Rethinking Fair Trade: Narratives and Counternarratives of Poverty and Partnerships
Infrastructure, Morality, Food and Clothing, and New Developments in Latin America
ISBN: 978-1-80117-435-0, eISBN: 978-1-80117-434-3
ISSN: 0190-1281
Publication date: 13 December 2021
Abstract
Since the introduction of product certification in the 1980s, fair trade has grown apart from its social justice roots and the focus has steadily shifted away from calls for institutional market reform, corporate accountability, and fair prices, and toward a celebratory embrace of poverty alleviation and income growth through market integration and business partnerships. This paper examines fair trade's narratives of poverty and partnerships, focusing on the brand communication strategies employed by influential fair trade organizations and businesses. These are compared with how fair trade coffee producers in southern Mexico understand and practice partnership, demonstrating some of the ways in which the latter resist narrative framings which position them as entrepreneurial businesspeople first and cooperativistas second. The business partnerships between coffee buyers and producers are highly asymmetrical, and the partnerships that matter most for the Oaxacan coffee farmers are not with global businesses and certifiers, but instead with each other and their producer organizations. These relationships did not originate with fair trade, although, they are, in part, sustained by this system which supports democratically organized producer groups, the sharing of technical and market information, and communal management of the fair trade premium. In contrast to the organizations that certify and market their products, the paper demonstrates how farmers regard their precarious economic circumstances as an issue of social justice to be addressed through increased state support rather than market empowerment. The analytical juxtaposition of farmers' attitudes with fair trade organizational priorities contributes to the expanding literature examining how fair trade policies are experienced on the ground.
Keywords
Citation
Lyon, S. (2021), "Rethinking Fair Trade: Narratives and Counternarratives of Poverty and Partnerships", Wood, D.C. (Ed.) Infrastructure, Morality, Food and Clothing, and New Developments in Latin America (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 41), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 187-215. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120210000041009
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022 by Emerald Publishing Limited
Since the introduction of product certification in the 1980s, fair trade has slowly but surely grown apart from its social justice roots. The focus has steadily shifted away from calls for institutional market reform, corporate accountability, and fair prices, and toward a celebratory embrace of poverty alleviation and income growth through market integration and business partnerships. This discursive evolution, which first emerged in the wake of the 2001–2002 coffee crisis and gathered momentum in the years following Fair Trade USA's (FTUSA) split from the Fairtrade Labelling Organization in 2011 (with the latter subsequently adopting the name Fairtrade International), mirrors the new narrative of international development which is grounded in neoliberal economic doctrines and emphasizes market-based solutions, economic partnerships, entrepreneurialism, and empowerment of the “poor” (Ilcan & Lacey, 2011). In other words, small farmer poverty is portrayed as a problem we can buy our way out of, and there is consequently no need to explore the structural conditions that actually produce this poverty. Here, I examine fair trade's narratives of poverty alleviation and partnerships, focusing on the brand communication strategies (Polynczuk-Alenius & Pantti, 2017) employed by three of the more influential organizations within global fair trade agricultural markets: FTUSA, Fairtrade International, and Keurig Dr Pepper (formerly Keurig Green Mountain), one of the world's largest buyers of fair trade certified coffee. I also investigate how fair trade coffee producers in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca understand and practice partnership, demonstrating the counternarratives they share which position themselves as cooperativistas rather than entrepreneurial businesspeople.
I first outline fair trade's social justice roots, situating it within contemporary analyses of international development's evolving understanding of and approach to poverty (Escobar, 1995; Fukuda-Parr, 2012; Green, 2006; Misturelli & Heffernan, 2008). From there, I explore fair trade's narrative shift away from social justice and toward poverty alleviation through market integration, contrasting these institutional representations with the context-specific understandings of well-being and cooperation that shape Oaxacan coffee farmers' narratives of partnership. There is extensive scholarship, discussed below, that explores the economic impact of fair trade within producer communities (Darko, Lynch, & Smith, 2017; Oya, Schaefer, Skalidou, McCosker, & Langer, 2017). Scholars have also analyzed fair trade through the lenses of morality and charity (Goodman, 2010; Varul, 2009), demonstrating how humanitarian principles of empowerment and participation are transformed through fair trade certification and exchange into techniques of governance and surveillance (Blowfield & Dolan, 2010; Dolan, 2010). Here, I am more interested in narrative representations of fair trade, how they have evolved over time, and how they circulate through global agricultural value chains to shape the production of commodities, meanings, and capital. In doing so, I build on previous works, such as Lyon, Mutersbaugh, and Worthen (2019), which explores how coffee-market value-chain discourses and economic actions affect gendered ideologies and agricultural practices in coffee-producing communities. This paper asks what discursive work does the changing language of poverty alleviation and partnerships perform and to what extent is this reflected in the actual work of fair trade coffee production and socioeconomic organization in southern Mexico?
The language of partnership connotes egalitarianism, and yet, in practice, the partnerships fostered through the business–humanitarian nexus mask continuing global inequalities. The coffee market is highly oligopolistic, and since the end of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, it is also increasingly volatile. This volatility is linked to financialization within the sector and the refocusing of coffee firm strategies away from productive investment toward speculative activities in commodity derivatives (financial products that allow investors to profit from agricultural commodities by purchasing the right to exchange them for a specified price at a future date), a process that is reproducing and exacerbating international inequalities along coffee value chains (Newman, 2009). Consequently, the business partnerships between coffee buyers and producers are highly asymmetrical (Naylor, 2018). The partnerships that matter most for the Oaxacan coffee farmers are not with global businesses and certifiers but instead with each other and their producer organizations, relations formed through daily practices of cooperative work in coffee organizations, and communal governance. These did not originate with fair trade, although they are, in part, sustained by this system which supports democratically organized producer groups, the sharing of technical and market information, and communal management of the fair trade premium.
The goal of the analysis is to demonstrate how fair trade organizations have displaced the movement's long-standing emphasis on social justice with neoliberal doctrines of poverty alleviation through the market. These doctrines serve the financial interests of fair trade organizations but are not widely shared among the producers the organizations aim to help. Fair trade organizational representations of empowerment center on enabling poor farmers to become responsible for their own development and economic growth through market participation. While never explicitly stated, it is evident that fair trade's envisioned empowerment does not encompass forms of political empowerment, such as claiming rights or advocating for higher incomes, which might pose a threat to businesses or governments. In contrast to the organizations that certify and market their products, I demonstrate here how farmers regard their precarious economic circumstances as an issue of social justice requiring greater state support rather than market empowerment. The juxtaposition of farmers' attitudes with fair trade organizational priorities makes this paper an effective contribution to the expanding literature examining how fair trade policies are experienced on the ground.
Fair Trade's Radical Roots
Histories of the fair trade movement often date its origins to the post–World War II era when alternative trade organizations such as Oxfam and 10,000 Villages started importing fair trade artisan products into Europe and North America. In fact, the contemporary certification-based fair trade market has its very roots in southern Mexico's Indigenous communities (Jaffee, 2007; Lyon, 2015a). In 1983, the members of 17 Indigenous peasant communities in the Mexican state of Oaxaca formed the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Region of the Isthmus (UCIRI) with the goal of earning fairer prices for their coffee. In 1988, they submitted a proposal to Solidaridad, a Dutch development organization, which resulted in the formation of Max Havelaar, the first fair trade certifying body (Boersma, 2009).
UCIRI's organizing efforts mirrored those of a number of grassroots, small-scale agriculture cooperatives formed across Mexico and Central America throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many of which were influenced by the Catholic Church's liberation theology and ideas about social justice inspired by the participatory action and mutual support structure of ecclesiastical base communities (Vásquez-Léon, 2010). In working with their partners in consuming countries, coffee cooperatives such as UCIRI offered an alternative vision for creating a just society “in which markets provide a means for meeting human needs rather than defining the essence of what it is to be human” (Boersma, 2009, p. 59). Their goal was to address the structural challenges contributing to small farmer poverty, many of which persist today. This ethic clearly influenced the ultimate goals and practices of the emergent certification-based fair trade movement which, in the 1990s and first years of the new century, was actively supported by individuals working in solidarity with Central American farmers suffering from the legacy of decades of armed conflict and civil wars, and later Zapatista-affiliated farmers in southern Mexico (Naylor, 2017, 2018), alongside social justice organizations such as Global Exchange and religious organizations. It's worth recounting this history in order to highlight how common historical accounts, which represent fair trade as an idea that originated in the North, are intentionally constructed to reduce narrative distance, positioning the consumers and retailers, rather than farmers, as protagonists in fair trade's origin myths.
Fair Trade Scholarship
Investigating the impact of fair trade certification continues to be a central research focus even though results are largely inconclusive. For example, some studies find that fair trade coffee producers typically earn higher prices than nonaffiliated producers (see Bacon, 2005; Gitter, Weber, Barham, Callenes, & Valentine, 2012; Riisgaard, Michuki, Gibbon, & Bolwig, 2009; Utting, 2009; Van Rijsbergen, Elbers, Ruben, & Njuguna, 2016). However, others find no significant difference in the prices earned by fair trade members versus nonmembers (Becchetti, Castriota, & Conzo, 2015; Minten, Dereje, Engeda, & Tamru, 2015; Ruben & Fort, 2012; Weber, 2011), and that fair trade offers little benefit to the most marginalized farmers (Beuchelt & Zeller, 2011; Cramer, Johnston, Mueller, Oya, & Sender, 2016; Valkila, 2009). Other studies show that although fair trade may not always result in higher prices, it typically does stabilize earned income over the long term (Lyon, 2011) and provide resilience to economic and environmental crises (Jaffee, 2007). A review of 45 impact studies published between 2009 and 2015 (Darko et al., 2017) concluded that fair trade minimum prices act largely as a safety net by providing variable price benefits depending on trends in market prices and that fair trade standards have limited impact on agricultural yields, quality, and practices. Similarly, Oya et al. (2017) found in a review of 43 quantitative studies and 136 qualitative studies on the impact of agricultural certification schemes such as fair trade that while there are positive effects on prices, workers' wages and household incomes are not higher as a result of certification.
As Naylor (2014, p. 273) points out, what is unquestionably true about these academic “stalemated debates” over the benefits of certification is how they situate fair trade within the geopolitical narrative of the global north–south tension between consumers and producers. In other words, fair trade is something that northern consumers do to impact and benefit southern producers. This charitable impulse is informed by broader narratives of small farmer poverty and the failures of agricultural markets, yet it foregrounds entrepreneurial subjectivities rather than economic inequalities. It also privileges the market-oriented dimensions of fair trade producer identities, occluding the social capital and cooperative practices that inform their search for “dignified work” (see Fisher, 2018). While the former do not stand apart from the latter, it is misleading to view producer organizations as simply entrepreneurial tools for market exchange. Furthermore, while fair trade may not always live up to its lofty ideals, it can support transnational solidarity networks that contribute to sustainability and social justice innovations within agricultural value chains (Bacon, 2013). Therefore, as Naylor suggests (2019), rather than simply asking whether fair trade is working for smallholders and farm workers, we should explore how fair trade is mobilized by different actors toward different aims and in support of diverse economic activities and identities. The present paper responds to Naylor's charge by investigating whether and how the changing language of poverty alleviation and partnerships circulating within fair trade agricultural value chains is reflected in the actual work of fair trade coffee production.
Poverty and International Development
Poverty has been mobilized in international development discourses and programming in important and evolving ways in recent decades. Researchers have explored how development institutions have increasingly worked to bring poverty as an entity “into being” through processes of description, quantification, location, (Escobar, 1995, pp. 21–22) and, ultimately, commoditization (Sylla, 2014, p. 2). Fair trade's deepening roots in capitalist imaginaries of economic growth, to the exclusion of broader social justice concerns, align with development narratives which, as Naylor (2019, p. 33) highlights, are necessarily focused on the “other,” effectively writing impoverishment onto places and bodies.
Poverty is almost as difficult to define and measure as it is to alleviate. Development studies historically employed an economic growth model of poverty, defining it in terms of low incomes and material deprivation (Tucker, Huff, Jaovola Tombo, Hajasoa, & Nagnisaha, 2011). The livelihoods, or multidimensional, model of poverty instead views it as multifaceted deprivation “not only of income but of the capabilities to achieve full human potential” (Green, 2006, p. 1111). This latter model informs the business–humanitarian development nexus undergirding fair trade agricultural value chains today. While this approach emerges from the capabilities framework, which foregrounds the actual ability of people to achieve well-being rather than merely their right to do so (Sen, 1983), in reconfiguring the concept to a set of numerical goals to meet material targets (such as the Sustainable Development Goals), it is stripped of the ethical commitments and human agency that are an essential element of capabilities perspectives (Fukuda-Parr, 2012, p. 14).
In summary, the last two decades have ushered in a broader shift within the international development apparatus; while still centering on global poverty as a “compelling moral concern” (Fukuda-Parr, 2012, p. 5), today's global aid regime emphasizes the market, partnerships, and the responsibilization of the poor (Ilcan & Lacey, 2011, p. 12). As Misturelli and Heffernan (2008) argue, this discursively shifts the burden of development away from solving the (structural) problems of the collective whole and instead narrows the focus to alleviating the poverty of specific individuals, such as small farmers. A fair trade movement focused on market expansion rather than more substantial concerns over the fundamental inequities upon which the global economic system rests is a perfect fit for a development community unified behind the goal of ending poverty (Lyon, 2015b).
Recent years have witnessed the rapid rise of the paradigm of the corporate private sector as a motor of development, particularly within the realms of food and nutrition (McKeon, 2017). These partnerships act as a means of governing, and the relationships they engender are inherently hierarchical. They serve to regulate the poor and direct them toward market participation (Ilcan & Lacey, 2011). The partnerships typically involve one or several firms as well as an intergovernmental or a nongovernmental humanitarian organization and revolve around resource mobilization, operational collaboration, and advocacy (Andonova & Carbonnier, 2014). Leading the charge in recent years, the World Bank advocates for a “new agriculture,” in line with the multidimensional or livelihoods framing of poverty, to be led by private entrepreneurs in global value chains that support entrepreneurial smallholders and their organizations, increase the assets of poor households, and make smallholders more productive (McMichael & Schneider, 2011, p. 124).
The growing prominence of corporations within international development is related to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR), “an evolving and flexible set of practices and discourse through which business (re)makes and asserts itself as an ethical actor” (Dolan & Rajak, 2016, p. 5). Dolan and Rajak (2016) detail how CSR has evolved to reject earlier foci on corporate philanthropy and paternalism in favor of a contemporary emphasis on entrepreneurialism and “bottom of the pyramid” approaches to development and empowerment. Popularized by Prahalad (2006), the latter argues for the creation of new markets around the needs and aspirations of the poor in order to efficiently solve the problems of poverty and serve as an engine for corporate profits. As corporations transform themselves into development agencies that set and implement agendas, they are able to extend their authority over the social order at different levels and render the problem of poverty commercial (Mosse, 2013). As Cross and Street (2009) explain, the relationships between the tightly interlocked international development industry and global businesses are more dynamic than ever before, and they continue to coproduce the narrative of enterprise as the solution to poverty and rural livelihoods. The dynamics of this entrepreneurial zeal within the fair trade coffee industry are further explored below.
The power of these partnerships is “voluntary and coercive at the same time,” and they produce new forms of agency and discipline (Abrahamsen, 2004, p. 1454). The former is coded within these partnerships as empowerment, a poorly defined term that broadly refers to the “the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives” (Narayan, 2005, p. 4). Social scientists critique the ways in which empowerment is understood and operationalized within development practice, arguing that the concept lacks clarity (Cheater, 1999, pp. 1–12; Rowlands, 1997) and is divorced from a deeper analysis of what constitutes power (Elyachar, 2010; Luttrell, Quiroz, Scrutton, & Bird, 2009). For example, Moore demonstrates how World Bank literature discusses empowerment mainly in terms of community organization, a type of empowerment that “poses no serious threat” (2001, p. 323; see also Bebbington, Lewis, Batterbury, Olson, & Siddiqi, 2007) to governments, agencies, or businesses.
Research on fair trade practice demonstrates that the achievement of ideals such as empowerment, participation, and democratic participation is mediated by a wide array of conflicting interests (Dolan, 2010). Fair trade scholars, Tallontire and Nelson (2013), maintain that the vision of power that rests on capacity building emphasizes economic empowerment, neglecting the fact that the power of producers could be constrained by other structural or institutional factors. Utting (2012, p. 7) argues that both economic and political power are critical for fair trade; economic empowerment that reconfigures price and market access should be complemented by political empowerment that reconfigures power relations. The latter might consist of building advocacy capability and networking across scales among producer organizations, investment in collective assets, and claiming rights (Tallontire & Nelson, 2013). Recent research by Mutersbaugh and Wilson (2020) illustrates how fair trade certification practices unfold within contested fields of power relations, ultimately disrupting communitarian practices and undercutting solidarity within producer communities. Building on this, the present paper argues that broader forms of political empowerment are rarely, if ever, addressed within the mainstream fair trade narrative of poverty alleviation through partnership.
McKeon (2017, p. 381) identifies three forms of power that global businesses wield in the partnerships they forge with development agencies, nongovernmental agencies, and even states in pursuit of the twinned goals of profit and poverty alleviation: (1) instrumental, or corporate attempts to influence policy processes through lobbying, funding, and influence; (2) structural, or their ability to reward or punish countries for their policy choices; and (3) discursive, or the role corporations play in framing issues and the use they make of narratives and norms to self-legitimate. It is this last dimension that I take up here, exploring the discursive power wielded by corporations and fair trade organizations. Earlier analyses (for example, see Dolan's work on Kenyan tea production [2010]) demonstrated that while fair trade is predicated on values of partnership, it operates within value chains that translate consumers' humanism into new technologies of governmentality, regulation, and surveillance. I do not aim to replicate this work, but rather add to it by analyzing how Oaxacan fair trade coffee farmers understand and practice “partnership.” I analytically shift the focus onto the farmers' agency and away from the disciplinary power of global fair trade governance. While the farmers may lack the resources and entitlements to reframe the terms of fair trade's engagement (see Green, 2006, p. 1113), they are acutely aware of the structural constraints on their livelihoods. Likewise, they are not duped into believing that fair trade facilitates equitable partnerships with global businesses. Instead, they push back against the individualizing and entrepreneurial aspects of fair trade exchange and instead use the system to sustain their local producer organizations. These organizations help build social capital and support agrarian livelihoods predicated on communal practices of land management and governance. Yet, they do not represent all community members equally, and there are often inequities within producer organizations. Therefore, while some members may financially benefit from fair trade, it does not contribute to widespread and equally distributed economic and political empowerment.
Methods
To systematically explore how the world's two leading fair trade certifiers and one of the largest buyers of fair trade certified coffee narrate their decisions, goals, and impacts, I collected and coded all available annual reports, press releases, and position papers. These organizations were chosen because of the prominent role they have played in developing and maintaining the fair trade movement and markets during the past two decades. The date range for Fairtrade International is 2004–2014, for FTUSA 2010–2016, and for Keurig Green Mountain 2008–2016. I employed open-coding guidelines (DeCuir-Gunby, Marshall, & McCulloch, 2011) to identify themes and patterns in the documents. The open-coding approach provided a rigorous and detailed method for identifying categories and concepts that emerged directly from the texts (Strauss, 1987). The documents were subsequently coded in Atlas.ti using broad categories including poverty, development, empowerment, justice, consumers, income, market, producers/farmers, relationships, partnerships, enterprise, organizations, products, growth, sales, premium, origin, chain, help, supply, environmental, sustainable, communities, and business among others. Discursive analysis such as this provides important insights into the rise and impact of corporate power since these narratives underlie and legitimate the entire construct (McKeon, 2017; Polynczuk-Alenius & Pantti, 2017). The narratives are essentially social products, produced by the organizations in particular social, historical, and cultural contexts (Lawler, 2002) in order to promote their own worldviews and interests (Tallontire & Nelson, 2013). Given that the focus of the research was on the development and circulation of narrative representations, this discursive analysis was appropriate. One limitation of this approach is that it relies exclusively on published documents and does not capture the discussions and debate that motivated their formation or investigate the ways in which the narratives influence practice. A more in-depth exploration of these organizations, one involving interviews and even participant observation, would provide deeper insights into how narrative representations are constructed and perhaps even contested as a result of the diverse experiences and perspectives of their creators.
Research in Oaxaca (2014–2017) was conducted by a team of geographers and anthropologists from the University of Kentucky and Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca. Methods included participant observation, semistructured interviews, focus groups, life history interviews (114 producers), and a stratified survey of 489 coffee producers who belonged to one of the five producer organizations in the Sierra Norte, Sierra Sur, Mixteca, Sierra Juarez, and Istmo regions. These are the primary coffee-producing regions of the state. While team members have many years of experience conducting research in rural Oaxaca, they did not have preexisting connections with the participating coffee organizations, which were chosen to represent a diversity of producer experiences (in terms of existing political systems, levels of out-migration, organizational age, and market position, etc.). Seventy-seven libre coffee producers, or those who do not belong to fair trade coffee organizations, were also surveyed. The survey collected gender disaggregated data from coffee organization members and nonmembers; in other words, we interviewed individual coffee producers (both men and women) rather than heads of households. The survey was conducted with the assistance of coffee producers and their children who we trained to serve as local research assistants.
In addition to the survey, we conducted informal, unstructured interviews with cooperative members, management, and staff, and engaged in participant observation at cooperative meetings and in the homes of producers. In 2016, we presented research results to focus groups with members of participating coffee producer organizations, requesting participant feedback to validate conclusions. Follow-up research conducted by team members included life history interviews and agricultural field surveys in one community of each region. Results were analyzed using SPSS and Atlas.ti; human subjects approval was obtained through the University of Kentucky Institutional Review Board. In addition to recording the details of individuals' life experiences, the life history interviews specifically explored: (1) the intersecting rationales and meanings of membership and participation in fair trade coffee organizations and (2) production practices. The fact that the Oaxaca research was conducted by a team rather than a single ethnographer undoubtedly influenced research results and potentially resulted in response bias among participating coffee farmers. However, we took steps to minimize this through the triangulation of data gathered through our mixed-methods approach and the validation of findings through dissemination and discussion with focus group participants. Another limitation of the research is the fact that, with the exception of the sample of libre coffee producers who do not belong to fair trade coffee organizations, the research focused exclusively on the members of fair trade producer organizations, and consequently the results do not provide deep insights into the experiences of landless laborers and those coffee farmers who choose not to join fair trade organizations.
In the next two sections, I explore in more depth how Fairtrade International, FTUSA, and Keurig represent themselves, their work, and their organizational decisions in their public reports and statements. The discussion of poverty and identification of poverty alleviation as a central goal for fair trade in the public narratives presented by Fairtrade International and Keurig peaked in 2010 and 2011; FTUSA's attention to poverty peaked a bit later in 2014. More recently, the language of partnerships, income generation, and business has gained prominence while the discursive focus on poverty recedes into the background. First, I explore the discursive evolution within the two fair trade organizational narratives which foreground producer empowerment and market growth. I then move to an analysis of the corporate narratives which stress the related concepts of partnerships and traceability.
Discursively Producing Fair Trade: From Social Justice to Market Growth and Empowerment
This section details fair trade organizational discourse to demonstrate how narrative representations evolved over time, shifting away from a focus on social justice and instead stressing poverty alleviation through market integration. Fairtrade International's clearest description of the relationship between fair trade and poverty is found in its 2011 position paper “Poverty Reduction and Trade: Fairtrade as a Vehicle to Combat Poverty,” in which poverty is a “trap” that “given their vulnerabilities, Fairtrade producers can easily fall into” (FTI, 2011, p. 2). In other words, poverty is not a structural result of global economic relations but rather something that can easily be avoided by farmers who work with fair trade “to combat poverty and strengthen their livelihoods” by following fair trade guidelines (FTI, 2011, p. 3). However, true to the livelihoods framing, Fairtrade International explicitly stated that combatting poverty is not about addressing people's (presumably financial) needs, “but their rights through their own empowerment and development” (FTI, 2011, p. 5). This understanding of poverty was replicated regularly in Fairtrade International's public narratives. For example, their 2010, 2011, and 2012 annual reports all included the organization's mission statement: “To connect disadvantaged producers and consumers, promote fairer trading conditions, and empower producers to combat poverty, strengthen their position and take more control over their lives” (FTI, 2010, p. 1; 2011, p. 3; 2012, p. 2). This privileging of self-sufficiency and empowerment highlights the extent to which the moral framings of these business–humanitarian projects are informed by market ideologies.
Fairtrade International also discursively stressed the many capabilities and forms of empowerment fair trade promotes, rather than simply the extra income it may provide to farmers. The certification itself was described as a “scheme set up to tackle poverty and to enable the empowerment of farmers and workers in developing countries” (FTI, 2010, p. 11). It was presented as a mechanism for providing the “leadership, tools and services that enable producers to benefit more from their labor” (FTI, 2009, p. 4). And the standards were said to “encourage producers to invest in empowerment and development” (FTI, 2004, p. 2). As in international development more broadly (see above), these representations of empowerment, while ill-defined, center on enabling poor people to become responsible for their own development and economic growth through market participation. While never fully defined, it is clear that the empowerment promoted by Fairtrade International does not include forms of political empowerment, such as claiming rights or advocating for higher incomes, which might pose a threat to businesses or governments. It is also evident that Fairtrade International's goals were firmly aligned with neoliberal economic doctrine well before Fair Trade USA's 2011 split from the umbrella Fairtrade Labelling Organization (Fairtrade International's predecessor).
In 2011, FTUSA, embracing conventional business logic, decided to chart a new course by certifying: (1) farmers who are not democratically organized; (2) plantations in sectors like coffee which Fairtrade International limited to small producers; and (3) northern producers (Raynolds & Greenfield, 2015). While FTUSA framed these strategies through the rubric of increasing impact, it's also clear that the organization's new business model was focused on revenue generation (and reduced dependency on grants and donations). In this regard, the move was successful; by 2013, FTUSA grew to $10.4 million in total revenue, 80% of which came from audit and certification services and licensing the Fair Trade Certified label on brand partners' product packaging. It also no longer had to pay a portion of this revenue to Fairtrade International (historically about 20%) (Walske & Tyson, 2015).
Immediately following its announced split from the Fairtrade Labelling Organization (subsequently renamed Fairtrade International) in 2011, FTUSA continued to describe itself “as a global movement to alleviate poverty” (2011, p. 8). The organization explained in its 2012 annual report that it seeks “to alleviate poverty in farming communities in ways that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable” (FTUSA, 2012, p. 10). However, in subsequent narratives, FTUSA made clear that its focus is on empowerment and market growth rather than structural changes achieved through a “global movement.” For example, in 2013, FTUSA explained that it enables “sustainable development and community empowerment” (2013, p. 5). Similarly, rather than reconfigure global economic relations, in its 2014 mission statement, FTUSA clarified, “We seek to empower family farmers and workers around the world, while enriching the lives of those struggling in poverty” (FTUSA, 2014b, p. 1). Besky (2015) describes FTUSA's vision of justice as an egalitarian one, which emphasizes the fundamental unity of actors, from farm to table, and plantation to cooperative. This is a significant departure from fair trade's social justice roots which implicitly, if not explicitly, acknowledged the fundamentally uneven terrain of global agricultural commodity markets.
FTUSA emphatically insisted that this empowerment is to be achieved through expanding market access. In fact, the word poverty does not appear once in the organization's 2013 annual report, but it does note that more than 2 billion people live on less than US$2 a day and that “Today's Fair Trade model reaches only a small percentage of them. Fair Trade can and must do more” (2013, p. 5). Poverty reappears in the 2014 document, “Fair Trade for All” (2014c, p. 2), yet it does so within a context of market expansion rather than fundamental changes to market structures:
Fair Trade USA is dedicated to empowering farmers and farm workers to fight poverty….We are proud of our proven track record within the Fair Trade movement – helping rural families across the globe earn more than $225 million in additional income since 1998….According to U.N. poverty statistics, over two billion people still live on less than two dollars a day. We at Fair Trade USA believe all small farmers and farm workers deserve to have access to the opportunities and benefits of Fair Trade if we ever hope to make a significant dent in global poverty.
Here, global markets are presented as infinitely expandable – capable of lifting all who enter them out of poverty through undefined processes of empowerment. The term empowerment allows organizations to say they are tackling injustice without actually requiring them to effect political and structural changes or the redistribution of resources (Luttrell et al., 2009, p. 9). Raising the incomes of fair trade farmers through market expansion may indeed contribute to forms of economic empowerment. While economic and political empowerment are not mutually exclusive, as noted above, the former will not automatically generate the latter. Political empowerment, in the form of claiming rights, building advocacy capacity, and networking across scales, will foment long-term structural changes whereas economic empowerment is more typically experienced at the individual level. Empowerment appeared only once or never in FTUSA's annual reports from 2010–2013. In its 2014 annual report, FTUSA used the term three times (FTUSA, 2014a), and, more recently, it has become one of their key words, appearing 9 and 11 times in 2015 and 2016's annual reports, respectively. In 2016's annual report, FTUSA largely presents itself as a business-based solution rather than a social movement:
Some people called us crazy, because we actually believed that rural farmers and workers around the world could learn to navigate the global market and empower themselves on a journey out of poverty. We believed that business could be a force for change, creating “shared value” and a better life for farming families.
More recently, Fairtrade International is also beginning to frame their work more intentionally through this lens of business partnerships and market expansion. For example, in a section of their 2016–2017 annual report, titled Diversifying Our Business Offer, the organization speaks to “the spirit of innovation that led to the creation of Fairtrade” (FTI, 2017). Building on this, Fairtrade International aims to increase their “investment in innovation” by “creating a portfolio of new ways of working with our commercial partners” (FTI, 2017). Their ultimate objective is to partner with more businesses and expand the market share of their fair trade certified products. It's difficult to definitively say that Fairtrade International is directly following in FTUSA's footsteps; however, it's clear that their organizational agendas have more in common than not. The shift away from discussions of poverty alleviation in favor of the business-oriented language of “commercial partnerships” and “innovation” parallels the increasing prevalence of social entrepreneurship within philanthropic circles (with a concomitant decline in the social justice focus). However, Fairtrade International and FTUSA's social entrepreneurship model is a compensatory rather than transformative one since it counterbalances market failures within global capitalism rather than explicitly seeking to change the system itself (Newey, 2018).
Fair trade consists of a broad international network of private businesses, small farmers, producer organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), donors, state organizations, importers, retailers, scholars, advocates, and consumers. Discursive constructs circulate through this network, shaping not only business and organizational practices but also the ways in which other entities narrate their own goals, decisions, and impact. Since 2000 when Global Exchange initiated their campaign to pressure Starbucks to buy fair trade coffee, corporations and large businesses have steadily gained influence within the network (Lyon, 2011). Consequently, it's not surprising that today's fair trade organizations represent poverty as something that is solvable through market growth and vague claims of empowerment, rather than the structural changes necessary to create a radically different type of market. However, it's critical to note that this discursive framing does not circulate within a fair trade vacuum, but rather is also found within diverse development and CSR narratives. For example, in its own discursive framings, Keurig highlights the power of partnership and the supply chain traceability it fosters. Yet, as discussed in the section below, these market partnerships are highly asymmetrical and may serve to limit the agency of coffee producers.
Corporate Narratives of Business Partnerships and Traceability
Keurig Dr Pepper is one of the large commercial partners that fair trade organizations court in order to ensure their survival and expand their impact. Ethical certifications such as fair trade first emerged within coffee value chains, and coffee is now one of the commodities most frequently labeled with various sustainability certifications (Bacon, Mendez, Gliessman, Goodman, & Fox, 2008; Fridell, 2014; Mutersbaugh, 2004). Consistent with broader CSR practices, coffee roasters continuously reinvent themselves by developing innovative material practices, coalitions, and discursive strategies in pursuit of new markets and protection from social and political challenges (Dolan & Rajak, 2016). CSR initiatives promote entrepreneurial subjectivities within the populations targeted by businesses (Mosse, 2013, p. 239), evidenced in Keurig's coffee narrative which represents small farmers as business owners rather than charitable subjects. This is consistent with the trending emphasis on partnerships rather than poverty alleviation; business associates are not charitable subjects deserving special accommodations and assistance, rather they are ostensibly equals who may gain or lose according to the contractual terms of a given relationship. In 2008, Keurig explained its “simple” goal: “to help the people in coffee-producing communities lead healthier and more prosperous lives” through on-the-ground assistance to help producers deliver high-quality coffee to the marketplace (Keurig, 2008, p. 14). By 2011, the corporation was comparing small coffee farmers to “small business owners everywhere,” explaining how “The success of smallholder farms and entrepreneurial ventures in coffee growing communities depends on sound financial planning and access to financial services” (Keurig, 2011, p. 22). This section details an emergent focus on traceability and the ways in which corporate buyers, such as Keurig, are blurring fair trade's focus on social justice by actively repositioning farmers as entrepreneurial business partners rather than political actors (consistent with neoliberal economic doctrine).
Keurig consistently employs a rhetoric of traceability and visibility in its narratives of corporate practice, representing fair trade as one of the several business tools for building supply chain management and resilience. For example, in 2013, Keurig explained how their Farm Identified Program is “based on the simple principle that when we know who grows our coffee, we have the potential for a long-term relationship where we can work with the grower to achieve our sustainability goals” (Keurig, 2013, p. 63). Traceability is increasingly important in agricultural supply chains as businesses recognize it as a tool for increasing consumer confidence, ensuring safety and reliability of products, and improving business functions and increasing profitability through decreases in waste and increases in accountability and information flow (Opara, 2003). However, traceability is not the same thing as transparency; while Keurig may claim to be able to “trace” their coffee to origin, this does not necessarily mean that these “tracings” nor the business contracts that produce them are public knowledge.
In 2012, Keurig Dr Pepper reported that 47% of its total coffee was traceable to origin through their Farm Identification program (a figure which includes fair trade certified coffee). By 2014, 64% was reportedly traceable to origin, and in 2016, 73% of the corporation's purchased coffee was traceable through various certifications, such as fair trade (22%) or the Farm Identification program (48%) (Keurig, 2012, 2014, 2016). A deeper reading of Keurig's narrative reveals, however, that “Farm Identified” doesn't necessarily mean the corporation has a meaningful or long-term relationship with the farmers; in other words, traceability is also not the same thing as partnership. Keurig claims, “When we know who produces our coffee, we are one step closer to knowing how they produce it. That helps us to make better informed risk assessments and purchasing decisions.” However, in the same annual report (2016, p. 63), the corporation notes:
While Farm ID aims to achieve traceability down to the farm or group/cooperative level for all purchases, in some supply chains we have traceability only to the specific mill or, more broadly, to the exporter's buying region. We continue to work with our supply chain partners to improve this over time as both ours, and the industry's, data tracking capability matures.
In comparison to other food commodities, the agricultural value chains through which coffee moves, especially the high-quality, specialty coffee sold by Keurig, are very tightly integrated. If one of the world's largest coffee buyers, a corporation with a demonstrable commitment to “sustainable” business practices finds supply chain transparency and product traceability in the coffee sector to be “sizable challenges” (Keurig, 2016, p. 63), this raises serious questions about the promise that market integration holds for rural poverty alleviation on a global scale. Nor is this unique to the coffee sector. Freidberg (2018) argues that a lack of information poses a significant challenge to broader attempts by food corporations to promote sustainability through supply chain management. However, Keurig continues to work toward a 2020 target of 100% traceable and (self-defined) responsibly sourced coffee (Keurig, 2017). This persistence is akin to the depoliticization of development analyzed by Ferguson (1994) in which failed development projects are redefined as success models for future projects. The net effect is to depoliticize questions of resource allocation and to strengthen bureaucratic power. Similarly, despite the challenges, food corporations such as Keurig pursue traceability to enhance their own profitability and power within the supply chain, not to highlight the structural inequalities that limit producer's agency (see Elder & Dauvergne, 2015).
In its 2009 CSR Report, Keurig identified “partnering with supply-chain communities” as one of their six practice areas under the banner of “Brewing a Better World” (Keurig, 2009, p. 1). The corporation consistently positioned itself as a partner not just to these coffee-growing communities but also to international development organizations and, at times, governmental agencies working to address global poverty. For example, in 2008, Keurig explained that, “By delivering the ultimate coffee experience, we hope to inspire others to view business as a partner and contributor in the global effort to create long-term solutions and sustainability for people and ecosystems worldwide” (Keurig, 2008, p. 6). Here, Keurig wields discursive power by framing the issues of economic and ecological sustainability with narratives (e.g., business as a partner and contributor) that enhance its corporate legitimacy.
There is no doubt that Keurig did indeed have meaningful and ongoing relationships with some coffee-producing communities. For example, Lyon (2011) documents the repeated trips to origin, sizable grants, and other efforts that the then Green Mountain Coffee Roasters corporation made to help develop organizational capacity and improve coffee quality among the members of a Guatemalan fair trade cooperative in the early 2000s. However, given the corporation's size, it is not surprising that today's “partnerships” are mediated by a diverse group of actors within the broader fair trade network. These include, for example, its initiative to fight poverty and hunger in the coffee supply chain through a partnership with the Sustainable Food Lab at The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (Keurig, 2008, p. 15) and its partnership with the social impact investment fund, Root Capital, which provides financial training and loans to agricultural cooperatives. Keurig explains that this partnership helps further its efforts to diversify livelihoods and stimulate income generation in coffee communities (Keurig, 2011, p. 21). More recently, it partnered with Heifer International to support income diversification efforts in Honduras; Catholic Relief Services to develop sustainable water management practices in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador; and Save the Children to promote food security in Nicaragua and improve hygiene in Indonesia. To address unfair labor recruitment and work practices among migrant workers on Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico coffee farms, Keurig partnered with a Guatemalan NGO, Verité, the US State Department, and the Skoll Foundation to conduct research and implement a Grievance Reporting Information and Dissemination System hotline (Keurig, 2016). While little independent, empirical research has been conducted to assess the impact of these efforts, based on the corporation's own narrative, it appears that its understanding of poverty is more nuanced than we might assume. The corporation's development efforts focus on concrete goals such as income diversification, rather than narrowly focusing on market access and vague claims to empowerment. Keurig also acknowledges structural barriers, such as unfair labor practices, which help to sustain economic inequalities over the long term. That said, larger, profit-driven firms, such as Keurig, historically have demonstrated lower levels of commitment to fair trade and a greater power to shape industry norms to their benefit (Howard & Jaffee, 2013).
Fraser, Fisher, and Arce (2014) argue that situating fair trade within global processes and agrarian histories of social change reveals how market-driven development encompasses the material conditions of peoples' existence in ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ways. Today, fair trade is a tool wielded by global businesses like Keurig which are accelerating their efforts to source and sell sustainable coffee in an effort to build brand reputation and consumer trust while ensuring quality and profitability (Elder, Liser, & Dauvergne, 2014). The growing focus on business partnerships in fair trade discourse repositions small farmers as entrepreneurs who are ostensibly on a level economic playing field with their northern “partners,” rather than as impoverished subjects in need of saving. This may mirror farmers' own positioning who, according to some researchers, tend to view coffee as a means for earning a living and not as a mission (see Jaffee, 2007). However, this narrative framing continues to obscure the structural inequalities that disempower small farmers within global markets. For example, Fridell (2007) highlights the double standard in fair trade networks that producers are required to meet strict organizational standards (specifically through the formation of democratically organized associations of small farmers) while retailers' organizational structures and labor policies remain unexamined. Fridell points out that it would be impossible for Starbucks to participate in fair trade if certification required it to adhere to fair trade labor standards in the North (2007, p. 253).
The self-legitimating narrative of global partnerships also masks the important question of what constitutes worthwhile and/or equitable partnerships for the coffee farmers? In her research into fair trade relationships, Doane (2010) finds that while coffee roasters and consumers gain a sense of agency and efficacy through their market participation, for producers agency is a minor theme and the marketplace is viewed as a defining and limiting, not empowering, structure. Kohl-Arenas (2015, p. 808) argues that the “hegemonic ‘win-win’ or ‘double-bottom-line development’ trend in poverty alleviation, which proposes that what is good for capital is good for the poor” ultimately impedes the actual reform of agricultural industry practices that hurt farm workers. As explored next, amidst the increasingly commercial orientation of corporate fair trade business “partnerships,” Oaxacan coffee farmers share a different understanding of what fair trade could and should be. For them, the most meaningful “partnerships” that fair trade facilitates are not with global organizations and corporate buyers; they are instead partnerships with one another and their local coffee producer organizations and, they hope, the Mexican state.
Growing Coffee and Struggling to Survive Without State Support in Southern Mexico
In Oaxaca, one of the Mexico's most geographically and culturally diverse states, coffee is predominantly a smallholder crop (the average Oaxacan coffee farmer has 1.24 hectares planted [Amecafé, 2013]) in which family members typically wash, ferment, depulp, and dry their coffee within their own homes, selling it in “parchment” form to local buyers (coyotes) or cooperatives. Oaxaca is one of the Mexico's poorest states (its Human Development Index score of 0.681 places it on par with Botswana), and coffee production plays an essential role in sustaining the fabric of many rural communities. The coffee farmers in our study are heavily dependent on coffee income, with 63% reporting that it constitutes half or more of their total household income (18% said that it is their sole source of income). Most supplement their coffee income with subsistence agriculture (72% of men and 52% of women have at least one-half hectare planted in milpa). However, many still struggle with poverty; some families experience food insecurity, and 82% of women receive money from the Mexican government's conditional cash transfer program, PROSPERA. In order to qualify for PROSPERA, households must have an estimated per capita income lower than the minimum required to acquire the basic food basket. Finally, in some coffee-growing communities, rates of out-migration to urban areas in both Mexico and the United States remain high with 10% of women and 21% of men having left the community in search of work in the past (17.2% of those surveyed reportedly received remittances with some regularity [see Lewis & Runsten, 2008 for a deeper discussion of migration and fair trade coffee in Oaxaca]). It's important to note that while the majority of the coffee producer organization members who participated in this research are poor, within their rural communities they occupy a relative place of privilege as land owners and coffee farmers who are able to meet the rigorous organic and fair trade certification standards required for membership in a coffee producer organization. Furthermore, there is variation within the sample in terms of total land ownership: on average, men own more land than women (6.5 vs. 4.3 hectares), and 21% of men owned more than 8 hectares. Therefore, the claims these farmers make on the state and their statements about the importance of cooperation should be read within this context of relative livelihood security – in a region of high out-migration, these coffee farmers are the ones who have successfully managed to maintain their families through farming in place.
Oaxaca's network of coffee producer organizations expanded after the 1989 dismantling of the Mexican Coffee Institute (INMECAFE or Instituto Mexicano del Café) and the liberalization of the Mexican coffee markets, which precipitated a decline in prices and productivity. INMECAFE'S dismantling coincided with the effective breakdown of the International Coffee Agreement, an international trade agreement that raised and stabilized coffee prices (between 1962 and 1989) through a system of target prices and export quotas. INMECAFE was dismantled under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's administration which relinquished control of the coffee market in accordance with the structural adjustment policies required by the World Bank and other international financial organizations (Renard, 2010). At its peak, INMECAFE serviced more than 85% of Mexico's smallholders and offered guaranteed prices and agricultural credit to members of its production and commercialization units (Ávalos-Sartorio, 2009). The withdrawal of INMECAFE created opportunities for organizations to broaden their bases of support and move into new areas of the production process (Snyder, 1999); however, it also set the stage for the ongoing crisis in smallholder production (Sesia, 2012).
The dismantling of INMECAFE contributed to a significant decline in support for Mexican coffee producers which translated into a lack of access to agricultural credit, insurance, and extension services. Rather than providing sustained and comprehensive support, the federal government chose a piecemeal strategy of responding to discrete events with cash payments. For example, when coffee prices fell to a hundred-year low in 2001–2003, the government created a stabilization fund to provide price supports to smallholders. However, in order to participate, individuals had to register with the National Coffee Census, agree to sell their crop to registered buyers, and pick up their checks in person at regional offices. These strict requirements meant that fewer than 25% participated (Ávalos-Sartorio & Blackman, 2010). The federal subsidies provided by programs such as this stabilization fund represented only 15% of the green coffee value in Mexico between 2003 and 2009, and the impact was very limited (Amecafe, 2009). It was also unevenly distributed: for example, we found that the members of coffee producer organizations were more likely to be registered in the coffee census (82%) and to receive Procafé subsidies (68%) than nonmembers (27% and 29%, respectively).
One afternoon we spoke with Luis, a member of a fair trade and organic certified coffee organization, Café de Oro, in the southwestern part of the state (in the Costa and Mixteca regions) that has more than 700 members living in 25 different communities and exports coffee to both US specialty roasters and a Oaxaca City–based chain of coffee shops. 1 Luis complained, “the federal government has posted notices announcing that SAGARPA (Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development) has sufficient money for the farmers, but what is the help they are giving us? Where is it? In the TV you see it and they say they're passing the help onto the farmers but when? When will we see it?” The next day, we spoke with the member of another producer organization in the region. Carlos' coffee cooperative belonged to the state's largest second-tier fair trade coffee organization in Oaxaca, Café Oaxaca. Formed in the wake of the International Coffee Agreements (ICA’s) 1989 dismantling, today Café Oaxaca has more than 30 member organizations. Carlos was doubtful about the small subsidy his organization had received from SAGARPA to help members purchase backpack sprayers to apply copper sulfate to their coffee trees infected with coffee rust. He explained, “SAGARPA says they're going to help the farmers but where? We're campesinos and no help has ever come and there are problems with coffee…they're going to help coffee? And no. Now we are putting ourselves into a project with SAGARPA but we'll have to see if the help actually comes to us.” José, a member of one of the Oaxaca's first fair trade coffee cooperatives, UCO (founded in 1982), explained why the members of his community are so poor, “why we have nothing”:
Because of the government, now they no longer help like they did before. Before…in the time of Vicente Fox, there was more help for workers. Now, there's been a lot of cutting of the support for society…Now they don't give us what is our due. We work a lot now, we work a lot for the (coffee producer) organization.
These individuals, all members of successful fair trade coffee organizations, voiced perspectives and concerns that frequently emerged in focus groups and interviews. Given the factionalized nature of many rural Mexican communities, José's opinions could be interpreted as a critique of more recent governing parties rather a more generalized comment on the state's failure to adequately support rural economic development through appropriate agricultural policies. However, given how frequently farmers across a range of diverse communities voiced similar sentiments, José's criticism should be read as a systemic rather than partisan one.
The business–humanitarian discourse shaping contemporary fair trade narratives implies that agricultural development, empowerment, and poverty alleviation can be achieved through the market without state involvement. In contrast, in their narratives, the members of coffee producer organizations represented the state as a necessary, yet currently inadequate, partner in their struggle to maintain the long-term viability of their livelihoods. Implicit in their critiques of the Mexican state is lament for a partnership that, once strong, is now irretrievably broken. In Mexico, the industry was tightly controlled by the government until relatively recently and consequently, it makes sense that many coffee farmers are waiting and hoping for state support today.
In short, Mexico has lacked a stable institutional strategy for coffee production over the past three decades. As a result, the national coffee institute, Amecafe (2009), estimates that nearly half of Mexico's coffee fields are technically abandoned and coffee production has become a form of “precarious self-employment” for smallholders with net profits on average constituting only three to five months of salary. The neoliberalization of Mexican coffee production increasingly disabled the agency of rural smallholders, and rather than a withering away of outdated modes of production, Richard (2008, p. 404) argues that it represents a clear case of planned obsolescence (see also Griffith, Grave, Viveros, & Cabrera, 2017).
Rather than viewing the market as a panacea, members of coffee producer organizations in Oaxaca continue to demand recognition and support from the Mexican state. For example, recently (January 2019), CNOC, a national group representing small coffee farmers, strongly protested President López Obrador's announcement of a planned opening of a large-volume, Nestlé-owned robusta coffee processing plant in the neighboring state of Veracruz. Arguing that the plant would turn the small farmers into “peons on the hacienda” and hasten biodiversity loss in the region (presumably since robusta coffee is typically produced in full sun rather than under a forest canopy as is often the case with arabica production), CNOC lobbied the federal government to instead provide MX$1.8 million to help support small producers during the current coffee price crisis (Castillo, 2019). This struggle between coffee cooperatives and the state is hardly unique to Mexico or even Latin America. For example, recent research in Uganda demonstrates that state, donor, and NGO institutional support for democratic coffee organizations is insufficient and framed within apolitical terms which obscure the contested political and economic nature of the cooperative revival in that country (Wedig & Wiegratz, 2018). In other words, while today's fair trade business partnerships may economically empower producers, they do not necessarily support meaningful forms of political empowerment.
Narratives of Cooperativismo and Divisions Within Producer Organizations
Oaxacan coffee farmers do not always earn more for fair trade certified coffee; in our study, producers who belonged to fair trade cooperatives reported earning less per kilo than their nonmember counterparts. However, their reported overall coffee incomes were significantly higher since they reported both more land planted in coffee and significantly higher coffee yields. These findings highlight that there are inequalities within coffee-producing communities, inequalities not captured in fair trade organizational stories, which shape farming outcomes; for example, the amount of land a farmer owns or the amount of cash she or he is able to invest in renovating and maintaining coffee fields in order to increase yield. This resonates with the work of other fair trade scholars, for example, Jaffee (2007) who explores the “unspoken differences” shaping fair trade farmer experiences in Oaxaca, and Cramer, Johnson, Oya, and Sender (2014) who argue that fair trade organizations misguidingly represent smallholder producers and cooperative members as homogenous and falsely claim they can exit poverty as a result of interventions designed to increase incomes from crop production.
If we push past the question of financial outcomes to explore what fair trade actually does achieve in producer communities, we find that, in Oaxaca, fair trade subsidizes producer organizations, effectively enabling them to pursue other economic opportunities such as state subsidies (e.g., Procafé), low-interest loans, cash payments from environmental services programs, technical assistance from NGO's, or financial support from social impact investors. Combined, these diverse sources of organizational income and subsidies form part of the financial package offered to members. In exchange, members contribute their unpaid labor in the form of service on management boards and attendance at meetings and trainings. While it is beyond the scope of this manuscript to analyze in-depth how members' contributions vary according to income and identity, there are definite variations. For example, women members participate less, in part because they view this organizational labor as a triple burden, an added layer of work on top of their household and agricultural activities (see Lyon, Mutersbaugh, & Worthen, 2017).
On average, the Oaxacan producers we surveyed have belonged to their organization for 13 years, and 40% have belonged for more than 15 years, meaning that they have a depth of organizational experience in addition to accumulated agricultural knowledge. The coffee associations use a system of cargos, or unpaid service work performed by community members, to accomplish required tasks and maintain institutional governance (Mutersbaugh, 2004). Their organizations are “associative corporations” (Nigh, 1997, p. 427), hybrid organizational structures that combine aspects of traditional indigenous communal governance and the characteristics of a modern capitalist corporation. However, in sharp contrast to the latter, they rely on the unpaid labor of their members to ensure their smooth functioning and continued existence (35% of members said they had served a cargo in their coffee producer organization during the last three years, and 63% said they had attended the last five organizational meetings). Like other agricultural cooperatives (Nembhard, 2014), those in Oaxaca are not just an institution. Instead, cooperativismo should be understood as a set of collective practices that evolve in concert with global and local political economic circumstances.
One way in which the Oaxacan organizations emphasize cooperation rather than the increasingly entrepreneurial, business-oriented nature of fair trade exchange is to refuse to allow coffee roasters to pay premiums to the individual members who are able to produce higher quality coffee (due to their farm altitude, production practices, or other desirable traits). For example, Café de Oro microbatches high-quality, women-produced coffee for a North American roaster for a premium that is then used to fund income diversification projects for all women cooperative members, not just those producing the microbatched coffee. When I asked Paulina, the manager of women's programming, how the microbatching program could be improved, she shook her head, replying, “Well it's for over there, not here.” In Paulina's opinion, this business partnership existed to meet the retailer's needs, not the producers'. She explained to me that, in her opinion, distributing the premium only to those members who technically supplied the coffee would disturb the egalitarian ethos at the very heart of Café de Oro.
Naylor (2017, p. 820) argues that rather than evaluating whether fair trade is “working” for farmers, we should rather consider how standards for fair trade certification “are negotiated by people as agents in their own right, not as fair trade subjects.” In some Oaxacan coffee communities, the long-term contracts and price stability fair trade provides effectively subsidize fair trade producer organizations, enabling them to engage in supply chain upgrading, for example, by building dry mills and directly exporting coffee to foreign buyers, and to capture additional revenues, for example, in the form of carbon offset payments. Francisco, also a member of UCO, explained to us the difference between his organization and those that sell conventional, rather than fair trade certified coffee:
UCO has fair trade certification, it has everything. Therefore, there is an organic premium…how many members do they have? They have maybe 4,000 members. There are 50 communities. Well, for everyone, they show them, “here is your premium”….And for this, UCO is always doing something….We have meetings every month. Because there is an adviser there. There is money. There are people like you who study. They bring projects for the coffee. For export. For milling. Everything. It's because of this that UCO is a bit hated because only UCO moves forward. There have been other organizations, they've abandoned us. For example, they organize and say we're going to buy your coffee and in a little bit, when the time comes, they don't come to buy. Because of this, the unorganized producers fail rapidly. With UCO it's very difficult to cheat.
What Francisco describes here is akin to the dignified work that Fisher (2018) argues fair trade garment workers pursue in Nicaragua: the women produced fair trade garments and, in the process, produced themselves as cooperative members, community leaders, and dignified beings. Yet Francisco's comment that UCO “is a bit hated” also speaks to the sometimes contentious nature of organizational membership and activities in some coffee producer communities. The fact that 20% of the members (27% of men) of producer organizations reported that they had belonged to a different coffee organization in the past hints at the fact that producer statements about the importance of cooperation are narrative constructions that do not always reflect that reality of organizational loyalties, which are sometimes weak. For example, Francisco's organization, UCO, is located in the Istmo, a region of Oaxaca where a more recently established coffee producer organization, UPCOBJ, is expanding. More than half (52%, 67% of men) of UPCOBJ members reported that they had belonged to a different coffee producer organization in the past. Qualitative research indicates that many are, in fact, former members of UCO. When a member such as Fracisco invokes ideals of cooperativismo, it may reflect the egalitarian ethos underlying the producer organization, but it is also a narrative device used to obscure exploitation, conflict, and divisions.
These narratives of cooperation are situated within local concepts and practices of comunalidad. As Robson, Klooster, Worthen, and Hernández-Díaz (2018) explain, comunalidad is a concept developed by indigenous Oaxacan intellectuals as a way to analyze forms of collective life in the region. The concept encompasses the four key elements of: (1) a lived relationship with a collectively held territory, (2) collective labor, including work parties and cargos in community governance structures and organizations, (3) communal governance, and (4) ritual celebrations (Robson et al., 2018). Eighty percent of the coffee organizational members we surveyed identified as comuneros, 35% of them have served a community cargo in the last three years, 87% attend community assemblies, and 83% regularly vote on issues of local importance. In sum, they are coffee producers who sell to global markets, but they are also active members of their local communities. In helping to ensure, at least in a small part, the continued viability of agricultural production in rural Oaxaca, the market-driven fair trade system, helps to strengthen the rural economy and lends support to practices of comunalidad. However, their participation in these networks of global exchange does not mean that the Oaxacan fair trade coffee farmers adopt the entrepreneurial identities that the proponents of business–humanitarian partnerships celebrate. Instead, in their own narratives, they foreground the failure of the state to support them, the importance of their producer group, and the ethos of cooperation that informs their organizational work.
Conclusion
This paper analyzes how powerful actors within fair trade value chains privilege the concepts of partnership and market expansion, demonstrating how these have moved front and center within the fair trade narrative. Although corporations wield significant discursive power within global agricultural value chains, ultimately this research shows that fair trade is best understood not as a northern imposition but rather as a coproduction of intertwined, yet distinct, narratives and practices. The paper poses the question of whether farmers have the right to self-determination within these partnerships. The answer in this case is yes; they resist the increasingly entrepreneurial, market-oriented nature of fair trade exchange, deploying their own counternarratives of partnership and calls for state accountability in response. Yet the business partnerships between coffee buyers and producers are highly asymmetrical. The partnerships that matter most for the Oaxacan coffee farmers are not with global businesses and certifiers, but instead with each other and their producer organizations, relations formed through daily practices of cooperative work in coffee organizations, and communal governance. At the same time, farmer claims about cooperation and egalitarianism should be understood as narrative representations that may gloss over local inequalities and conflicts.
The analysis of fair trade's narrative representations, how they have evolved over time and how they circulate through global agricultural value chains to intersect with commodity production practices in farmer communities, demonstrates the extent to which the movement's long-standing emphasis on social justice has been steadily replaced by neoliberal economic doctrines that center poverty alleviation through marketization and responsibilization. Empowerment, as discursively constructed within fair trade networks, no longer encompasses forms of political empowerment, such as claiming rights and lobbying for enhanced state support. In contrast to the fair trade organizations that certify and market their products, farmers represent their precarious economic circumstances as social justice issues that will require more than market access to resolve. The juxtaposition of farmers' attitudes with fair trade organizational priorities makes this paper an effective contribution to the expanding literature examining how fair trade policies are experienced on the ground.
Note
All cooperative and individual names are pseudonyms.
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- Prelims
- Introduction: Anthropological Investigations into Infrastructure, Money, Community and Morality, Food and Clothing, and New Developments in Latin America
- London's ‘Super Sewer’: A Case Study for the Interdisciplinary Possibilities of Anthropologists and Economists Investigating Infrastructure Together
- Part I Money, Community and Morality
- A Responsible Worker and a Caring Mother: Experiences of Russian Commercial Surrogates
- God, Gift and Charity: The Case of Zakat and Dasvandh in the Local Governance of Social Welfare Provision in Pakistan
- Money for Belongingness: The Account Book and the Management of the Communal Fund of a High School Alumni Association in South Korea
- Microcredit Schemes of Tension: Women and the Economic Violence of Credit Mobilization in Ibadan, Nigeria
- Part II Food and Clothing
- The Multiple and Changing Values of Rescued Food: Case Study of a Food Security Initiative in Urban New Zealand
- Digitalizing Local Markets: The Secondhand Market for Pre-owned Clothing in Hamburg, Germany
- Doing Difference: The Performance of Order in the Market for Islamic Fashion in Berlin
- Part III New Developments in Latin America
- Rethinking Fair Trade: Narratives and Counternarratives of Poverty and Partnerships
- Assessing Cost-effectiveness in Reintegrating Ex-combatants in Colombia
- A Tale of a Much Maligned but Persistent Cultural Pattern: Networks of People Giving to Receive Something in Exchange
- Index