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With Friends Like These: The Corporate Response to Fair Trade Coffee

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA 19426, mfridell{at}ursinus.edu

Ian Hudson

Department of Economics, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 5V5, hudsoni{at}ms.umanitoba.ca

Mark Hudson

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA 19426, mhudson{at}ursinus.edu

Capitalist agriculture is highly exploitative of both producers and the environment. Fair trade is a movement attempting to mitigate this exploitation, partly by baiting corporate actors into the arena of "ethical production." In the coffee industry, major corporations are responding by discrediting fair trade and branding themselves as ethical. While falling well short of addressing the real demands of the movement, the proliferation of "ethical" labels resulting from this response threatens to destroy fair trade's own ethical brand.

Key Words: fair trade • coffee • sustainable development • social movements • branding

Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 40, No. 1, 8-34 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0486613407311082


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