The Living Wage Debate in the Kenyan Cut-Flower Industry

Over the past three decades, the Kenyan cut-flower industry has come under intense scrutiny for its environmental impacts and poor labor conditions, including low wages. A multitude of certification schemes have been introduced to address this criticism, each with its own regulations and standards. However, these certifications have had little impact on industry wages. Even though the most well-known standard, Fairtrade, explicitly targets living wages, wage levels remain well below living wage calculations for Kenya’s flower-producing hubs. This article explores this discrepancy. First, I discuss local experiences with wage levels in the major flower-growing hub at Lake Naivasha.This discussion indicates that local evaluations of wage levels in the flower industry are more differentiated than global discussions on the living wage suggest. Secondly, I argue that certifications, including their measures to support living wages have a depoliticizing effect and side-line local mechanisms for setting wage levels. Consequently, living wages in the Kenyan flower industry are still a long way from materializing

Living Wages and Living Incomes in Fair Supply Chains? A Critical Review

The living wages and living incomes approach was designed to contribute to poverty reduction, environmental sustainability, and social justice. It is prominently positioned in the Fair Trade movement, which treats living wages and living incomes as a core political demand. While the concept of living wages and living incomes is not new, the challenges arising from a globalized, crisis-ridden world are increasingly complex and poorly understood. This special issue presents four international, wide-ranging empirical papers that, first and foremost, ask whether living wages and living incomes provide socially just and sustainable livelihoods for workers and smallholder farmers in countries that produce key primary commodities, mainly in the Global South. This editorial first reviews the origins and evolution of the living wages and living incomes concept and different methods of calculation. It then previews the empirical contributions in this special issue and discusses the practical implementation challenges of living wages and living income ideals.  

Voluntary Sustainability Standards and Social Network Development: The Unpredictable Impact Pathways to Achieving a Living Income Amongst Indonesian Coffee Farmers

This paper presents coffee producers’ subjective perceptions of voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) programs across southern Sumatra, a global center for Robusta coffee production. Household surveys and a series of farmer interviews revealed that producers generally had positive perceptions of these programs. Despite positive perceptions, the standards had little impact on yield or household incomes. This apparent paradox is explained by improved social networks and social capital, which were seen as important for broader livelihood security. Producers believed that VSS facilitated access to material support and increased knowledge exchange. This builds both bonding and bridging social capital, all with minimal disruption to the low-input system of coffee production that fits within farmers’ broader livelihood strategies. Our approach highlights the challenges that impact assessments (including applications of the living income concept) face when seeking to establish ostensibly objective measures of well-being

Gendered Dimensions of Labor and Living Incomes Among Coffee Farmers in Southern Mexico

The Fairtrade Standard for Small-Scale Producer Organizations was recently adjusted to reflect core International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions on good working conditions. The standards require smallholders to offer permanent and temporary workers training on labor rights as well as gradual salary increases to close the gap between existing wages and living income targets. However, many smallholder coffee producers depend on inexpensive labor sources like wage laborers, household members, or other community members who engage in reciprocal or collective labor exchanges to meet quality demands and comply with certification standards. Coffee producers in southern Mexico face labor-intensive farm renovations, tight labor markets, and the advancing age (and declining size) of farm families. These shifting labor burdens have differential gender impacts, and farmers find it difficult to finance long-term farm investments at current Fairtrade prices. Thus, a living income—whether for farmers or laborers—remains a distant dream, not an achievable, short-term objective. Using data from nearly 500 smallholder coffee producers in Oaxaca, Mexico, this article explores i) how Fairtrade-certified smallholders manage the labor demands of coffee production and ii) how these practices are specifically gendered. We explore how smallholders meet labor demands and the rationales underpinning their methods, noting the constraints, opportunities, and why these labor practices matter for smallholders, their communities, and long-term Fair Trade supply chain resilience

Living Wages as Life Boat to Rescue Fairtrade’s Values for Hired Labour? The Case of Indian Tea Plantations

Fair Trade is a normative concept for creating more “ just” trading relations between producers in the Global South and consumers in the Global North. It aims to foster the sustainable development of producers through instruments like minimum prices, long-term partnerships, and labor and environmental standards. However, as a market-based instrument, Fair Trade cannot fully escape capitalist logics like price competition. This is especially true of “Fairtrade”-certified products that compete with conventional products in supermarkets. Furthermore, as more large-scale enterprises like plantations are certified, questions emerge about how much workers actually benefit from certification. We understand Fairtrade’s recent living wages policy as a response to this critique and examine how Fairtrade attempts to address the contradictions between its alternative, moral mission and conventional market logic through the instrument of living wages play out in the hired labor context. We draw on moral geography to frame our understanding of fairness as the outcome of a contested process in which different actors assume responsibility. We combine this process-oriented approach to fairness with an understanding of shared responsibility derived from differently situated actors’ capacity to generate change. We illustrate the practical challenges of implementing universal concepts like fairness in the arena of wage setting at certified Indian tea plantations. The case reveals Fairtrade’s limited capacity to make a difference, especially pertaining to workers’ representation. The question of who is responsible for establishing fairness and on what level it should be done remains unsolved

The impact of land use/cover change on extreme temperatures on the Yangtze River Delta, China

The contribution from land use/cover change (LUCC) toward temperature in recent decades is of great concern across the globe. Although there have been many studies, most of them focus on the discussion of average temperature and lack a discussion of extreme temperatures. In this study, we first investigated the spatio-temporal changes in extreme temperatures in the Yangtze River Delta during 1980–2020 using the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method. Then, we explored the impact of LUCC on extreme temperatures using the observation minus reanalysis (OMR) method. Finally, the relationship between the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and extreme temperatures was analyzed using the correlation analysis method. We found that: (1) extreme temperatures have a nonlinear variation characteristics on different time scales. Extremely high temperatures (EHT) clearly exhibited a monthly time scale (quasi-3-month), an interannual time scale (quasi-1-year, quasi-2-year, quasi-3-year and quasi-5-year), and an interdecadal time scale (quasi-10-year and quasi-35-year). Extremely low temperatures (ELT) also clearly exhibited a monthly time scale (quasi-3-month), an interannual scale (quasi-1-year, quasi-2-year, quasi-3-year and quasi-6-year), and an interdecadal scale (quasi-10-year and quasi-20-year). (2) EHT showed an east–middle–west staggered phase and ELT showed a southeast–northwest anti-phase characteristic in spatial distribution. (3) The contribution rates of LUCC on EHT and ELT are 53.6% and 92.4%, respectively, which are higher than for the average temperature (40%). (4) The monthly time scale response of the NDVI to extreme temperatures is more regionally concentrated and significant than that on the interannual time scale in spatial distribution. This paper makes up for the insufficiency of the impact of land use/cover changes on extreme temperature changes at multiple time scales and enriches our understanding of climate change

Soil erosion in the Xiangxi River Basin based on the RUSLE model

The Xiangxi River basin is the largest branch in the upper reaches of Three Gorges Reservoir located in the Hubei prov- ince of China, and it has a significant effect on the storage of the Three Gorges Reservoir. However, soil erosion of the Xiangxi River basin often leads to a series of problems. To minimize the impact of soil erosion on crop production and ecological life, the objective of this study was to evaluate soil erosion of the study area based on the soil and water loss model (RUSLE) with average monthly rainfall data for many years, land-use maps, soil maps, and the remote sensing (RS) images of the Xiangxi River basin and to analyze the spatial characteristics of soil erosion of the study area by geographic information system (GIS) methods in ArcGIS 10.2. The results showed that the areas of a lower grade of ero- sion increased dramatically while the number of the areas of a higher erosion grade decreases relatively compared with the previous study in 2011. This conclusion illustrated that the engineering measures taken by relevant departments affect high grade soil erosion. However, the slope zone of [30, 40) still suffered from high erosion due to mountains with heavy rainfall. It is suggested that more attention should be paid to reduce erosion in mountains, because the Xiangxi River basin belongs to early karst development and large areas of soil are covered with limestone soil. Existing measures to enclose the land for reforestation were not strong enough, thus other measures like planting grass in mountainous areas to alleviate soil erosion should be taken. Meanwhile, for the yellow-brown soil with high erosion, it is necessary to protect soil from stagnant water

The spatio-temporal dynamics of the short-term rental market in Berlin (2008-2020) - The case of AirBnB

Over the last decade, the emergence and development of the digitally mediated short-term rental market (STR) has vastly disrupted urban housing and touristic accommodation markets. Whereas the fact about emergence and devel- opment of STR in cities is well-known, there are lesser insights on how this emergence and development takes place in space and time. In this short communication, we build on the case of Berlin – a city which has implemented a strict regulatory framework towards limiting housing misuse, including the provision of dwellings through short-term rental platforms – in order to explore the ways the short-term rental market emerged and expanded in the city. In doing so, we focus on both the spatial distribution of the listings and the quantitative attributes of the market, building on the analysis of data from the AirDNA dataset that contains all AirBnB listings (n = 104,746) in Berlin from 2008 to 2020. Our findings confirm the peak of spatial concentration of STR listings in predominantly central-city district tenement hous- ing quarters which, since the 1990’s, have gone through gentrification and touristification processes

Special Economic Zones in the Global South: Between integrated spaces and enclaves – a literature review

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have gained massively in popularity worldwide and particularly in the Global South. However, they are also discussed as a controversial economic policy instrument. Some analyses view SEZs as promising spaces with integrative linkages, while other studies see them as enclaves marked by spatial and economic segregation. To shed light on the various and partly contradictory perceptions of SEZs, this paper reviews literature on SEZs in the Global South and suggests a differentiated and more comprehensive view for SEZ analyses in order to understand their different characteristics, interactions, and the related processes between SEZs and their host regions. Our review goes beyond dichotomies of viewing SEZs as enclavistic or integrated spaces. Instead, it systematically outlines how even a single SEZ can integrate into regions in some ways, while remaining disintegrated in other ways. Here, we build on recent studies of SEZs in the Global South, employing the enclave approach as a conceptual basis, and include conceptual works on economic linkages and global production networks