Afterword: Fair Trade in a Boom Market

Abstract

For a movement that seeks to improve the lives of Southern coffee producers, the coffee crisis in the early half of the 2000s provided a stark illustration of the inequities created by the international coffee market. Reports like Oxfam’s (2002) Mugged: Poverty in Your Cup highlighted the devastating impact of the price collapse on coffee-producing families with dramatic section headings like ‘families going hungry’ and ‘growing attractions of growing drugs.’ When the international price bottomed out at $0.48 per pound in 2003, the fair trade message about the dysfunctional nature of the coffee industry became especially germane in both the North and the South. In the North, the coffee crisis brought home the real problems of poverty created by the coffee industry, to which fair trade’s minimum price offered a concrete solution. In the South, the minimum price made fair trade cooperatives increasingly attractive purchasers as the conventional price collapsed.