FairTrade

Proposal for the inclusion of an integrated framework of cultural evaluation in the methodolgy of public planning. Covers the meaning, application and results of culture. Includes appendices and bibliography. Also available as a PDF document (ISBN 1863350500), downloadable from www.theHumanities.com. Author was the Director of the Australian Centre of International Theatre Institute and Director of the Community Arts Board of the Australia Council.

By 2008, total Fair Trade purchases in the developed world reached nearly $3 billion, a five-fold increase in four years. Consumers pay a “fair price” for Fair Trade items, which are meant to generate greater earnings for family farmers, cover the costs of production, and support socially just and environmentally sound practices. Yet constrained by existing markets and the entities that dominate them, Fair Trade often delivers material improvements for producers that are much more modest than the profound social transformations the movement claims to support. There has been scant real-world assessment of Fair Trade’s effectiveness. Drawing upon fine-grained anthropological studies of a variety of regions and commodity systems including Darjeeling tea, coffee, crafts, and cut flowers, the chapters in Fair Trade and Social Justice represent the first works to use ethnographic case studies to assess whether the Fair Trade Movement is actually achieving its goals. Contributors: Julia Smith, Mark Moberg, Catherine Ziegler , Sarah Besky, Sarah M. Lyon, Catherine S. Dolan, Patrick C. Wilson, Faidra Papavasiliou, Molly Doane, Kathy M’Closkey, Jane Henrici

This paper explores interactions between the Indian government's colonially inspired Plantations Labour Act and TransFair USA's fair trade standards. Although fair trade makes claims to universalistic notions of social justice and workers' empowerment, what “fairness” means and how it is experienced varies by locale. In this paper, I discuss how state laws and fair trade certification agencies complement and contradict each other on Darjeeling tea plantations. I argue that by reinforcing neoliberal logic, fair trade undermines the state, which has maintained the responsibility of regulating the treatment of workers on plantations. Certification often leads to the dissolution of unions, which are regarded as a barrier to trade.

Several individual scholars and international organizations have attempted to conceptualize “culture” in its different meanings in sustainability. Despite those efforts, a tangle of different approaches are being used, reflecting the various disciplines and policy aims. In this paper we propose an interdisciplinary framework for identifying the different roles of culture in sustainability in an attempt to guide the research and policy activities in this complex field. The framework is comprised of three representations defined by a literature review on “cultural sustainability”, which are further explored through eight organizing dimensions that mark the similarities and differences between the three representations. The article reveals that the three representations are partly interlinked and that they also reveal gradients in the dynamics of the system, as well as in the human/nature interface.

After building the first worker-owned free trade zone in the world, the women of the Fair Trade Zone in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, rejected fair trade and elected to go their own way. The small cooperative's decision, as well as their claim to be seeking “dignified work” (trabajo digno), does not express the existing norms and conventions of a local moral economy. Rather, it stems from an alternative work ethic that was formed through their particular experiences of fair trade production—one that rejected the logic of reproducing capital at the expense of social life and sought to preserve their workplace as a forum for dignity. Here, alternative work ethics unleash the inventive play of ethical labor and give rise to unruly subjects. [gender, labor, the work ethic, cooperatives, development, fair trade, Nicaragua]

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