The International Fair-Trade Consumer Movement

Abstract

There is a growing body of research that has revealed significant variations in the organisation of fair-trade production systems within and between countries in the developing world (Barrientos & Dolan, 2006; Dolan, 2008; Jaffee, 2007; Lyon & Moberg, 2010; Raynolds, Murray & Wilkinson, 2007). However, academic research exploring fair-trade consumption within a comparative context is limited. To my knowledge Varul (2009) offers one of the only examples of such a study. Varul examined how the fair-trade market is organised in the UK and Germany, and suggested that fair-trade consumers understand their decision to purchase fair-trade differently in these national contexts because of differing infrastructures of provision, histories of colonialism and visions of the consumer. In the UK, the privatisation of public services has led to an image of the consumer as an autonomous agent who exercises their right to free choice and in so doing regulates the market. The fair-trade consumer in the UK is able to access fair-trade goods in mainstream retail outlets and understands fair-trade as a business relationship based on a notion of equal exchange. By contrast, in Germany, there is an emphasis placed upon the rational planning of consumption and the consumer is an agent who is guided by expertise from the established agencies who are responsible for ensuring that fair-trade farmers are protected. The fair-trade consumer in Germany accesses fair-trade goods through alternative retail outlets (the World Shop) and understands fair-trade as something that educates producers and provides them with social welfare (i.e. a guaranteed set of rights). The national context of fair-trade consumption informs the way that people are able to think about their responsibilities to distant others and influences the ways in which they are able to construct themselves as ethical consumers. As we saw in the previous chapter, different cultural, political and economic contexts have an important impact upon the way citizen-consumers are mobilised. Indeed, recent comparative research across six European countries found that there were significant differences in the levels of consumer activism and consumer trust, suggesting that notions of consumer power are differently instituted within varying socio-political contexts (Kjærnes, Harvey & Warde, 2007).