Producing justice: Fair trade coffee, livelihoods and the environment

Producing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability and Survival looks at the social, economic and environmental benefits of fair trade for the small farmers who participate in this fast-growing alternative market system. Based on extensive ethnographic and survey research in Zapotec indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, Producing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market, as well as conventional farming families in the same remote villages who are dependent on local middlemen and the fluctuations of the world coffee market. The study finds that fair trade does indeed deliver many of the social, economic and environmental benefits to participants and their families that are touted by the movement. Compared with their conventional neighbors, Michiza member families are more food secure, less indebted, have higher gross incomes, engage in more environmentally beneficial organic coffee farming methods, generate more paid work for local people, and are more likely to continue growing coffee rather than abandoning or razing their shade coffee plots. However, fair trade does not bring the majority of participants out of poverty. In many cases, the fair trade minimum prices do not even cover farmers' costs of production. The dissertation also explores critically the politics of the international fair trade movement. Drawing on dozens of interviews with fair trade leaders, it examines the relationship between alternative markets such as fair trade and the dynamics of the global market. Producing Justice looks at new challenges to fair trade posed by large corporate retailers who have recently entered the system, and discusses the relationship between fair trade and broader movements for global economic justice. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for strengthening fair trade, in order to provide greater social and economic justice for the farmers who are the reason for its existence.