Product Description

Over the past two decades, sales of fair trade coffee have grown significantly and the fair trade network has emerged as an important international development project. Activists and commentators have been quick to celebrate this sales growth, which has allowed socially just trade, labour, and environmental standards to be extended to hundreds of thousands of small farmers and poor rural workers throughout the Global South. While recent assessments of the fair trade network have focused on its impact on local poverty alleviation, however, the broader political-economic and historically-rooted structures that frame it have been left largely unexamined.

Addressing this omission, Gavin Fridell argues that while local level analysis is important, examining the impacts of broader structures on fair trade coffee networks, and vice versa, are of equal if not greater significance in determining its long-term developmental potential. Using fair trade groups in Mexico and Canada as case studies, Fridell examines fair trade coffee at both the global and local level, assessing it as a development project and locating it within political and development theory. In addition, Fridell provides in-depth historical analysis of fair trade coffee in the context of global trade, and compares it to a variety of post-war development projects within the coffee industry.

Timely, meticulously researched, and engaging, this study challenges many commonly held assumptions about the long-term prospects and pitfalls of the fair trade network's market-driven strategy in the era of globalization.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #796293 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
"Fair Trade Coffee is a sophisticated, historically informed, and ethically critical addition to the literature, which lacks comparable works in terms of breadth and theoretical scope." --Gordon A. Babst, Peace & Change, volume 34, number 1

"Fridell has produced an excellent piece of work. This is a must read for anyone not only interested in fair trade, but the much broader issue of ethical consumption. It is engagingly written, yet intellectually rigorous." --Ian Hudson, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, volume 28, number 2.

"Gavin Fridell's Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice is an ambitious book, which succeeds in its aims. Fair Trade Coffee in many ways sets an academic benchmark in its combination of political theory, social history and case study analysis. Measured and intelligent, well written and accessible, while at the same time strongly argued and quite persuasive, it will be required reading for all those concerned with international commodity trade, fair trade and social justice and will, no doubt, end up on many reading lists." --A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Development and Change, volume 40, number 2.

"This book deserves a prominent position among current analyses of fair trade. Students of commodities and of Latin American economic history, as well as the diverse actors involved in fair trade, will find much that is stimulating in Fridell's unique perspective on the subject." --Guillermo E. Narváez, Business History Review, volume 82, number 3.

"This book is a valuable contribution to the existing literature on fair trade and will be useful to anyone interested in the global economy and transnational economic, political, and social links." --Sarah Lyon, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, volume 33, number 65.

About the Author

Gavin Fridell is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Trent University.

Customer Reviews

Just the Facts Man...
I bought this book and pushed through it in a matter of about a week of free time. The book is mostly facts, heavy facts of the past and present. It is presented in such a way that even those against fair trade would be even more wary of stepping into the moral market of coffee fetishism. Regardless of all that, it was a decent read and helped give me good solid information for both sides. Where it all came from, where it is at and where it is going.