Justice, sustainability, and the fair trade movement: a case study of coffee production in Chiapas.

• Date: 22 September 2004
• Author: Hudson, Mark,Hudson, Ian
• Published date: 22 September 2004
• Author: Hudson, Mark

Introduction

ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ELEMENTS OF GLOBALIZATION IS THE SPREAD OF capitalist production and commodity exchange. It affects economic security, social structures, systems of governance, and perhaps most important, human relations with nature. This is not very much in dispute. Rather, the dispute between the triumphant heralds of globalization and its critics lies primarily in the quality of the transformation: is it for better, or for worse? (1) This dispute takes place on paper and in active political struggle. One of its products is a long catalogue of cases documenting the rough incursion or intensification of capitalist relations into new spaces. As Marx, and a host of other historians have shown, capitalism never arrives on a gentle breeze (Hobsbawm, 1987; Polanyi, 1957). It involves the removal of people from the land, the introduction of new conceptions of nature as divisible and alienable property, the (often coerced) subjection of the displaced population to the system of commodity production, wage labor, and factory discipline, and the rupture of previously established systems of obligation and privilege. Unsurprisingly, there is a parallel and continuing history of resistance to these incursions.

One effort to support alternative, sustainable, and just relations of exchange and production in the face of globalization is the fair trade movement. Although often understood as a consumers' movement, similar to the "anti-sweatshop" movement, this article uses a case study of coffee production in Chiapas, Mexico, to argue that the potential of the fair trade movement lies in the fact that it addresses relations of exchange and relations of production. In particular, we suggest that the system of fair trade manages to address issues of social justice and environmental sustainability in an integrated way. It does so by supporting a more equitable relationship of exchange between Northern consumers and Southern producers, and by supporting certain kinds of productive relations among Southern coffee farmers. By encouraging and helping to sustain noncapitalist forms of production, fair trade goes beyond the issue of "a fair price" for internationally traded goods. It enables a certain degree of autonomy for Southern producers in their decisions about the labor process, the governance of their communities and organizations, their strategies for meeting their subsistence needs, and their productive engagement with nature.

Various organizations and networks have been working to develop alternative forms of international trade since at least the 1940s, when the Mennonite Central Committee in the United States began trading with Southern producers. Alternative trade can be distinguished from conventional trading relationships because it is based on more than the gains that can be made from impersonal and self-interested voluntary exchange. Rather, alternative trade organizations exist primarily to improve the welfare of those with whom they trade. Fair trade remains a speck in the wave of international commodity trade, representing an estimated .01% of the total. However, fair trade sales increased impressively in the 1990s and into 2000. North American fair trade organizations grossed about $100 million in sales in 2000, largely because of increased sales of coffee. Our article focuses on the coffee branch of the fair trade system because it is strongly identified as a sort of "flagship" commodity for the fair trade movement, and because it is such a vital piece of the livelihoods of so many small farmers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Fully half of the coffee traded globally is produced by small farmers with fewer than five hectares in production (International Federation for Alternative Trade, 1995). Other fairly traded products include tea, cocoa, sugar, honey, and craft products (woven goods, wood products, iron products, ceramics, etc.).

Fair trade activists have endeavored to increase sales by increasing consumer awareness of fair trade and of the negative consequences of conventional coffee production and exchange, and with some success. Total gross sales of fair trade certified coffee in the U.S. and Canada increased 50% from 1999 to 2000, reaching $64.4 million (Lobe, 2002). Pressure has also been brought to bear on merchants to make fairly traded coffee more available. A highly publicized threatened boycott of Starbucks in 2000 resulted in an agreement to have bulk fair trade coffee made available at the company's ubiquitous outlets. Starbucks purchased one million pounds of fairly traded coffee in 2002, and activists continue to pressure them to regularly offer brewed fair trade coffee. The Fair Trade Federation attributed primary responsibility for increased sales in 2000 to sales from large retailers (such as Starbucks) that are outside the fair trade network (Ibid.). Fair trade also attracted national media attention through an effort in Berkeley, California, to pass a ballot measure requiring local merchants to sell coffee that was certified as either fair trade, shade grown, or organic. Though the initiative was defeated, it provided a national spotlight for fair trade.

This article provides a brief backgrounder on Chiapas in the context of globalization and the international coffee trade. We look at the redistributive aspect of the fair trade system: how fair trade attempts to circumvent the unequal trading relationships of the world market by offering "fair" prices to certain kinds of producer groups. This is the most publicized and transparent aspect of fair trade. The next section examines the productive relations that are supported by the fair trade system. Fair trade is explicitly committed to the support of producers growing coffee in certain ways, involving certain relations of production, and within the framework of a larger development scheme. Finally, we introduce the ecological aspect of fair trade, looking at two very different ecologies of coffee production. The first is a product of capitalist forms of production, fully integrated and dependent on world commodity markets, and characterized by what Wright (1978: 73) outlines as the "three central processes underlying the basic capital-labor relationship: control over the physical means of production; control over labor power; control over investments and resource allocation." This ecology is heavily conditioned by the logic of economic efficiency, the dictates of accumulation, and a split between those in direct interaction with nature (direct producers) and those controlling how production takes place (plantation owners and managers). The other ecology--explicitly supported by the fair trade system--is a product of a long and intimate interaction between small-scale producers and their land. It is governed by democratically determined priorities, has a commitment to ecological sustainability, and is enabled by the maintenance of the direct producers' control over the production process.

Background: Chiapas and the Coffee Economy

Chiapas is one of the poorest states in Mexico. A much larger percentage of its population is below the minimum wage (an income level determined by the federal government to be adequate to meet the basic needs of a typical family) than typifies the Mexican national average. It is alarming that 26% of the Mexican population ekes out an existence on less than the minimum wage, but this pales in comparison with the 56% of the population doing so in Chiapas. Table 1 (at the end of the article) shows the income distributions for Mexico and Chiapas.

As is often the case in impoverished regions, literacy rates, educational attainment, and health indicators also lag behind the rest of the country. Beyond the much lower wages, the gap between Chiapas and other regions of Mexico, especially the northern maquiladoras, appears to be growing (Hanson, 2003). Since investors have found maquiladora wages too expensive and were lured by lower-wage countries such as Guatemala and Vietnam, the Mexican government's plan for the region, Plan Pueblo Panama, attempts to use the wage gap in Chiapas to attract investment (Aranda, 2002).

Subsistence agriculture, based predominantly on the collective land-holding system known as ejido, (2) has traditionally been vital to the economic security of Chiapas' campesinos. However, the security provided by this system is now under renewed threat by the influx of foreign investment and Mexico's inclusion into the NAFFA. To accommodate the incoming investment, the government was obliged to slam the door on the Revolution's most valued victory: that of land reform. In 1992, Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, which was the backbone of agrarian reform stemming from the Mexican Revolution, was reformed to allow ejido land to be purchased by large farmers and foreign investors--a practice previously disallowed, thus presenting a barrier to potential investment and to the modernization of Chiapas' economy. Modernization in agriculture largely involved a shift away from small-scale agriculture and toward timber and beef production (Reding, 1994). With land fully commodified, indebted campesinos once protected by Article 27 are now at risk of having their land appropriated by creditors. Further frustrating campesinos, who have been struggling--in some cases for decades--for land tenure through the court system, the reforms halted further land distribution (Ibid.).

Though the end of land reform is perhaps the most devastating symbolic blow to campesinos and may cause the greatest long-term damage to peasants in the name of Mexico's commitment to the global economy, another threat more immediately undermines their economic security. The fall of trade barriers following the enforcement of NAFTA has resulted in a flood of very cheap basic grains from the United States, where mechanized and chemical-intensive...