With Friends Like These: The Corporate Response to Fair Trade Coffee (original) (raw)

Do Consumers Care about Ethics? Willingness to Pay for Fair-Trade Coffee

Journal of Consumer Affairs, 2005

Consumers' buying behavior is not consistent with their positive attitude toward ethical products. In a survey of 808 Belgian respondents, the actual willingness to pay for fair-trade coffee was measured. It was found that the average price premium that the consumers were willing to pay for a fair-trade label was 10%. Ten percent of the sample was prepared to pay the current price premium of 27% in Belgium. Fair-trade lovers (11%) were more idealistic, aged between 31 and 44 years and less ''conventional.'' Fair-trade likers (40%) were more idealistic but sociodemographically not significantly different from the average consumer.

Weak Coffee: Certification and Co-Optation in the Fair Trade Movement

The sociological literature on social movement organizations (SMOs) has come to recognize that under neoliberal globalization many SMOs have moved from an emphasis on the state as the locus of change toward a focus on corporations as targets. This shift has led some SMOs to turn to forms of market-based private regulatory action. The use of one such tactic—voluntary, third-party product certification—has grown substantially, as SMOs seek ways to hold stateless firms accountable. This article explores the case of the international fair trade movement, which aims to change the inequitable terms of global trade in commodities for small farmers, artisans, and waged laborers. Drawing from interviews with a range of fair trade participants, document analysis, and media coverage, the article describes fair trade's growing relationship with multinational coffee firms, particularly Starbucks and Nestlé. It explores intra-movement conflicts over the terms for and the effects of corporate participation in fair trade, and illuminates tensions between conceptualizations of fair trade as movement, market, and system. The article makes two arguments. First, while fair trade has succeeded partially in reembedding market exchange within systems of social and moral relations, it has also proved susceptible to the power of corporate actors to disembed the alternative through a process of movement co-optation. Second, it argues that co-optation takes a unique form in the context of social movements whose principal tools to achieve social change are certification and labeling: it occurs primarily on the terrain of standards, in the form of weakening or dilution.

Seduced or Sceptical Consumers? Organised Action and the Case of Fair Trade Coffee

Sociological Research Online, 2007

This article brings together research on political consumerism, social movements and markets to analyse the phenomenon of fair trade coffee. It does this to demonstrate the influence of organised consumers in shaping markets, and to show that people are not inevitably individualised and seduced by the power of corporate marketing. The case of fair trade coffee is used because of the pivotal role of coffee in the global economy. 'Organised consumers' are treated as comprised of three inter-connecting, fluid, components: an activist core, responsible for building the campaign and its alternative trade networks; a widely dispersed alliance of civil society and social movement organisations, articulating the connections between trade justice, human rights and wellbeing; and an 'outer edge' of quasi-organised consumers acting as part of a largely imagined group by using economic capital to express cultural and political values. Despite saturated markets, and oligopoly among suppliers in a highly rationalised supply chain, such consumer movements have been instrumental in an emerging new trade paradigm, which has influenced the business and product strategies of trans-national corporations. The creation, and rising sales, of Fair Trade products are evidence of the role of consumers as sceptical actors, challenging consumerism and the ethics of a supply chain which impoverishes coffee farmers. Although the future trajectories of fair trade campaigns and products are uncertain, their growth indicates that people continue to draw on sources of social identity beyond that of 'consumer'.

An Intersectional Analysis of Fair Trade Coffee

Coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity and is moved over great distances for the comfort and enjoyment of consumers. The labeling and use of fair trade coffee has increased in popularity and acceptance in consuming countries, but what are the ramifications for those countries which produce coffee? Through a study of ethnographies, statistical data and theoretical literature, this paper seeks to understand the consequences of fair trade. Multiple layers of oppression exist within the production and trade of coffee, even when it is fair trade. Underlying tensions appear in the forms of neocolonialism and gender subordination, all of which are facilitated by capitalist trade. This paper examines the intersectional layers of discrimination and oppression within fair trade coffee. Key Terms: fair trade, coffee, gender, neocolonialism, capitalism, dependency theory

“Our fair trade coffee tastes better”: It might, but under what conditions?

Journal of Consumer Affairs, 2021

The sustainability of Fair Trade ultimately relies on consumers choosing fair-traded products. To date, research has tended to study consumer and producer engagement, and reactions to Fair Trade separately. These areas do, however, interconnect systematically through supply chains. In this paper we introduce a self-catalysing model of Fair Trade which acknowledges those interconnections, traces them along supply chains from producer to consumer and addresses different international development priorities articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Its conceptual elements span a) product quality, in this case taste experience influenced by organoleptic properties and moral satisfaction; b) organizational morality via corporate social responsibility and living wages; and c) strategic management of slack farming resources-each catalysed by, and catalysing, positive emotions. Contingencies at each point in the model alter the likelihood that produce will be and feel fair and taste better to consumers.