Fair Trade, Sustainability and Social Change

Is fair trade a radical movement aiming to transform global systems of production and exchange, or is it a marketing niche that delivers small benefits to Southern farmers and a clean conscience to Northern consumers? Schisms currently opening between the US-based Fair Trade USA and the rest of the international fair trade movement are reflective of this choice. This book evaluates the extent to which fair trade is likely to be a transformative movement. The authors show that fair trade's most significant, and threatened, contribution is its potential to reveal to otherwise 'blinded' consumers the qualitative aspects of labour and nature embodied in commodities. Integrating insights from economic and sociological theory and research, the book sheds new light on this potential of the movement, its role in producing social change, and, given the recent strategic trajectory of the movement, the serious problems it now faces.

Ian Hudson is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He has previously co-authored (with Robert Chernomas): Social Murder and Other Shortcomings of Conservative Economics, The Gatekeeper: Sixty Years of Economics According to the New York Times, and To Live and Die in America: Class, Power, Health and Healthcare.
Mark Hudson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Global Political Economy Program at the University of Manitoba, Canada. In addition to several co-authored articles on fair trade and ethical consumption, he is author of Fire Management in the American West: Forest Politics and the Rise of Megafires.
Mara Fridell is a member of the Province of Manitoba's Priorities & Planning Secretariat and an affiliate of the Global Political Economy Program at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She researches the neoliberal social politics attending conservative labour market, environmental and financial policy, and is a contributor to the forthcoming Counting on Marilyn Waring anthology.