Fair trade and ethical trade: are there moves towards convergence?

Fair trade and ethical trade have traditionally had quite different aims, scope and modalities, the former principally focused on terms of trade with small scale producers and the latter on working conditions in mainstream production. Global value chain analysis suggests that this coincided with different forms of governance in the chain: fair trade reflecting relational governance based on trust and mutual dependence, while ethical trade was incorporated into the industrial coordination of buyer-driven, modular value chains. This paper explores the potential for greater synergy between the two as a result of recent developments, taking UK supermarket value chains as a case study. We conclude that convergence may occur in some supermarket chains, in a context of relational governance, while in others ethical trade and fair trade will remain inherently different. Whether and how convergence occurs will depend largely on the prevailing culture, values and strategies of the supermarket concerned. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Contesting ethical trade in Colombia's cut-flower industry: a case of cultural and economic injustice

Based on a case study of Colombia's cut-flower industry, this article draws strategically on Nancy Fraser's model of (in) justice to explore the mutual entwinement of culture and economy. It examines responses by cut-flower employers and their representatives to ethical trade discourses demanding economic justice for Colombia's largely female cut-flower workers. It argues that employers' misrecognition of both ethical trade campaigners and cut-flower workers may serve to deny and redefine claims of maldistribution. Through a 'home-grown' code of conduct, employers also seek to appropriate ethical trade in their own interests. Finally, a gender coding of worker misrecognition ostensibly displaces workers' problems from the economic realm to the cultural, offering the 'modernity' of full capitalist relations as the solution. In further examining the 'responses to the responses' by workers and their advocates, the contestation of ethical trade is highlighted and its prospects assessed