Fair Trade, Sustainability and Social Change

01 02 Is fair trade a radical movement aiming to transform global systems of production and exchange, or is it a marketing niche that delivers small benefits to Southern farmers and a clean conscience to Northern consumers? Schisms currently opening between the US-based Fair Trade USA and the rest of the international fair trade movement are reflective of this choice. This book evaluates the extent to which fair trade is likely to be a transformative movement. The authors show that fair trade's most significant, and threatened, contribution is its potential to reveal to otherwise 'blinded' consumers the qualitative aspects of labour and nature embodied in commodities. Integrating insights from economic and sociological theory and research, the book sheds new light on this potential of the movement, its role in producing social change, and, given the recent strategic trajectory of the movement, the serious problems it now faces. 04 02 1. Things and What They Hide 2. Car Trunks to Shipping Containers 3. The Persistence of Poverty 4. Free Riding and the Fairness Frame 5. Power and Consumption: Corporate Countermovement and the Threat of Asymmetry 6. W(h)ither, Fair Trade? Afterword: Fair Trade in A Boom Market 02 02 The authors critically evaluate the fair trade movement's role in pursuing a more just and environmentally sustainable society. Using fair trade as a case study of the shift toward non-state forms of governance, they focus on its role not only as a regulatory tool, but as a catalyst for broader social and political transformation. 08 02 'This is an excellent new work and a must read for anyone interested in trade justice and, its antithesis, corporate dominance of the world trading system. The book is broad in its depth, intellectually scrupulous, and a pleasure to read. The authors offer thought-provoking new insights and the challenging conclusion that, despite many bumps on the road, fair trade (at its best) represents an alternative to large scale, capitalist agriculture by altering the relations of production, exchange and consumption.' — Gavin Fridell, Saint Mary's University, Canada 'This book blows the lid off populist ideas that fair trade is necessarily a poverty busting strategy for coffee producers in the Global South. Theoretically rigorous and empirically rich the book explores how fair trade does have within it a deeply transformative potential. Yet for this to be realised it needs to go well beyond the rhetoric of the need for soci