I think I have all my buttons pressed right. If I have, this post will appear where it should on the blog. I apologize if there is any confusion in the sequence. This was not a product of my luddism but of simple technological incompetence.
Bill
In my last post, I set out my take on where organics made a primordial mistake; in this one, I turn to Fair Trade and Slow Food admitting at the outset that I know I know much less about both than I do about organics.
I have always thought the original Fair Traders were on to a useful but limited kind of activity. When I did my doctoral field study in what was then known as Tanganyika, I had been struck by local carvings that turned up in miscellaneous shops in Dar es Salaam. Most carvings were stereotypical but occasionally one would turn up that would knock my socks off. I still remember one of a Makonde (a Tanganyika tribe whose faces where characterized by patterned scarification) riding a motorcycle complete with face markings; I still kick myself because I couldn’t bargain the store owner down.
In the early years of Fair Trade, its basic orientation struck me as progressive but rather precious. Its protagonists were religious people, anthropologists, and other good souls outraged at the discrepancy between the price paid to the carvers and the price at retail in the developed countries. Some decided to do something about this by creating their own commodity chain (as we refer to it nowadays) and control the movement from producer to buyer. Nice, also reasonably successful and growing for quite a while, but in the totality of products originating in the Third World (as it was then called) it was peanuts. Not to be sniffed at but a drop in the bucket.
I don’t know who invented the next stage which was to move into more economically significant commodities such as coffee. The principle of the Fair Traders controlling the production chain from the producers to the consumers was retained and a bunch of organizations sprang up to do that job. It seemed to work fairly well although volume was small.
Then, as near as I can make out, some business administration people sympathetic to Fair Trade came along and suggested that producers and wholesaler/retailers keep on doing their job but Fair Traders take over the middle of the chain so that producers could get a guaranteed price, no matter what.
This was a pretty potent idea and when I talked to one of the protagonists, Paul Rice of San Francisco, I was impressed. And when Paul and Fair Trade fellow organizers figured out how to pressure Starbucks to start buying Fair Trade coffee and touting it to their customers, I was even more impressed.
This new strategy involved using the moral economy to get Starbucks to see the light. They were using a model that had been used by trade unions for over a century (the union label and boycotts) and that Cesar Chavez had utilized to win a stunning victory in getting grape growers to sign a contract with the UFW in the early1970s (retail store pickets and a boycott). (I’ll write about the driving force of movements and the moral economy in another post but I want to stick with Fair Trade now.) The strategy: tell Starbucks that if they don’t start sponsoring FT coffee, they’ll see pickets in front of a lot of Starbucks shops. Starbucks finally agreed without the usual sturm and drang of many employers.
Fair Trade then took off in coffee, tea, cocoa, bananas, especially in Europe but also in the US. These were big time commodities even if the beginning and end of the chains didn’t get much attention. Doug Murray and Laura Raynolds started the FT Institute at Colorado State, and Aimee Shreck, Christy Getz, and others, working on their dissertations came on the scene. All supported FT and, as a literature developed and it began to become clear that, while the FTers had succeeded in delivering a fair price to producers, there were things to be concerned about at the production beginning and perhaps at the wholesale/retail end.
I want to emphasize my ignorance of what was going on in the various segments of the commodity chains. I had some indications that, at the chain’s beginnings, there were problems with producers not having much of an understanding about what FT was about; mostly producers knew that they were getting a better price (sometimes). I also got hints that there were problems about democracy in the producer co-ops and with the role of women.
In the previous post on organics, I was fairly clear about my take on what I call the “primordial error” of the organics pioneers in turning to the state for regulation. I’m more uncertain that I have any reasonable idea as to whether what went wrong at the co-ops level is accurate and what might have been done about it. If the FT activists used a useful technique getting Starbucks and other chain coffee shops to see the light, why didn’t they address the issue of democracy, women’s equality, and the moral meaning of FT to the primary producers?
Maybe the FT activists who were so successful in getting Starbucks to cave might have brought equivalent attention to the beginning and end of the commodity chains.
What I’d like to hear from FT agrifoodies is: what worked and didn’t work in FT strategy? Did some things work well and others not so well, or abysmally? What models might we bring to bear to deal with any failures?
When I turn to Slow Food, I have to admit that when I first heard about it, I was first fascinated but later nauseated. What I liked was that the SF movement took on fast food, its corporate structure, lousy wages for its workers, etc. That was great. When I learned about the convivia, which seemed in the US at least, gatherings of middle- and upper-middle foodies indulging their love for food adventures, my stomach started to gurgle. I had a good argument about SF with Mara Miele and Jonathan Murdoch at the Rio meeting of IRSA because I only knew about the convivia and nothing about the emphasis that was being given by SF activists to artisanal production in Italy. Once I learned about that, I developed additional mixed feelings, this time more positive.
What I can say is that I don’t have a balanced analytic view of SF as a movement as I should have. I’m impressed that SF is a movement, it’s big, it’s a lot more significant in Europe than in the US. And it abhors fast food and its corporate structures (as do I). Do agrifoodies researching SF have much to say about the movement rather than about this piece of it or that piece? Or there models that might be drawn upon to deal with movement failures (assuming there are some)? Is it “progressive” and, if so, in what respects? And does it contribute to strengthening civil society?
Bill Friedland
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