Fair trade is widely regarded as a universal good. This fascinating anthropological study takes a closer look at a coffee-growing community and cooperatives in Costa Rica - and subjects the fair trade movement to critical scrutiny.As with conventional coffee, Western demand for organic fair trade produce is largely met by more affluent individuals with larger landholdings. As a result, it is caught up in the conflicts of interest and resentments that are part of the coffee industry...

Concern about our food system is growing, from the costs of industrial farming to the dominant role of supermarkets and recurring scandals about the origins and content of what we eat.Food for Change documents the way alternative food movements respond to these concerns by trying to create more closed economic circuits within which people know where, how, and by whom their food is produced.Jeff Pratt, Peter Luetchford and other contributors explore the key political and eco...

Prices permeate contemporary life. From the cost of basic foodstuffs in developing countries to the pay of CEOs in rich ones, the question of the politics and ethics of pricing everything through the market dominates public life. At the same time, we know that dilemmas about how to value fairly, but also efficiently, goods and services have been with us for more than two thousand years, since the times of Aristotle in Ancient Greece. Through the course of the centuries, important thinkers ...

Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European ...