Buying into Fair Trade

Culture, Morality, and Consumption

Keith R Brown, Keith R. Brown

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780814725375
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814725399
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Stamped on products
from coffee to handicrafts, the term “fair trade” has quickly become one of
today’s most seductive consumer buzzwords. Purportedly created through fair
labor practices, or in ways that are environmentally sustainable, fair-trade
products give buyers peace of mind in knowing that, in theory, how they shop
can help make the world a better place. Buying
into Fair Trade turns the spotlight onto this growing trend, exploring how fair-trade
shoppers think about their own altruism within an increasingly global economy.





Using over 100 interviews with
fair-trade consumers, national leaders of the movement, coffee farmers, and
artisans, author Keith Brown describes both the strategies that consumers use
to confront the moral contradictions involved in trying to shop ethically and the
ways shopkeepers and suppliers reconcile their need to do good with the
ever-present need to turn a profit. In addition to his in-depth analysis of the
fair-trade market, Brown also provides a how-to chapter that outlines
strategies readers can use to appear altruistic.This chapter highlights the ways that
socially responsible markets have been detached from issues of morality. A
fascinating account of how consumers
first learn about, understand, and sometimes ignore the ethical implications of
shopping, Buying into Fair Trade sheds
new light on the potential for the fair trade market to reshape the world into
a more socially-just place.

1
A Taste of Life in the Nicaraguan Campo

During my first night in the campo (countryside), I was alert to unfamiliar sounds: a bat flew in and out of my room, roosters crowed throughout the night, and a woman pounded fresh corn tortillas before the sun rose. My room looked like it had been used for storage before being converted into lodging for fair-trade ecotourists. It was damp because of the dirt floor and the incessant rain. The wooden walls were dilapidated and almost transparent. Unlike our host families, who had no such protections, my fellow travelers and I slept under nets to protect us from mosquitoes carrying malaria and dengue fever.

I later learned that the rest of our group was also experiencing culture shock. Stacey and Alyssa woke to the sound of a pig being slaughtered; Mike was surprised to see young children carrying machetes to work the coffee fields; and Christopher, somewhat arrogantly, I thought, expressed frustration at the unsanitary way food was being prepared, asking, “How much does bleach really cost?” Why, I wondered, had these fair-trade activists paid more than $1,200 for the chance to stay here?

For ten days, I lived alongside fourteen travelers who wanted to learn more about Nicaragua and fair-trade coffee. Although there is not total agreement over the definition of “fair trade,” most supporters agree that fair trade is a “social movement,” not simply a “brand.” The most holistic definition of fair trade is endorsed by Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (often called Fairtrade International or FLO), the World Fair Trade Organization, the Network of World Shops, and the European Fair Trade Association, all of which are prominent fair-trade organizations:

Fair trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency, and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers—especially in the South. Fair Trade Organizations (backed by consumers) are actively engaged in supporting producers, in awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practices of international trade.¹

We all signed up for this trip after hearing that Global Exchange hosts learning tours, or what it calls “reality tours,” to communities where fair-trade coffee is grown. (Global Exchange describes itself as “a human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world.”)² Five of the travelers were juniors and seniors from a progressive high school in Vermont. Their parents had sent them to live in Nicaragua for four weeks so that they could learn about the political economy of the region. Everyone on the trip knew about fair trade, but a few had signed up primarily so that they could experience life in a Spanish-speaking country. Our ages ranged from sixteen to sixty-four. Two participants were especially strong fair-trade advocates, most seemed to be aligned with left-leaning political groups, and everyone had previously traveled outside the United States. We arrived in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, in late December 2005 and traveled by bus to coffee-growing communities north of Matagalpa.

We lived in groups of twos and threes in the homes of the farmers. Each morning, we awoke at 6 a.m. My hosts, Bernabe and Maximina, whom everyone in the community referred to with the honorific titles “don” and “doña,” woke much earlier to prepare for the day ahead. On our first morning, we joined don Bernabe, his grandson, and his grandson’s friend to pick coffee in their nearby fields. We stopped along the way to eat carrots out of the ground, oranges from the trees, and some exotic fruits I had never seen before. It was a cool, quiet morning punctuated by the howls of monkeys sitting in the trees where we picked coffee cherries. (At this point in their growth, the beans are encased in a bitter-tasting pulp called a cherry.) After a few minutes of picking, I noticed two young girls staring at me and at my fellow gringo traveler, Christopher. They were don Bernabe’s granddaughters. One of the girls wore what I immediately assumed to be a donated pink dress that looked like it had been worn by a little ballerina; the other girl did not have any shoes. I guessed that their ages were about four and six but later learned that they were each three years older. They were in the fields to help us work but spent an equal amount of time playing. The two girls and don Bernabe’s other grandchildren ended up shadowing us throughout our visit. We picked coffee together, played baseball in the dense jungle, and competed in card games of Go Fish at night.

Our group’s itinerary, put together by Global Exchange, kept us busy: we met with union activists, toured a coffee plantation to see how it contrasts with a fair-trade cooperative, heard all about the “coffee crisis,” learned how coffee gets from the tree to our cups, and were inundated with stories about the benefits of fair trade. We were overwhelmed with facts, but, for me, the face-to-face interactions with fair-trade coffee farmers had a greater impact on how I viewed this system of trade. Playing with the young children, eating with our host families, and sharing stories with coffee farmers all were memorable experiences and fostered a growing allegiance to fair trade.

By the end of the ten-day trip, I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. I had never before seen levels of poverty like those in both the towns and the countryside of Nicaragua. In Matagalpa, a bustling town in the mountainous northern region of the country, we saw countless children begging in the street when they could have been in school. In the campo, we saw malnourished children and met with parents working tirelessly to keep their kids healthy. In both locations, we saw starving stray dogs that acted as a haunting reminder of the ever-present poverty.

I feared I would not be able to explain to my family and friends what I had seen. On the flight home, I was thinking about these issues when the young woman sitting next to me, Harriet, told another passenger that she was working at an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) located in northern Nicaragua. She had not traveled with our group, and I was surprised to learn that she had extensive knowledge of coffee production and fair trade. I struck up a conversation and asked Harriet how she was able to explain to others how fair-trade benefits coffee farmers.

Harriet said she had moved to Nicaragua in 2002 after finishing college. Around the same time, the price of coffee plummeted to forty-one cents a pound, a one-hundred-year low.³ The price did not consistently return to more than a dollar a pound until late 2006.⁴ This coffee crisis devastated farmers around the world. In Central America, plantation owners stopped paying their coffee pickers because it was costing more to grow the coffee than owners could earn by selling it. Malnutrition, already a problem, reached epidemic proportions. Young children could not get enough to eat, and hundreds of thousands of people migrated to cities, where they were often unable to find work.⁵

Harriet was living with a family that grew coffee when the youngest son became gravely ill. He was malnourished, and the family did not have access to health care. Seeing this six-year-old boy die greatly affected Harriet, but nothing had prepared her for the reaction of the boy’s older brother, who “jokingly” said, “At least this means there will be more food for the rest of us.”

Upon returning home, the activists from my trip told similar, though often less dramatic stories about poverty, life in the campo, and the impact of fair trade. They viewed the trip as a success because they had gotten a firsthand glimpse of how fair trade benefits farmers. As an ethnographer who is trained to systematically study culture, I had a harder time processing what I had seen. I kept asking myself, “What kind of researcher studies a place for only ten days and comes to any meaningful conclusions?” So, about a month after I left Nicaragua, I began to contact my fellow travelers to ask about the trip’s effect on them. I learned that many had written letters to their local newspapers. Others had petitioned their local supermarkets to carry fair-trade coffee. And still others had given PowerPoint presentations to their coworkers, churches, and elementary schools about the benefits of buying fair-trade-certified products. Even the traveler who had been most skeptical about fair trade became a strong supporter.

I began to understand that my initial search for objectivity had been foolish. Instead of trying to determine how beneficial fair trade is for coffee farmers, I needed to turn my attention to how activists construct meaning during reality tours to places like Nicaragua. I began to understand how these trips transform travelers and encourage them to “buy more fair-trade” products when they return home. Just like the overly dramatic description of traveling to Nicaragua in my introduction to this chapter, fellow fair-trade travelers returned home with powerful stories about the poor living conditions of farmers and artisans. They often tell stories that sound exotic because they do not understand much about the political and economic histories of the places they visited. But even if they are knowledgeable, as I explain in chapters 3 and 5, travelers often exoticize the poor living conditions of far-off producers to convince others of the merits of fair trade. As my project expanded, I met with consumer activists, fair-trade store owners, and NGO employees who are active in the fair-trade world. These individuals all told me that meeting face-to-face with fair-trade artisans and coffee farmers had greatly altered their understanding of fair trade. Instead of reciting facts about the benefits of fair trade, most of them focused on a memorable experience meeting a fair-trade farmer or artisan. These encounters had convinced them that they had seen for themselves how their actions as shoppers can make a difference in the world.⁶

Buying into Fair Trade takes an in-depth look at the fair-trade market. It is a book about how American consumers who identify as socially conscious think about altruism within an increasingly global economy. It explains how consumers navigate the moral hazards involved in trying to shop ethically when so many products are produced according to standards that do not align with their ideals. Buying into Fair Trade explores the social forces, from record high oil prices to growing awareness of global warming to declining trust of the government, that lead consumers to shop ethically. It examines the latent rules involved in the search for status as an altruistic consumer and describes the micro-dynamics of face-to-face interactions that impact our everyday search for moral purity through shopping. In showing how consumers first learn about, understand, and sometimes ignore the ethical implications of shopping, this book sheds light on the potential for the fair-trade market to reshape the world into a more socially just place. Before examining these issues, however, we need to understand the origins of fair trade and how this movement is constantly in tension with market norms.

Fair Trade: Market and Movement Tensions

The origins of fair trade are diverse, and it is difficult to pinpoint one person, event, or even place where the current fair-trade movement originated. I focus primarily on two mission-driven organizations that helped grow the fair-trade movement in the United States. Whereas many companies that sell fair-trade products enter this market to increase profits, both Ten Thousand Villages and Equal Exchange have sought to keep the improvement of the lives of their suppliers at the forefront of their goals. Before describing the growth of these pioneers of the handicraft and coffee markets, it is worth pointing to one significant social change that facilitated the growth of these markets.

In the middle of the twentieth century, cheaper and more efficient telecommunications and transportation systems greatly altered the ways individuals interact with each other and view themselves within the world. These trends, often referred to as defining aspects of globalization, exposed many individuals to wider ranges of cultures, peoples, and experiences. Critics note that globalization has fostered greater economic inequalities within the global “world system.” For instance, the sociologist Anthony Giddens writes, “the share of the poorest fifth of the world’s population in global income has dropped, from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent between 1989 and 1998. The proportion taken by the richest fifth, on the other hand, has risen.”⁷ But globalization has also heightened awareness about the ill effects of global inequalities.⁸ Today, it is clear that an increasing number of consumers are looking critically at the social, cultural, and economic ramifications of their everyday purchases.⁹

Products certified as fair trade are sold in order to improve the social, economic, and environmental living conditions of producers in Central and South America, Africa, and parts of Asia.¹⁰ In 1946, Edna Ruth Byler, a member of the Mennonite Church, began importing embroidered pieces from impoverished women in Puerto Rico. Byler’s primary goal was to improve the living conditions of these women. She correctly believed that selling attractive hand-sewn embroidery was a sustainable means for doing so. Sales of these products, as well as her later imports from Palestine and Haiti, continued to increase, and Byler’s growing mission-driven business was later acquired by the Mennonite Church and renamed SELFHELP Crafts.¹¹

Today, that same business is called Ten Thousand Villages and is one of the largest not-for-profit fair-trade organizations in North America. The current name was inspired by a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi: “India is not to be found in its few cities but in the 700,000 villages. . . . [We] have hardly ever paused to inquire if these folks get sufficient [income] to eat and clothe themselves with.” The goal of Ten Thousand Villages has been to provide “fair” income to artisans in developing countries by telling their stories and by opening up a market where they can trade their handicrafts.¹²

Ten Thousand Villages was founded around the same time that Alternative Trade Organizations (ATOs) began to open throughout Europe. These shops originated in the mid-1900s and expanded more rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. These ATOs created networks of “world shops” in cities throughout Europe to sell handicrafts. These stores were all associated with developmental initiatives in impoverished regions and often had close ties with churches and other charitable organizations.¹³

Like that of the ATOs in Europe, Ten Thousand Villages’ rise has been slow and steady. The organization relies heavily on volunteer labor within its retail stores. This keeps its costs low and allows it to return more profits to artisans. Volunteer labor has its drawbacks (high turnover, problems with reliability), but it also ensures that the volunteers support the goals of the organization. Having a deep commitment to the values of an organization encourages staff to work harder than staff who do not share these values.¹⁴

Ten Thousand Villages also grew because of the rise of identity marketing. Consumers who purchase its products are buying much more than handicrafts and coffee. They are buying the stories behind the products, stories that align with the type of person the consumer aspires to become.¹⁵ Americans took twice as many trips overseas in 2009 as they did in 1988.¹⁶ As they travel more, they look for ways to tell stories about their trips, they look to support impoverished groups they met along the way, and they look for products that reflect their own ethnic heritage. The products sold at Ten Thousand Villages all include detailed narratives that allow consumers to align their identities with their purchases.¹⁷

Whereas handicraft sales provided an underpinning for the future success of fair trade, the market for mission-driven products was forever ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A Taste of Life in the Nicaraguan Campo
• 2. “Just One Normal Coffee”: Crafting Joe’s Moral Reputation
• 3. “Buy More Coffee”: Becoming a Promoter through Extraordinary Experiences
• 4. “Who Are We Pillaging from This Time?”: Managing Value Contradictions in Shopping
• 5. How to Appear Altruistic
• 6. The Great Recession and the Social Significance of Buying into Fair Trade
• Appendix: Research Methods
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author