Agatha Herman

Connecting the complex lived worlds of Fairtrade.

Although certified Fairtrade continues to use discourses of defetishization, its move into mainstream markets has acted to refetishize the consumer–producer relationship through the use of a standardized label, which acts as a substitute for engaged knowledges. Through Fairhills, a South African Fairtrade wine project, this paper explores the contextual complexity on the producer side of the commodity network. By incorporating the national discourse of Black Economic Empowerment into its operations, both in Fairhills and in South Africa in general, Fairtrade has adapted to this context, ensuring its relevance and credibility to stakeholders. However, in the UK, little more information than that commonly associated with Fairtrade is offered to Fairhills consumers. The particular market challenges facing Fairtrade wine in the UK make this negotiation between regulation and representation extremely pertinent. A productive way forward may be to conceptualize commodity fetishism as a continuum rather than a binary particularly when considering the difficult balance required when adding complexity to the targeted message of the existing label. This strategy for the sustainability of Fairtrade may be enhanced by utilizing the micro-level dynamism and adaptability that this paper shows is inherent, and indeed essential, to the durability and transferability of the discourse of Fairtrade.

From warfare to welfare: veterans, military charities and the blurred spatiality of post-service welfare in the United Kingdom

The military offers a form of welfare-for-work but when personnel leave they lose this safety net, a loss exacerbated by the rollback neoliberalism of the contemporary welfare state. Increasingly the third sector has stepped in to address veterans’ welfare needs through operating within and across military/civilian and state/market/community spaces and cultures. In this paper we use both veterans’ and military charities’ experiences to analyse the complex politics that govern the liminal boundary zone of post-military welfare. Through exploring ‘crossing’ and ‘bridging’ we conceptualise military charities as ‘boundary subjects’, active yet dependent on the continuation of the civilian-military binary, and argue that the latter is better understood as a multidirectional, multiscalar and contextual continuum. Post-military welfare emerges as a competitive, confused and confusing assemblage that needs to be made more navigable in order to better support the ‘heroic poor’.

Are We There Yet? Exploring Empowerment at the Microscale in the South African Wine Industry

Empowerment is a standard but ambiguous element of development rhetoric and so, through the socially complex and contested terrain of South Africa, this paper explores its potential to contribute to inclusive development. Investigating microlevel engagements with the national strategy of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) in the South African wine industry highlights the limitations, but also potential, of this single-domain approach. However, latent paternalism, entrenched interests, and a ‘dislocated blackness’ maintain a complex racial politics that shapes both power relations and the opportunities for transformation within the industry. Nonetheless, while B-BBEE may not, in reality, be broad-based its manifestations are contributing to challenging racist structures and normalising changing attitudes. This paper concludes that, to be transformative, empowerment needs to be reembedded within South Africa as a multiscalar, multidimensional dialogue and, while recognising the continuation of structural constraints, positions the local as the critical scale at which to initiate broader social change.

New spaces of food justice

‘Food is fundamental to life’ (Sbicca 2012, 456) and this shared need establishes food as a site of potential for connective and convivial practices and relations. Yet, when we realise that more than one billion people are undernourished worldwide (Food Ethics Council 2010), despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed billions more than the current global population of seven billion (Holt-Gimenez et al. 2012), the social, political, economic and environmental challenges posed by contemporary food systems start to become apparent. Given current global production levels – whether we agree with the social and environmental implications of these or not – it is clear that malnutrition rates worldwide are not simply an indicator of agricultural praxis but demonstrate the continued, broader social and structural issues of access, equity and justice. Recognising that many feel increasingly disenfranchised from formal political representation, marginalised by a hegemonic neoliberal capitalism or disconnected from ‘healthy’ social or environmental relations, food offers an opportunity to re-engage individuals and society with critical questions and practices of justice because, as Allen (2008, 159) notes, ‘no other public issue is as accessible to people in their daily lives as that of food justice. Everyone – regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or social class – eats. We are all involved and we are all implicated’. The multiplicity of ways in which we can engage with food – including growing, buying, eating, cooking, writing, processing, marketing, selling and watching – enacts its radical potential as a set of dynamic socio-material relations (Alkon 2013; Alkon et al. 2013) that can both conform to and subvert existing practices and understandings, enabling food to ‘speak’ to many different people in a range of different contexts. Although this multiplicity has its dangers (Heynen, Kurtz, and Trauger 2012), it also means that food matters and matters in complex and diverse ways: ‘It rallies people and it often induces unexpected changes in society’ (Van der Ploeg 2013, 999).

Six questions for food justice

In July 2014 the Food Justice: Knowing Food/Securing the Futureworkshop at the University of Reading, UK brought together over 60 academic and civil society delegates to discuss the contemporary state of food justice. While food is essential to the growth, development and health of human life, and to social well-being (Riches 2018), an array of contemporary challenges demonstrates that our food system does not ensure freedom from want and oppression, or environmental sustainability (Allen 2008). Indeed, when we consider the number of malnourished children that live in countries with food surpluses it becomes clear that a more equitable and healthy food system is substantively not an issue of production but, rather, of access and justice. Justice, in the context of food, has a variety of framings, including questions of rights, anti-poverty politics, community food security, distribution, political representation and collective self-determination (Levkoe 2006; Barnhill and Doggett 2018) Consequently, “food justice” as a concept, process, practice and outcome remains open to multiple interpretations (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010) with all the inherent dangers of being an “empty signifier” (Heynen, Kurtz, and Trauger 2012). Despite this, there is a utility and importance to wide, diverse engagements from a range of stakeholders in working through notions of food justice (Wekerle 2004). Indeed, this is mirrored by the number of alternative food movements across the world focusing on “the multiple ways that racial and economic inequalities are embedded within the production, distribution, and consumption of food” (Alkon and Mares 2012, 348). These endeavour to explore the causes, symptoms, processes and outcomes of food justice and injustices (Agyeman and McEntee 2014) and recognise the need to address and challenge the socio-economic, political and ecological contexts and structures that have shaped food injustice (Alkon and Guthman 2017a). Food justice is, therefore, a critical concept both for scholars and for people’s everyday lived realities. For the former, it offers a conceptual framework to understand and analyse the broader structural inequities that shape people’s experiences of food systems and potentially contribute towards progressive policy development and social change (see, for example, Levkoe 2006; Sbicca 2012; Bradley and Galt 2014). For the latter, realising a more just food system means one in which everyone has “access to sufficient, affordable, healthy, culturally appropriate food, and – very importantly – respect and self-determination” (see also Dowler and O’Connor 2012; Bradley and Galt 2014, 173). Although food justice practices generally work through principles and ideals embodied within the broader struggle for social justice, the movement is not homogenous, especially when considering US experiences versus those in the UK (Food Ethics Council 2010; Moragues-Faus 2017; Kneafsey et al. 2017) and other parts of the globe (Besky 2015; Blake 2017). The tensions and contestations reflecting the range of reformist to radical approaches, practices and rationalities (Brent, Schiavoni, and Alonso-Fradejas 2015) were, and are, exemplified in our workshop and this special issue.