Trading Fat for Forests: On Palm Oil, Tropical Forest Conservation, and Rational Consumption

The longstanding butter vs margarine debate has recently become more complex as the links between margarine, industrial palm oil plantations, and tropical deforestation are made increasingly clear. Yet despite calls for consumers to get informed and take responsibility for tropical deforestation by boycotting margarine or purchasing buttery spreads made with sustainably-sourced palm oil, research in multiple contexts demonstrates that even the most aware, engaged, and rational consumers run into significant barriers when trying to reduce their environmental impacts. This paper supplements important critiques of neoliberal conservation at the site of extraction or intended conservation (Carrier and West 2009; Igoe and Brockington 2009; Bόscher et al. 2012), with empirical research from the other end of the commodity chain. It argues that programs which place faith in the ability of rational consumers to influence conservation outcomes through their choices on the market, neglect significant structural constraints and overestimate the efficacy of market choices. While careful to recognise the importance of civic pressure for policy legitimacy, this article also contributes to a special section on rational actors, calling into question the dominant ideology of free and rational choice that undergirds so many market-based conservation programs

From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption

This article reviews some of the recent literature in geography and related disciplines on ethical consumerism and political consumption. Many geographers began their engagement with questions of ethics, politics, consumption and consumerism inspired by critical theory, commodity chain analysis and a sense that geographical knowledge might have a central role to play in progressive social change. Since these early engagements, it has been established that consumption practices are rarely the practices of rational, autonomous, self-identified consumers, and so-called ethical consumption practices are rarely detached from organisations and their political activity. Over time, therefore, some researchers have gradually shifted their focus from consumer identities and knowledge to consumption practices, social networks, material infrastructures and organisations of various kinds. This shift in focus has implications – both for the field of political consumption and for how the discipline of geography relates to this field

Fairtrade bananas in the Caribbean: Towards a moral economy of recognition

Working through a Caribbean case study, this paper examines the networks and associations of Fair Trade bananas as they move both materially and morally from farms in St Vincent and the Grenadines to supermarkets and households in the United Kingdom. In doing so, the paper provides grounded empirical evidence of Fair Trade's moral economy as experienced by banana producers in the Caribbean. The paper follows Nancy Fraser's distinction between ways of framing justice to argue that, in order to transcend its complex postcolonial positionalities, the Fair Trade Foundation needs to include recognition in its moral economy as well as representation and redistribution. The paper compares the moral framework of Fair Trade as an ideology and social movement with the lived experience of certified Fairtrade banana farmers in the Windward Islands who work mostly for, rather than within, an idealized moral economy. The paper also contributes to several recent debates in the agri-food literature exploring the interconnections between production and consumption, the role of materiality in contemporary food networks, the historical and (post)colonial nature of food moralities, and links between political and moral economies of food. Following an outline of recent debates about the moral economies of food and its relation to Fair Trade as a movement, the paper dissects the moral economy of the Fairtrade Foundation, highlighting the historical and geographical, material and symbolic, gendered and generational ways that food producers in the Global South (in this case, banana farmers in St Vincent and the Grenadines) may be counterposed to 'responsible' consumers in the Global North. Despite the good intentions of those who promote the Fair Trade movement through the Fairtrade Foundation and the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO), our case study reveals a moral economy of non (or partial) recognition, which has a range of unintended consequences and paradoxical effects

Fighting standards with standards: harmonization, rents, and social accountability in certified agrofood networks

In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with reference to value-chain rent theory, that the shift to globalized standards has transformed rent relations in ways that benefit certain actors (that is, retailers) and imperil the earnings of others. In brief, globalized standards increase the costs of standards compliance, the full burden of which falls upon immiserated producers, to the point at which farmers see little economic advantage to certified-organic and fair-trade production. I then examine social-accountability standards that seek to ‘fight standards with standards’ by championing the consolidation of strong labor and environmental protections under a single label. The study suggests that a single-label strategy can be successful, yet must struggle to overcome a Polanyian double bind, for, in order to build broad coalitions necessary to extend the reach of protective standards, the coalitions must include corporate interests that prefer weaker, contract-based standards.

The number is the beast: a political economy of organic-coffee certification and producer unionism

The author argues that organic-coffee certification enacted under the rubric of transnational certification norms alters the logic and practice of economic management and governance in an Oaxacan (Mexican) peasant producers' union. As the title indicates, these changes are productive of social and economic tensions. An economic and ethnographic analysis of 'certification labor' demonstrates (a) that the work of certification is distributed within producer organizations such that village and regional leaders become burdened by significant new responsibilities, and (b) that practical changes -- including a new producer logic ('market-price interdependence') and village certification-service providers ('peasant inspectors' and 'community technical officers') -- have a significant qualitative impact upon household and village economic governance. In addition, certification (c) affects the operation of statewide producer unions, altering the ways in which these interact both with their member organizations and with certifiers: unions must intervene to aid (regional) member organizations in their efforts to certify, yet also find that certification norms, such as conflict-of-interest provisions, constrain the union's ability to promote producer interests. Thus a qualification to an organic and ethical-products literature that conflates quality certification with the protection of smallholder cultural and economic independence is provided. The author concludes that a rethinking of certification norms, together with efforts to assist producer certification, should be a priority for supporters of sustainable agriculture.