Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice? An Analysis of Fair Trade's Plantation Problem. Issue 5 (4th June 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Besky, Sarah
• Is Part Of: Antipode. Volume 47:Issue 5(2015:Nov.)
• Page Start: 1141
• Page End: 1160
• Publication Date: 2015-06-04
• Subjects: Geography -- Periodicals; 910.5
• DOI: 10.1111/anti.12159
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0066-4812

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="main"> <title>Abstract</title> <p>A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. On one side of this debate is Fair Trade USA, which supports plantation certification. On the other is the retailer Equal Exchange, whose leaders fear that fair trade's longstanding commitment to small farmer cooperatives may be in jeopardy. Drawing on the two organizations' experiences with tea plantations and cooperatives in Darjeeling, India, as well as my own ethnographic research, I explore how advocates in the global North identify <italic>who</italic> counts as a legitimate laboring subject of agricultural justice. This debate underscores that social justice in global agriculture is fundamentally multiple—in Nancy Fraser's terms, "abnormal". The seeming intractability of this debate shows that while the agricultural justice movement has attended to questions of economic distribution and cultural recognition, it must do more to address problems of political representation at national and international scales.</p> </abstract>