Center for Fair & Alternative Trade
New Book on Fair Trade
Posted: Summer 2009.
CFAT Directors Laura Raynolds and Doug Murray co-edited along with John Wilkinson the book Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization.
The book explores the challenges and potential of Fair Trade, one of the world’s most dynamic efforts to enhance global social justice and environmental sustainability through market based social change.
Fair Trade is expanding rapidly around the world. This movement offers important opportunities for empowering producers and alleviating poverty in the global South and for increasing Northern consumer consciousness and action promoting global social justice. Yet, the expansion of Fair Trade into new types of commodities, production regions, and retail venues is raising important new challenges. How can Fair Trade face the challenges ahead and fulfill its promise, broadening and deepening its positive impacts now and in the future?
Our research reveals the challenges that Fair Trade faces in its effort to transform globalization, emphasizing the inherent tensions of working both in and against the market. The volume explores Fair Trade’s recent rapid growth into new production regions, market arenas, and commodity areas through case studies of Europe, North America, Africa and Latin America undertaken by prominent scholars in each region. The authors draw on, and advance, global commodity and value chain analysis, convention, and social movement approaches through these case studies and a series of synthetic analytical chapters. Pressure for both more radical and more moderate approaches compete within the movement’s historical vision, reshaping Fair Trade’s priorities and efforts in the Global North and South.
For a summary of our conclusions, see our Policy Brief for the Carnegie Council: The Fair Trade Future.