Fairtrade bananas in the Caribbean: Towards a moral economy of recognition

Abstract

Working through a Caribbean case study, this paper examines the networks and associations of Fair Trade bananas as they move both materially and morally from farms in St Vincent and the Grenadines to supermarkets and households in the United Kingdom. In doing so, the paper provides grounded empirical evidence of Fair Trade C T N F distinction between ways of framing justice to argue that, in order to transcend its complex postcolonial positionalities, the Fair Trade Foundation needs to include recognition in its moral economy as well as representation and redistribution. The paper compares the moral framework of Fair Trade as an ideology and social movement with the lived experience of certified Fairtrade banana farmers in the Windward Islands who work mostly for, rather than within, an idealized moral economy. The paper also contributes to several recent debates in the agri-food literature exploring the interconnections between production and consumption, the role of materiality in contemporary food networks, the historical and (post)colonial nature of food moralities, and links between political and moral economies of food. Following an outline of recent debates about the moral economies of food and its relation to Fair Trade as a movement, the paper dissects the moral economy of the Fairtrade Foundation, highlighting the historical and geographical, material and symbolic, gendered and generational ways that food producers in the Global South (in this case, banana farmers in St Vincent and the Grenadines G N Despite the good intentions of those who promote the Fair Trade movement through the Fairtrade Foundation and the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO), our case study reveals a moral economy of non-(or partial) recognition, which has a range of unintended consequences and paradoxical effects.

Who is left behind in global food systems? Local farmers failed by Colombia’s avocado boom

“…A growing scholarship on food justice highlights how alternative networks share many characteristics of the industrial global food supply, represent the values of white middle and upper classes, and marginalize minorities (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Guthman, 2014). Trauger (2015) and Wilson and Jackson (2016) study the consequences of fair trade bananas for producers in the Caribbean and suggest that fair trade schemes impose the values of consumers and companies in the global North over Caribbean workers and producers, in many cases leading to a deterioration in working conditions in producing regions. The ethical concerns of consumers in wealthy countries can aggravate the livelihoods of farmers in the global South.…”

“…Vertical lines of connectivity have been drawn between farmers and other producers, often in the global South, and companies that market food products that reach the plates of consumers, primarily in the global North (Goodman and Dupuis, 2002). In particular, this work has looked at various booms in newly fashionable goods, including French beans (Freidberg, 2004), papayas (Cook, 2004), and bottled water (Jones et al, 2017) and contested the ethical production of items such as Fairtrade bananas (Wilson and Jackson, 2016), wine (Kleine, 2008), and organic coffee (Mutersbaugh, 2002). Here we build upon this body of work, but look at what farm to shelf research has missed.…”

Amazonian struggles for recognition

“…Adopting Fraser's model, as environmental social scientists including geographers do, provides a useful way to parse the legalistic dimension of recognition, wherein recognition comes to stand for peoples’ explicitly articulated rights claims from institutions (e.g., Fisher et al., , p. 266; Martin, , pp. 91–93; Wilson & Jackson, ; Zeitoun et al., ). Honneth's conceptualisation of recognition in terms of love, rights and solidarity, by contrast, spans both legal and intersubjective dimensions.…”

The moral economy of ready‐made food

“…In recent years, there has been a proliferation of studies using the term ‘moral economy’ to account for the rise of ethical consumption movements and food politics (Goodman ; Jackson, Ward and Russell ; Adams and Raisborough ; Wheeler ; Morgan ; Wilson and Jackson ). The concept has gained much currency in the field of human geography to explore how moralities are mobilized across geographical scales, reflecting established power asymmetries between producing and consuming countries.…”

“…The concept has gained much currency in the field of human geography to explore how moralities are mobilized across geographical scales, reflecting established power asymmetries between producing and consuming countries. Whilst Morgan () imagines food politics driven by moral economies operating outside of the political economy (rehearsing the hostile worlds/separate spheres position – Zelizer ), Peter Jackson and colleagues have highlighted the interactions between political and moral economies (Jackson et al ; Jackson ; Wilson and Jackson ). Political economies can be moralized through spatially contingent regulatory mechanisms and meanings on the one hand and moral economies can be enacted through existing structural inequalities associated with conventional capitalist political economies on the other.…”