CONSUMING THE CAMPESINO

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct the everyday moral plausibility of fair trade consumerism by linking it back to an analysis of the moral grammar of capitalist consumer culture and understanding it as both an actualization and development of this moral grammar. Fair trade movements re-moralize global markets by insisting on a just price for Third-World produce. The paradigm for fair exchange is the equitability implied in ordinary practices of commodity exchange while such equitability is constantly negated by the fact of capitalist accumulation. Fair trade is also an attempt to tap into the recognition function of market exchange in order to move away from charity and its paternalistic implications. As this proves not entirely possible on a voluntary basis, the price gap between conventionally traded and fair trade products needs to be justified by non-altruistic motives such as increased material and symbolic use values. These include romanticized images of commodified agricultural and artisanal producers. In this romanticization, fair trade conjures up the ghost of colonialism–failing to deliver full equity and recognition, but thereby also insisting on the need for final de-colonization.

Keywords:

• fair trade
• ethical consumption
• consumerism
• recognition
• advertising
• romantic commodification

Acknowledgements

This paper is partly based on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project ‘Fair trade Consumption as Everyday Ethical Practice’ RES-000-22-1891. I would like to thank Jo Littler and Sam Binkley for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Sandino and Che used to feature quite a lot on coffee packaging in the 1980s and the ‘internationalist solidarity’ style still informs, e.g. some of the aesthetics applied by Cafédirect

2. As Dolan (2005) shows, there is an uncanny continuity between colonialist benevolence and present day ethical consumerism.

3. The colonial (and particularly Black African) servant woman has, in the Victorian era, provided a foil for the emergent white female domesticity. Once the latter had been firmly established, the foil was no longer needed yet, as Mehaffy (1997, p. 158ff.) argues, it has not vanished but still ‘undergirds’ contemporary advertising. That it should resurface in fair trade advertising might be surprising and particularly unsettling. One reason may be that the de-racialization of the consumer and the statement of equality between producers and consumers undermines the domesticity constructed on the racist undergirdings, calling for a replacement of the racial Other by a cultural/ethnic Other.

4. Indeed, one could say that this assertion is an attempt to defuse the rather obvious use of African female ‘sex appeal’ to get the attention of a European audience by implying that women could not possibly produce images that are sexist.