Summary :
The chance to revisit the issues, places, and relationships described in Brewing Justice after seven years is a wonderful opportunity and at the same time a formidable challenge. The political landscape of the fair-trade movement and market has in many ways been altered dramatically—its scale and scope greatly expanded, its key institutions reshaped, and its center of gravity shifting toward new consumers, geographies, commodities, and forms of production. Yet there is also stability: many pioneering firms and NGOs remain deeply involved, and the general terms of the struggle over the movement’s future direction, indeed its soul, remain remarkably consistent. It is these tensions and divergences that I aim to explore in this revised edition. I am grateful to University of California Press—and especially to my editor Naomi Schneider—for this invitation to reassess the state of the social relationships embodied in fairtrade coffee. Beyond a doubt, many more consumers are now aware of fair trade. Global sales of all fair-trade-certified goods have more than quadrupled since the statistics cited in the original edition, from $1.3 billion in 2005 to $3.3 billion in 2007 and over $7 billion in 2012. Many more mainstream consumers now have access to fair-trade products, with much of this growth occuring through mass-market brands and mainstream retail channels. Yet through this mainstreaming process, the fair-trade system’s embrace of conventional market actors—transnational agrifood corporations such as Dole and Nestlé, as well as the largest global retail-ers, including Walmart and McDonald’s—a process already well underway by 2007, has become more pronounced and entrenched. The power of these firms to influence the content of fair-trade certification has increased, and many longtime participants allege that standards have been correspondingly weakened. Simultaneously, there has been an increase in the certification of crops produced under fair trade’s “hired labor” modality by waged laborers on agribusiness plantations, rather than small farmers organized into democratic cooperatives or associations. As a result of these trends and others, the certification of fair-trade goods is now more complex and contested than it was seven years ago. This is especially true in the United States, where a major institutional split—Fair Trade USA’s recent decision to break from the international fair-trade system and create its own standards—has roiled the movement, dividing activists and commercial firms alike. The updated edition examines how this schism has unfolded and explores the repercussions. As a result of these developments, consumers in the United States now face a proliferation of competing fair-trade labels and claims, making the fair-trade market increasingly challenging to navigate.

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