Exploring the Limits of Fair Trade: Towards a Critical Political Economy of the Local Food Movement
Year: 2010
Type: preprint
Abstract: In this paper, I explore the limitations of the fair trade movement in the context of the global political economy. I argue that local food systems, based on regimes of trust and reciprocity, may be able to transcend the spatial and theoretical limits of the fair trade movement by re-embedding production in the local context. Drawing on the works of David Harvey, Karl Marx, and Karl Polanyi, I argue that the potential for such local production represents a more powerful potential corrective to the discourse of globalization in the context of food production and consumption. While remaining mindful of the limits of the local-global binary and the transformative potential of any local movement in the context of a globalized system of capitalist agricultural production, I argue that the local food movement may nevertheless represent a powerful alternative to the logic of neoliberal globalization. Indeed, drawing on examples from the United States, Canada, and South Africa, I argue that localization has the capacity to re-embed food production in local social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, potentially transforming the nature of food production in ways that the global fair trade movement cannot.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Noah Zerbe
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2257771872