Introduction

The fair trade movement is arguably one of the mostsuccessful social movements of the late 20th andearly 21st centuries. In contrast to its humbleorigins in charity shops run by Oxfam in the UK, andthe Mennonite Central Committee and Church of theBrethren in the US, the largest of the three majornetworks of fair trade organisations, FairtradeInternational, generated global sales of €7.3billion in 2015 from 1,200 producer organisationswhich served more than 1.65 million farmers and farmworkers in over 70 countries (FairtradeInternational, 2016).

Having emerged to assist Second World War refugees, aglobal social movement evolved as a response to theperceived economic and social inequities of theinternational food production and distributionsystem, first under a banner of ‘alternative trade’and later as ‘fair trade’. The movement's membersand supporters reflect diverse approaches to‘alternative’ social relations of production andconsumption, including mutualism (producer andconsumer cooperatives), Utopian industrialism,religiously inspired views linking business andsocial justice (including liberation theology),‘alternative lifestyles’ based on communalism andanti-capitalist ‘counter-culture’, andanti-colonialism. For example, ‘Third Worldsolidarity groups’ in the Netherlands startedselling cane sugar in the 1950s as a vehicle foreducating consumers about international developmentissues (Kocken, 2006).

A key goal of the movement is to offer both atheoretical and practical alternative to theexisting power relations in global trade that areargued to structurally disadvantage producers in theGlobal South (Barratt Brown, 1993). Hence the fairtrade movement has built its practice around two keyprinciples: payment of a ‘fair price’ (Zadek andTiffen, 1998) and a primary focus on producerwellbeing. Littrell and Dickson (1999, p 5) neatlysummarise these two principles as ‘an ideologicalfocus on paying producers “as much as possible”rather than “as little as possible”’.

Fridell (2007, p 24) says, ‘[f]rom a theoreticalperspective, the origins of the [fair trade]network's development vision lie in thestructuralist, dependency and world systemstheories…’, which argue that the existing gapbetween core (rich) and periphery (poor) countriesis maintained, in part, through international tradepolicies.