University of Florida doctoral candidate, Alison M. Ketter, supervised by Dr. Brenda H. Chalfin, will examine the impacts of fairtrade, a trade-not-aid approach to sustainable development that aims to empower marginalized producers in the global south through branding associated with the promotion of specific kinds of production, distribution, and consumption practices. Fairtrade is part of the new moral economies, which present themselves as alternatives to conventional capitalist markets. The researcher will investigate how different groups are able to negotiate their relative power and interests within this system; the effects of fairtrade on agrarian policy, labor, and property relations; and whether these local effects in turn affect the fairtrade movement.
The research will be focused on the Fairtrade South Africa (FTSA) consortium. Specifically, the researcher will investigate FTSA's recently implemented south-south trade strategy, where fairtrade certified goods produced in South Africa will also be sold in South Africa. This program is a radical departure from the Fairtrade founding strategy of sourcing from the global south for marketing and consumption in the global north. The researcher will utilize a mixed methodological approach. Data will be obtained via participant observation, semi-structured interviews, structured interviews, surveys, and archival research. The researcher will analyze these data to determine 1) how FTSA policy and practice affect agrarian transformation and rural livelihoods in South Africa; and 2) how FTSA affects the global fairtrade model and cooperative policies and practices among states and between producers and consumers in the global south. The collection of qualitative and quantitative data will allow the researcher to address agrarian labor and production relations, within the context of post-apartheid national policy transformations and evolving geopolitical alignments.
This research will contribute to science and anthropological thought by investigating the broad impact of moral economy movements in the context of contemporary market-focused globalization and the proliferation of economic relations that are not easily contained with traditional notions of the nation state. The research also supports the education of a graduate student.
This dissertation, entitled "Negotiating the Spaces of Fair Trade in South Africa’s Wine Industry," investigates the convergence of global capitalism, moral economies, and local, post-colonial agrarian non/transformation in South Africa’s Western Cape Province. Fairtrade is an international economic initiative that aims to empower marginalized producers across the global south through the promotion of equitable production, distribution and consumption practices. Based on a trade-not-aid approach to sustainable development, Fairtrade International was officially launched on a world-wide scale in 1997. It is now a widespread template for agrarian reform, encompassing over 50 producer states in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Using a mixed methodological approach, this project was based on two guiding research questions: 1) How do the various stakeholders within the Fair Trade system influence policy transformation within both the international Fair Trade movement and Western Cape agrarian reform efforts; and 2) What do these negotiations and power plays mean for the ways in which policy is implemented and for on-the-ground realities such as business sustainability and farm worker livelihoods? I have worked with a variety of stakeholders in order to address these questions. These stakeholders—whom I have termed "agentic actors" to represent each individual’s relative power within the system—include farm owners, managers, and workers; winemakers; Fairtrade International, Fairtrade Africa, FLO-Cert, Fair for Life, and Fairtrade Network personnel; NGOs; government officials; and numerous other individuals. This research examined several policy flows and transformations. Of primary interest in reconfiguring the Fair Trade paradigm in South Africa—with its subsequent consequences for the nation’s fairly-traded wine industry—are questions relating to inclusivity, standards, and certification. Notably, Fairtrade Network increased inclusivity and now represents a more broadly-defined fairly-traded family in South Africa. Relevant Fair Trade bodies also addressed—in numerous ways and with varying degrees of success and democratic process—standards and certification requirements relating to Fairtrade International’s South Africa-specific BEE addendum, a potential ban on the export of Fairtrade-certified bulk wine, and an ongoing review of environmental standards on pesticide usage. This research also examined how farm workers in the Western Cape have historically dealt with a plethora of challenges including physical and verbal abuse by producers, alcoholism resulting from the now banned wine-for-labor system, poverty, sub-standard housing conditions, and far-reaching disempowerment. Government policy and international ethical certification bodies like Fair Trade attempt to reconstitute what it means to be a farm worker in rural South Africa. Though progress has been achieved, the legacy of apartheid-era violence and its continuing tremors still permeate the countryside and color efforts at racial reconciliation. Farm workers remain one of the most vulnerable populations in South Africa despite strict government labor laws. With farm-focused trade unions proving to be ineffective in the Western Cape, ethical trade paradigms with their heightened labor and livelihood standards have provided workers with their at-present best opportunity to reconfigure deeply entrenched power structures and demand their human and worker rights in the neoliberal era. Still, farm workers’ legally and trade certification-backed demands are typically met with both violent and nonviolent forms of resistance by producers who see their own position in rural South African society being jeopardized. Many producers also struggle to remain financially solvent in the highly competitive global wine industry due to deregulation, global inequalities in the realm of agricultural subsidies, and disadvantageous relationships with exporters and/or buyers throughout the value chain. Farm workers and producers now find themselves at a critical juncture where they must come to terms with their shared history and create new communal and personal identities moving forward. However, navigating identity and personhood is an especially complicated task in an era in which neoliberalism and its alternatives further marginalize struggling populations.
