![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
Abstract
Fair trade coffee sales have boomed since the late 1980s, making it one of the most recognised forms of ‘ethical consumerism’ in the world. Around the same time exports of lower quality coffee beans from Vietnam also boomed, launching Vietnam from an insignificant coffee exporter to the world’s second largest with historically unprecedented speed. These disparate projects have had significant impacts on thousands of farmers – with Vietnam’s new class of coffee producers representing three and a half times the number of coffee families certified by fair trade. Northern actors, however, have given far more public and positive attention to fair trade. This article will argue that this difference does not stem from a strictly objective appraisal of the relative merits and shortcomings of each project, but from the compatibility of fair trade with ‘free trade’ and its emotionally charged ideological fantasies. This includes unconscious beliefs and desires around individualism, voluntarism, democracy and the affirmation of the exaggerated power of Northern consumers – as opposed to the Southern agency and complicated collective action implied by Vietnamese coffee statecraft.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Canada Research Chair programme for funding support, and Kate Ervine, Ilan Kapoor and the anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback.
Notes
1. Stephanie Clifford. 2013. “Some Retailers Say More about their Clothing’s Origins.” New York Times, May 8. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/business/global/fair-trade-movement-extends-to-clothing.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Before the collapse, Fair Trade USA had a small pilot project on fair trade clothing and it is not clear if Bangladeshi factories were involved. Andria Cheng. 2013. “Fair Trade Fashion Gaining Momentum after Bangladesh Tragedies.” MarketWatch, June 20. http://blogs.marketwatch.com/behindthestorefront/2013/06/20/fair-trade-fashion-gaining-momentum-after-bangladesh-incidents. A version of this anecdote appeared in Gavin Fridell. 2013. “Mamy władzę jako konsumenci?” [Fair Trade and the Limits of Consumer Power?], Kultura Liberalna [Liberal Culture, Warsaw], December 3.
2. Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism, 6.
3. Žižek, The Sublime Object, 32.
4. Dean, Democracy; Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics; and Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism.
5. Milonakis and Fine, From Political Economy to Economics; Chang, Bad Samaritans; and Grinspun and Mills, “Canada’s Trade Engagement.”
6. Dean, Democracy, 50, 55–56.
7. Ibid., 58.
8. Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics, 65.
9. Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism, 117, 14–15.
10. Ibid., 2.
11. See Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee.
12. For example, see Bacon, “Confronting the Coffee Crisis”; Jaffee, Brewing Justice; Hudson et al., Fair Trade; Lyon and Moberg, Fair Trade and Social Justice; and Raynolds et al., Fair Trade.
13. Fair trade involves over 670,000 coffee farmer families, around 3% of the world’s estimated total coffee farmer families. See Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee. In 2012 the sale of green coffee beans on retail markets was 77,429 metric tons (MT), which was 1.1% of the world’s total coffee exports for that year of 6,789,420 MT. See Fairtrade International, Unlocking the Power; and the International Coffee Organization statistics, http://www.ico.org.
14. Since 2011 the fair trade minimum price for washed Arabica coffee beans has been five cents above the conventional market price, with a guaranteed floor price of US$1.40 per pound, plus an additional 20-cent social premium and an additional 30 cents for certified organic. For more on the ica, see Talbot, Grounds for Agreement; and Fridell, Alternative Trade, 36–66.
15. Moberg, “Fair Trade.”
16. Frundt, Fair Bananas.
17. Dawson, The Consumer Trap.
18. Lyon, “Evaluating Fair Trade Consumption”; Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee, 263–271; and West, From Modern Production.
19. Goodman, “Mirror of Consumption,” 113.
20. Starbucks Corporation, “Starbucks Global Responsibility Report: Goals and Progress 2012,” 4, http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/global-report (accessed June 24, 2014); and Pemberton, “Playing Fair[Trade].”
21. See Coscione, clac.
22. The Canadian Fair Trade Network (cftn, http://cfnt.ca) and Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org/programs/fairtrade) offer resources on fair trade, while the Guardian (UK) has a fair trade site where it has collected hundreds of articles: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/fair-trade.
23. In 2012 the sale of fair trade green beans on retail markets was 77,429 million tons. This is 5% of Vietnam’s total coffee exports of 1,528,500 million tons. Fairtrade International, Unlocking the Power; ico statistics, http://www.ico.org; and Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report.
24. Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report; and Oxfam International, Mugged.
25. Oxfam International, Mugged; and bbc News, “Vietnam’s Coffee Farmers in Crisis,” September 18, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2265410.stm.
26. Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 75–77, 127–128; and Greenfield, “Vietnam and the World Coffee Crisis.”
27. Gowan, The Global Gamble; Harvey, The New Imperialism; and Wood, Empire of Capital. The notion of ‘coffee statecraft’ is further developed in Fridell, “Coffee Statecraft.”
28. Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, 7.
29. Ibid; D’haeze et al., “Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts”; Agergaard et al., “Global–Local Interactions”; and Ha and Shively, “Coffee Boom, Coffee Bust.”
30. Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report; D’haeze et al., “Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts”; Agergaard et al., “Global–Local Interactions”; and Ha and Shively, “Coffee Boom, Coffee Bust.”
31. Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report.
32. Veronique Mistiaen. 2012. “A Better Future is Percolating for Vietnam’s Coffee.” Guardian, March 26. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/mar/26/better-future-vietnam-coffee-growth.
33. ico, Monthly Coffee Market Report, November 2013, http://www.ico.org/documents/cy2013-14/cmr-1113-e.pdf.
34. Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report; and D’haeze et al., “Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts.”
35. Fridell, “Coffee Statecraft.”
36. ico statistics, http://www.ico.org.
37. Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report.
38. Data from World Integrated Trade Solution (wits)–United Nations Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade), http://wits.worldbank.org/wits/. See also Daniel Allen. 2011. “China’s New Brew.” Asia Times, March 11. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/MC11Cb02.html.
39. At the opposite end of the spectrum, for example, West observes that coffee farmers in Papua New Guinea operate ‘with little to no support from private or government agricultural extension’. West, From Modern Production, 7.
40. Giovannucci et al., Vietnam Coffee Sector Report, xi.
41. Baker, “What the Papers Say,” 44.
42. Fridell, Alternative Trade; Lines, Making Poverty; and Talbot, Grounds for Agreement.
43. Dean, Democracy.
44. Sean McHugh, Executive Director, cftn, “The Importance of Trade,” Fair Trade Magazine (Canada), Issue 2 (2013): 29.
45. West, From Modern Production, 23–25. See also Renard, “The Interstices of Globalization.”
46. Goodman, “Mirror of Consumption,” 111–113.
47. Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics, 65; and Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism.
48. Franklin, Vietnam, 176–177.
49. Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism, 4, 117, 24–25.