2014/08/09 by Gavin Fridell · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #Organic Food and Agriculture
paper · doi:10.1080/01436597.2014.926108
openalex publication_date 2014/08/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Fair trade coffee sales have boomed since the late 1980s, making it one of the most recognised forms of ‘ethical consumerism’ in the world. Around the same time exports of lower quality coffee beans from Vietnam also boomed, launching Vietnam from an insignificant coffee exporter to the world’s second largest with historically unprecedented speed. These disparate projects have had significant impacts on thousands of farmers – with Vietnam’s new class of coffee producers representing three and a half times the number of coffee families certified by fair trade. Northern actors, however, have given far more public and positive attention to fair trade. This article will argue that this difference does not stem from a strictly objective appraisal of the relative merits and shortcomings of each project, but from the compatibility of fair trade with ‘free trade’ and its emotionally charged ideological fantasies. This includes unconscious beliefs and desires around individualism, voluntarism, democracy and the affirmation of the exaggerated power of Northern consumers – as opposed to the Southern agency and complicated collective action implied by Vietnamese coffee statecraft.