how important various attributes are for sustainable products and which product labels they consider indicative of sustainable products. We found that all five sustainability dimensions occurred as elements of consumers' understanding of the sustainability concept. The environmental dimension, the social dimension and the developmental dimension were particularly outstanding. With regard to attributes that are important for sustainable products, consumers placed high emphasis on recyclability of the packaging, fair payment of producers, low energy use and low carbon dioxide emissions during production and shipping. Humane animal treatment was also considered an important attribute of sustainable products. The product labels that were considered most indicative of sustainable products were the Nordic Swan and the Norwegian Debio label. Consumers' judgments of how indicative the labels are of sustainable products were related positively to familiarity with the labels.

Data from Mesoamerican studies shows that the proportion of women registered as ‘farm operators’ in fairtrade–organic coffee producer unions has increased significantly. However, this increase is uneven across Mesoamerican communities and the prospects for improved gender equity rest on several questions that we explore in this study. First, what explains the large discrepancies in participation across groups? Second, what effect does the ‘farm operator’ status have on women’s ability to participate in producer unions and in fairtrade–organic coffee networks? Third, how will fairtrade–organic organizational and procedural norms affect women’s insertion into the coffee ‘value-chain’? Making use of ethnographic, archival, and survey data we find that fairtrade organizational norms combine with organic procedural norms to bring significant impacts in three areas: women’s organizations have greater access to network benefits, women gain greater control over farm practices, and women enjoy increased access to cash. However, we also find that the burden of complying with norms together with stagnant real prices excludes some women who might otherwise benefit from expanded participation.

We test the hypothesis that cooperative membership is a trust and trustworthiness reinforcing device and, as such, it affects (in a trust game) both trustors' and trustees' contributions and beliefs. Through trust games played by sugar farmers in the Philippines we find that i) cooperative membership is a signal of (and induces higher levels of) trust and trustworthiness since players' behaviour is largely influenced by the information on their counterparts' cooperative membership status ii) this signalling effect is superior in magnitude and robustness to the direct membership effect (for which causality is often difficult to isolate) iii) an in group bias is at work since, contrary to non members' expectations, the positive affiliation-trustworthiness link works only between coop members.

This paper aims to reconstruct the everyday moral plausibility of Fair Trade consumerism by linking it back to an analysis of the moral grammar of capitalist consumer culture and understanding it as both an actualization and development of this moral grammar. Fair Trade movements re-moralize global markets by insisting on a just price for Third-World produce. The paradigm for fair exchange is the equitability implied in ordinary practices of commodity exchange while such equitability is constantly negated by the fact of capitalist accumulation. Fair Trade is also an attempt to tap into the recognition function of market exchange in order to move away from charity and its paternalistic implications. As this proves not entirely possible on a voluntary basis, the price gap between conventionally traded and Fair Trade products needs to be justified by non-altruistic motives such as increased material and symbolic use values. These include romanticised images of commodified agricultural and artisanal producers. By this romanticization, Fair Trade conjures up the ghost of colonialism, failing to deliver full equity and recognition, but thereby also insisting on the need for final de-colonization.

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumptionpresents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. *Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. *Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns. *Fills a gap in research on the topic with its distinctive focus on fair trade consumption. *Locates ethical consumption within a range of social theoretical debates -on neoliberalism, governmentality, and globalisation. *Challenges the moralism of much of the analysis of ethical consumption, which sees it as a retreat from proper citizenly politics and an expression of individualised consumerism.