Behind the Label: Always Fairly Traded?

Since Fair Trade entered the mainstream market, a label symbolizing the quality of being “fairly traded” has mediated between the producers and the consumers instead of the more direct relationship existing when fair trade was an alternative trade organizations business. With the lengthening and a larger opacity of the commodity chain, the label is supposed to give information and a guarantee to the consumers about the conditions of trade offered to the producers. A system of standards and certification has been developed to deliver the label.

On the other side, as the literature on Fair Trade demonstrates, the corporations have developed multiple strategies to occupy the promising market niche that fair trade represents, through favoring competing labels that induce consumers’ confusion or being themselves certificated by the fair trade institutions for a small part of their purchases.  

Based on a case study in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, South of México, the papers pretends to demonstrate how a single label, the Fair Trade International label (or FLO), covers (or hides) very different and opposite realities on the side of production and supply: on one side, autonomous cooperatives of coffee peasants, that have sold under Fair Trade conditions to Alternative Trade and Fair Trade Organizations in the North for long time; on the other side, producers organized and financed by one of the largest coffee trade corporations, engaged in a multi-label strategy in order to occupy all market niches, that buy up their coffee to be sold under the FLO label.