Alastair Smith

EVALUATING THE CRITICISMS OF FAIR TRADE

This article critically examines some of the most common arguments used to support the view that Fair Trade should be rejected by consumers and businesses seeking to socialise their economic decisions. Overall the paper finds that the majority of such criticisms lack evidential rigor and sophisticated theory and instead rely on a high degree of rhetorical aptitude. While this does not naturally lead to the position that Fair Trade is necessarily beneficial, the conclusion reflects on a substantial amount of positive evidence to suggest that Fair Trade should not be abandoned by consumers or businesses.

Fair Trade, Diversification and Structural Change: Towards a Broader Theoretical Framework of Analysis

This paper responds to the argument that while Fair Trade governance might increase short-term welfare, it reduces long-term development prospects by discouraging diversification and structural change. Even though it is agreed that lower-value sectors, such as commodity agriculture, are unlikely to offer a long-term solution to global income inequalities, the importance of their short- and medium-term contributions cannot be ignored. Furthermore, critics have evaluated Fair Trade governance against the benchmark of perfect market organization. However, given the realities of the developing world, dismantling Fair Trade abandons poor producers not to theoretical free markets and successful diversification, but to market failures, capability constraints, and risk management issues—all of which present serious obstacles to beneficial change. In light of this, analysis of the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International is used to argue that, far from being detrimental, Fair Trade might actively contribute to diversification by alleviating some of the real-world obstacles that otherwise retard development.

LACK OF RIGOUR IN DEFENDING FAIRTRADE: SOME IMPORTANT CLARIFICATIONS OF A DISTORTING ACCOUNT – A REPLY TO PETER GRIFFITHS

Peter Griffiths claims to have undermined defensive accounts of Fairtrade by highlighting a lack of rigour in their methodology and textual construction. However, inter alia he has significantly distorted the meaning and relevance of a variety of contributions, not least that literature which he accuses others of failing to acknowledge.

What does it mean to do fair trade?: Ontology, praxis, and the “Fair for Life” certification system

Purpose – The purpose of the article is to move beyond positivistic political economy analysis of fair trade, and to examine competitive dynamics between competing interpretations in terms of the very fair trade concept itself.Design/methodology/approach – Grounded in an ideational ontology, the paper provides a theoretical framework concerned with the contestation of meaning. Analysis applies this framework through a heuristic reading of fair trades history, drawing on secondary literature, documents and primary qualitative research; and the discursive construction of Fair for Life – a new programme seeking to negotiate the “constitutive rules” of fair trade.Findings – The article identifies that the history of fair trade and its current competitive dynamics are constituted by a negotiation and contestation of the constitutive rules that set the parameters of the fair trade concept.Research limitations/implications – The paper complements political economy analysis of socially constructed governance suc...

Evaluating the Criticisms of Fair Trade: How strong is the argument that consumers and businesses should abandon Fair Trade as a means to socialise their economic decisions?

This article critically examines some of the most common arguments used to support the view that Fair Trade should be rejected by consumers and businesses seeking to socialise their economic decisions. Overall the paper finds that the majority of such criticisms lack evidential rigor and sophisticated theory and instead rely on a high degree of rhetorical aptitude. While this does not naturally lead to the position that Fair Trade is necessarily beneficial, the conclusion reflects on a substantial amount of positive evidence to suggest that Fair Trade should not be abandoned by consumers or businesses.

Cross-border innovation in south-north fair trade supply chains: The opportunities and problems of integrating fair trade governance into northern public procurement

Fair trade is a means of governing South-North supply chains to increase the benefits of international trade integration for poor southern producers of agricultural and handicraft goods. Although the approach itself is arguably innovative in comparison with commercially orientated supply chains, many consider that its formalisation within third-party, Fairtrade International certification, has facilitated a process of conventionalisation. Furthermore, Fairtrade certification is considered to dominate producer and consumer attention; and therefore marginalise other more innovative and radical fair trade approaches, making differentiation increasingly difficult. The chapter investigates one aspect of this narrative by elucidating the effects of the Fairtrade Towns scheme: a promotional program viewed to be precipitating ‘Fairtrade absolutism’ within the wider movement. Focusing on the devolved region of Scotland, evidence for this process is uncovered and the implications for Southern producers highlighted through a parallel case study of the National Smallholder Farmers Association in Malawi. Here it is found that the costs of certification and their geographic restriction are actively isolating some producers; which combined with ‘Fairtrade absolutism’ in consumer countries undermines the principle of fairer access to northern export markets. The final section however, connects the producer and consumer cases, by reporting on an innovative fairly traded supply chain constructed between Malawian rice farmers and Scottish schools. Overall, the chapter highlights the continued potential for innovation within the fair trade movement, and suggests that such opportunities will emerge where supply chain actors are more proactively embedded in wider understandings of development and trade justice.

EVALUATING THE CRITICISMS OF FAIR TRADE1

This article critically examines some of the most common arguments used to support the view that Fair Trade should be rejected by consumers and businesses seeking to socialise their economic decisions. Overall the paper finds that the majority of such criticisms lack evidential rigor and sophisticated theory and instead rely on a high degree of rhetorical aptitude. While this does not naturally lead to the position that Fair Trade is necessarily beneficial, the conclusion reflects on a substantial amount of positive evidence to suggest that Fair Trade should not be abandoned by consumers or businesses.

Access to the Fairtrade system: the geography of certification for social justice

A growing body of research and analysis identifies that fair trade practices create opportunities for developing world producers in a manner best described as providing ‘shaped advantage’, as access to Northern markets is reconfigured to operate under preferable conditions for some producers, but is not necessarily universally expanded and improved. From this point of view, impact potential is first and foremost delineated through the conditions of access to fair trade supply networks. In order to unpack this perspective, the article analyses barriers to entry embedded in the most significant avenue through which producers become involved in fair trade: certification by Fairtrade International. Here it is found that in addition to arguably justifiable restrictions on participation, structured around producer capacity to viably engage in trade, more arbitrary geographical restrictions embedded in the Fairtrade system are also an ongoing and significant barrier to widening impact. This article illustrates t...

What role for trade in food sovereignty? Insights from a small island archipelago

The food sovereignty movement has been gathering momentum in advocating the rights of individuals and nations to control their own food systems. Alongside this is a mounting critical engagement regarding its privileging of local food production as the means through which to achieve this goal. Adopting a place-based approach, we explore the foodways of diverse communities across a small island archipelago – the Turks and Caicos Islands in the West Indies. Based on interviews and focus groups, we unpack narratives relating to islanders’ changing food practices and aspirations. These are understood as two competing but inter-related themes of disruption and reification of current practices shaped by wider food regimes in interaction with ecological challenges. Given that conditions of historic dependency implicate the islands in a myriad of dependent trade relationships, we argue that small island economies offer, and require, unique cases for understanding how sovereign conditions for trade might be developed in line with a food sovereignty framework. We underline the importance of an inter-disciplinary focus for bringing forth a nuanced understanding of what might be required to shape more sustainable, sovereign and secure food futures. Doing so is necessarily rooted in an appreciation of islanders’ accounts of social, economic, political and ecological change over time.

Fair trade places

This chapter adopts a phenomenological understanding of ‘place’, as a distinctive coming together of ‘actants’ (humans and their identities, geographical spaces and the material world), thereby imbuing a particular space (more or less bounded or diffuse) with an array of intersubjectively constructed meanings (Agnew 2011). Given that place is therefore socially constructed in the critical realist sense (Danermark et al. 2005), the idea of place employed here explicitly accepts the possibility of multiple interpretations and, therefore, the potential for contestations over meanings and identities. Although the concept of alternative trade, and later fair trade, has been constructed with strong reference to the nature of the practices involved, these have always been embedded in supportive interpretations and senses of place. Fair trade requires the recognition that, far from unfolding within an even plane of empty space, the outcomes of economic interactions are both differentiated by place and contribute to the unique nature thereof. The characteristics of ‘producer countries’ simultaneously differentiate the outcomes of economic activities while also contributing to the very classification of their associated underlying spaces. Building on these imagined geographies, fair trade is therefore part of a longer and broader tradition to structure trade between places in ways that promote increasing levels of both procedural and distributive justice (Trentmann 2007). Within the broad geographies of fair trade, more specific places of production have been fundamental to discourses of the movement – and there is a good tradition of scholarship focused on analyzing their associated issues (see, for example, several of the chapters in Part IV of this volume). In contrast, this chapter focuses on formally constituted fair trade places in ‘consumer countries’ that have specifically focused on: 1) the purchasing and promotion of fair trade goods and 2) wider promotion, awareness raising and activism designed to ‘make trade fair’.1 While this is not to say these activities necessarily exist in empirical