“Fighting the Tide: Alternative Trade Organizations in the Era of Global Free Trade”—A Comment

Fair trade as a social enterprise: Oversold, misunderstood or unethical?

“…For some consumers, the act of purchasing FT products may benefit them because they feel they are promoting their social reputation and self‐esteem. Self‐esteem is used in the sense of a “feel good” factor—Richardson & Stahler, and Hayes, call it the “warm glow effect”. If the supplementary utility exceeds any utility losses caused by the additional charge for the FT product compared with the conventional product, then the act of the consumer demanding such a product is fully rational.…”

EVALUATING THE CRITICISMS OF FAIR TRADE1

“…Microeconomic evidence provides support for the hypothesis that by providing more stability and alleviating capacity constraints, Fair Trade provides a targeted response to real‐world problems that deductive evaluation from economic theory grossly ignore (Smith, 2008a, Part 4; forthcoming). A further aspect of reality missed by critics is that because Fair Trade operates in economies with labour surpluses it is most likely to keep people from unemployment, not more efficient activities in other sectors (Hayes, 2008).…”

Fair trade governance and diversification: The experience of the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi

“…Originally conceived for the production of handicraft goods, this critique has been extended to agricultural commodities exports (Sidwell, 2008) -the promotion of which also potentially threatens domestic food security (Brown, 2007) -and has been projected into public discourse in the mains tream media (See for example : Chambers, 2009;The Economist, 2006). In response, academics have proposed wider theoretical lenses that aim to re-embed analysis in the lived realities of trade relationships (Hayes, 2006(Hayes, , 2008Smith, 2009) -and therefore arguably sought to contribute towards freeing "policy imagination" from the ideological binaries that have tended to characterise debate around state strategies (Chang, 2012). Having said this, there has been no direct empirical investigation of how fair trade governance interacts with the diversification strategies of southern stakeholders.…”