Product Description

This book explores the challenges and potential of Fair Trade, one of the world’s most dynamic efforts to enhance global social justice and environmental sustainability through market based social change.

Fair Trade links food consumers and agricultural producers across the Global North/ South divide and lies at the heart of key efforts to reshape the global economy. This book reveals the challenges the movement faces in its effort to transform globalization, emphasizing the inherent tensions in working both in, and against, the market. It explores Fair Trade’s recent rapid growth into new production regions, market arenas, and commodity areas through case studies of Europe, North America, Africa, and Latin America undertaken by prominent scholars in each region. The authors draw on, and advance, global commodity and value chain analysis, convention, and social movement approaches through these case studies and a series of synthetic analytical chapters. Pressures for more radical and more moderate approaches intertwine with the movement’s historical vision, reshaping Fair Trade’s priorities and efforts in the Global North and South.

Fair Trade will be of strong interest to students and scholars of politics, globalization, sociology, geography, economics and business.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #713627 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
This edited volume – the first of its kind – is a valuable contribution. The book fills an important niche, pulling together in one place a wealth of detailed data on the rapidly changing political and organizational landscape of the international fair trade movement. It will be valuable to researchers and practitioners working on fair trade and other alternative market initiatives, and would be useful for graduate courses on food systems, globalization, development and other topics in a range of social science disciplines. – Daniel Jaffee, Agriculture and Human Values, vol 25

About the Author
Colorado State University, USA Rural Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Customer Reviews

On Fair Trade
I received the book very quickly and it was in great condition. The book is a wonderful compilation of information on Fair Trade and what it means as it develops as a serious and viable social justice movement. The authors are experts in the field and offer a very comprehensive understanding of Fair Trade. Read the book!

A clarifying research
This book about Fair Trade is amazingly well documented; every chapter focuses on a specific subject which addresses in deep detail and develops with a quite academic and powerful stance.

I would say that this is not for newcomers but for experienced Fair Trade activists who want to gain a powerful insight into the movement.

To me, the better chapters are the one dealing with banana plantations certification and the final one, accurately describing the current tensions inside the Fair Trade community.

Really worth reading.


Roberto Valbuena
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