Connections in Fair Trade Food Networks

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Connections in Fair Trade Food Networks

Michael K. Goodman

Agatha Herman

Forthcoming (2015) in Raynolds, L., Bennett, E. (Eds.), The Handbook of Research on Fair Trade.

Edward Elgar, London.

Introduction: The tactical practices of connection and disconnection in fair trade networks1

Close to two decades ago, Sarah Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne (1997) used fair trade (hereafter

‘FT’) coffee to introduce the relatively novel theoretical device of actor-network theory (ANT) to the

political economies of food. At the same time, they used it to illustrate what Peter Evans (2000) has

called the rise of the ‘counter-hegemonic globalisation’ movement. So, as well as providing one of

the earliest academic descriptions of a FT network, through their analysis, they worked to elaborate

a “topological spatial imagination concerned with tracing points of connections and lines of flow, as

opposed to reiterating fixed surfaces and boundaries” (Whatmore and Thorne 1997, p. 289; original

emphasis). Yet, what are these points of connections and lines of flow, and, most notably, how do

they work? And, importantly, how do they do this work in a much more contemporary context as FT

has moved into the ‘everyday’ supply chains for supermarkets, corner stores and institutions across

the UK and Europe? This chapter analyses the shifting temporal and spatial practices that have given

shape to and animated these alternative connections and flows in FT’s agro-food networks.

The connective practices of FT have substantively changed as FT markets have moved into

the commercial mainstream at the same time new markets have arisen as novel commodity

networks for FT goods such as wine. Crucially, these connective practices are tactical in nature: they

have shifted over time in efforts to grow FT markets and bring new goods online, but are also

practices designed to facilitate those practical connections across FT commodity chain nodes which

are, in turn, designed to facilitate the flow of these goods from marginalised producers to better-off

1 Acknowledgements: Colin Sage and Alexandra Sexton;

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consumers. But, given that connections simultaneously denote disconnections, or at least a lack of

connection, to other networks, also of concern in this chapter are the disconnections that are

equally embedded in the tactical practices of FT and how these too have shifted over time. Here

then, the tactical practices of FT networks are fundamentally political in that they do and say some

things over others, make some connections and disconnections over others, and create some flows

over others. In short, what we are interested in understanding and analysing in this chapter is how

FT’s socio-economic connections and disconnections are communicated to consumers, but also,

equally crucially, similarly communicated to all the stakeholders and actors that bring FT goods to

market.

This chapter analyses the tactical practices of FT connection through two different but

related lenses. The first is that of the shifting marketing practices of FT in the form of what Barnett

et al (2005) call the ‘practical devices’ designed to bring consumers into FT networks. Here we focus

on three key historical and often paradoxical or contradictory ‘moments’ in the creation of the

semiotics and textual discourses surrounding FT goods. These temporal, tactical and politicised shifts

in the consumer-focused semiotic connections and disconnections of FT2 work up what we, as

critique, call FT’s ‘Faustian bargain’. In contemporary FT markets, the practice of choice is becoming

de-politicised and disconnected from the progressive moral economy of the original

consumer/producer connections of FT networks as a trade-off that has allowed the astronomical

growth of the FT market, and, with this market growth, improved the livelihoods of even more FT

producers than would perhaps be the case. In essence, as mainstreaming in the UK has proceeded,

the figure of the consumer-citizen—what Barnett et al (2005) refer to as the ‘subjects . . . of ethical

consumption’—actively choosing FT goods such as coffee, chocolate and bananas has receded into

2 These semiotic shifts in FT’s cultural politics have ‘real’ world material implications that we don’t have the space to explore here; for more specifically on the connections of the shifts in FT’s cultural politics to its material outcomes, such as shifting commodity pathways and networks, see Goodman et al (2012).

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the mists of the emerging ‘corporate-citizen’ connected to and now supplied FT goods as the only

choice in various product lines or menu items.

The second lens through which the tactical practices of FT are analysed focuses specifically

on FT wine networks that have recently begun to flourish in the Western Cape Province of South

Africa. Shifting to a more producer-oriented focus, we explore the ‘complex lived worlds’ (Herman,

2010) of FT in the ways that FT regulations have been tactically adopted and adapted ‘on the

ground’ to ensure the Fairhills winery is made knowable both to consumers and to producers

through the dynamic interactions between the two ethics of Fairtrade and Broad-Based Black

Economic Empowerment. A further brief example of the FT-certified winery Tukulu explores the

proliferation of ethical discourses and different ‘scales of knowing’ that inhabit and construct these

tactical practices that allow a brand to become known in particular, politicised ways to the other

crucial nodes in the chain (Herman, 2012). More broadly, and in direct efforts to get beyond the

charges of ‘selling out’ or ‘making it’ that have been made against FT, this chapter critically

interrogates the tactical practices by which the deployments of knowledge—and their related

impacts and ethics—in FT networks have been put in place but have also shifted over time and space

in the making of contemporary, mainstreamed FT markets.

The Shifting Cultural Politics of Fair Trade: The Consequential Moments of Knowing and Not

Knowing

With respect to food and drink, the visual and textual marketing imaginaries of FT have undergone

substantial shifts over its 50 year history, with many of these accelerating in the last 10 years as FT

has rocketed into the mainstream with a market value of over £1 billion in the UK alone (see

Davenport and Low, 2012; Moore et al, 2006; Nicholls, 2010; Nicholls and Lee, 2006; Raynolds,

2009). These moves can be seen as articulating equally fluctuating semiotic practices of connection

and disconnection that represent the shifting cultural politics of a FT, which are designed to switch

on a consumerist politics of choice for politics in the coffee we drink, the chocolate we eat and the

bananas we provide to our families. There are a number of critical ‘moments’ in these shifting

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cultural politics of FT, which each have a set of tactical practices embedded in their rationales as well

as implications for those supplying and consuming FT goods.

The originalist moment of transparency and direct, caring connections

Early on in the widespread commercialisation of FT, there was a tactical need for it and its products

to tell a series of stories about itself for consumers to come to know the differences and relations of

care differentially embedded in FT goods. Thus, festooned on product labels such as coffee bags and

chocolate bars, in-store/charity-shop marketing materials and in advertisements in the media where

a kind of visual and textual “thick description” of the producers’ lives and livelihoods as written in

the very smiling faces, labouring bodies, positive words and small, sustainable farms of the farmers

themselves. Thus, in examples drawn from Goodman (2004), a farmer with the famous Kuapa Kokoo

cooperative in Ghana explains that

We rely on the money we get from cocoa for everything: for food, clothes, medicines, and

school fees. ... Kuapa Kokoo pays all its farmers a fair price for their crop, in cash, and on time.

I am very happy: since I joined Fair Trade I can afford to send my children to school. (Goodman

2004, p. 900)

Consumer stories were also common. As the UK’s Fairtrade Foundation relates,

Emily Eavis drinks a lot of coffee. But coffee didn’t arouse her passion till she met Fairtrade-

registered coffee farmers in the Dominican Republic. ‘It was incredibly eye-opening. You arrive

here, and you realise that the whole system is completely imbalanced’. ... Emily was most

struck by ‘how simple it could be for consumers in the UK to change things. All we need to do is

to be aware of the problem’. (Goodman 2004, p. 900)

While there is considerable debate about this particular moment in the history of FT and

implications of these discourses and visual imagery (e.g. Adams and Rainsborough, 2009; Barnett et

al, 2005; Carrier, 2010; Davenport and Low, 2012; Getz and Shreck, 2006; Guthman, 2007; Hudson

and Hudson, 2003; Johnston, 2002; Lekakis, 2012, 2013; Le Mare, 2007; Lyon, 2006; Scrase, 2010;

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Varul, 2008; Wheeler, 2012; Wright, 2004, 2009), these testimonials do several crucial things in

creating connections in FT networks.

First and foremost, the provisioning of knowledge in this initial moment is about

encouraging and facilitating a direct semiotic connectivity between FT consumers and FT producers.

Seeing FT farmers and hearing their testimonials is a powerful set of devices designed to articulate

production-consumption engagements. These connections of care create a “solidarity in difference”

between producers and consumers: While encompassing and utilizing the situated cultural,

economic, political and power differences between producers and consumers, FT looks to transcend

these differences with a move toward a more social justice-like vision of equality in “the good life”

(Smith 1997) for all those involved. In this way, FT seeks to expand the everyday experiences of care

and responsibility to include the “needs of distant strangers” (Corbridge, 1998) through the

everyday-ness of eating, drinking, and situated commodity production. This spatial dynamics of

concern in FT networks that works to connect the distant places and spaces of production and

consumption through these semiotic connectivities, offers up a moral economy that is as much

discursive, visual and indeed, emotional and cognitive, as it is material in the provisioning of the FT

premium, its minimum prices and more direct trade relations.

Second, this initial marketing moment in the earliest commercial FT networks has a

pedagogical function in teaching consumers the difference that the FT difference makes. The

knowledge regime—or better yet, pedagogical regime—of FT networks is the key to educating

consumers in the “whats”, “wheres”, “who”, “whys” and “hows” of the practices of FT. Third, FT’s

connections of care and pedagogical regime seek to make its networks semiotically transparent. This

works in conjunction with the original material and economic transparency of FT networks that

proposed to do business differently by making the terms of trade in FT supply chains knowable to

the public: who is buying from whom, at what price and under what conditions. In this, producers as

well as consumers are made to “(re)appear” by being painted in the light of labels and marketing

materials. Simultaneously, however, a more worrying process is set in train, namely a pernicious

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kind of commoditization of people and place. That is, through these connective stories of FT-led

development, a kind of competitive market is created based on small farmers’ development

narratives and livelihoods and the need to have a marketable livelihood to sell; thus, in the end,

there is seemingly deeper embedding of uneven development in the processes of economic growth

of FT networks. The commodification of difference—and indeed care and responsibility for

marginalised and poor commodity producers—can make a difference but one that is characterized

and confined by the dictates of the market relations—and cultural politics of connection—in which

FT networks are entangled.

Finally, all of these previous processes combine into FT’s earliest and wide-scale attempts to

create new ‘subjects of ethical consumption’ through the development of the figure of the FT

consumer-citizen (Wheeler, 2012). This is the self-reflexive and self-governing figure who works to

choose FT goods over others because of the responsibilised and affective connections they feel to

producers that have been put in place by the transparent and pedagogical practices of FT labels and

its surrounding marketing. In this, consumer choice is ultimately politicised and embedded with the

processes and practices of care and responsibility articulated in FT’s indispensable and meaningful

semiotic moral economy. In this way, through FT, particular forms of global development and—on

the part of the consumer—global citizenship were able to be clearly purchased off the supermarket

shelf for those FT consumer-citizens willing and able to choose FT commodities.

The quality moment: Branding care, virtual fair trade farmers and institutional supply chains

The next tactical phase in the commercialisation of FT goods is what we are calling the ‘quality’

moment whereby there was a move by FT business, NGOs and key movement players to make FT

attractive to and move into mainstream supply chains such as supermarkets. Indeed, at the time, for

some FT companies, selling and marketing FT goods as quality items began to overtake the

previously semiotically front-loaded moral economy embedded in its networks. As a marketing

manager in the UK FT coffee industry put it at the time (Goodman et al. 2012, p. 214),

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We’re not the ethical brand they have on their shelves, we are another brand and sure we’re ethical

... but we are a brand just like Kellogg’s. ... So there is definitely the changing focus to premium foods

and fair trade second because that is how we see ourselves being, competing under mainstream

against the big players, we differentiate on quality and price.

While insisting that “we are fair trade at our core”, he presented one of their newest FT lines by

arguing that “it’s a great tasting product, and, you know, that’s what we are selling it on. It’s on

quality; it’s not on fair trade”. Another interviewee from an organic, FT chocolate company put it

succinctly: “I think with [our company], taste is the first thing, and then the fact that it’s organic and

then the fact its ethical”.

This desire to make FT a quality product, much of it led by the coffee, chocolate and tea

markets, has had a number of significant and far-reaching implications for the tactical practices by

which FT is made knowable to consumers. First, across much of the sector, the images and

descriptions of farmers and their livelihoods became “too” ethical and “fair trade”, and thus too

closely associated with earlier perceptions of the often poor quality of these goods. When asked

about this shift in imagery directly, the same FT coffee marketing manager put it in no uncertain

terms: “There’s not a picture of a smiling farmer on the front and there is a reason for that because

that would be very FT and very ethical, and you go, ‘oh look’, you know, ‘farming’. . . but that scares

consumers.” The connective and meaning-full transparency of FT networks had become a liability in

the rapidly mainstreaming spaces of FT quality. Instead, other images of quality—in the form of

touristic landscapes, supermarket own-label branding, to images of harvested foods and the tools

used in preparing and harvesting them, to stylized FT company logos—took over from the previous

imaginaries of FT goods. Instead, farmers and their livelihoods have gone ‘virtual’, now being staged

on company and FT movement websites whereby consumers are offered those same possibilities as

the first marketing moment to come to know and understand about the livelihoods of FT farmers.

Fair trade, in a sense, is being semiotically “re-placed” back into the bodies and places of producing

communities as performed through the online forum of the webpages of the likes of the UK’s

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Cafédirect and Fairtrade Foundation. Interestingly, the “un-quality” of farmers and their livelihoods

has gone virtual, yet in such a way that it does not take away from the sense of product quality that

FT goods have built up over the last few years. Virtual farmers and their more virtualised labor are

“safe”, while more “real” farmers—at least on the packages of the largest FT companies—are not.

Second, as direct connections to farmers and their livelihoods began to disconnect and

disappear from labels on foods and their associated marketing material, the certified FT logo itself

has become a kind of visual proxy for the relations developed in previous FT narratives; this logo has

now taken on particularly important meanings in these shifting cultural politics. In the absence of

the previous images and voices of farmers, it has now become a branded emblem of trust

embodying both a pedagogical function—one sees the logo and knows it is about care and

development—and taken on FT’s semiotic connective role—the logo is what connects consumers to

poor farmers.

Third, as the growing quality of FT networks gained notoriety and visibility, the supply of FT

goods to and through larger, institutional and corporate supply chains began to accelerate. This was

often brokered by FT movement activists and university students to have, for example, caterers at

university campuses to sell only FT coffee and snacks (e.g. Wilson and Curnow, 2013); similar moves,

through combined activist work and that of internal buyer decision, were made for supermarkets

such as Sainsbury’s to only sell FT bananas in its stores. In this, the semiotics of connection earlier

embedded in FT recedes even further into the background as often there is either no or very little

indication that what one is buying, drinking and/or eating is a FT good.

To summarise, then, this quality moment in FT networks served to problematically ‘muddle

up’ the semiotic transparency, pedagogical possibilities and knowledge provisioning that was so

much a part of the early incarnations of FT. Instead, the FT logo has taken on the even more

meaningful mantle of transparency, pedagogy and knowledge and worked to complete the kind of

commodification and ‘brandification’ of care and responsibility in FT networks that Lekakis (2012)

talks about. The pedagogical and connection possibilities of FT have now gone virtual which, by

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default, require a different level of intention and so a more difficult pathway to the development of

the FT citizen-consumer who might know about and care directly for the producers of their coffee,

chocolate or tea. But even more than this, through the growth of institutional supply where the

semiotics of FT are almost completely hidden or simply hang on the FT logo—creating what Wheeler

(2012) calls the ‘accidental’ FT consumer who has no choice but to buy FT goods—the activist-

oriented FT consumer-citizen has been replaced quite rapidly with the FT ‘corporate-citizen’ who

actively chooses to only supply various FT goods and, so, remove FT’s previous politics of choice. As

the discussion of the next moment in FT’s semiotic history highlights, it is through even closer ties to

corporate-citizens that FT has worked to effectively co-brand itself with some of the most visible and

global multinational brands around.

The co-branded, multinational moment

The most recent shift in FT’s tactical marketing practices can be encapsulated in its ‘multinational’

moment as large, previously dismissive corporations have taken up FT supplies into existing lines or

developed new FT lines of goods. Coffee and chocolate have lead the way here as for example in the

UK Starbucks and Percol have FT lines of coffee and, not uncontroversially, both Cadbury’s and

Nestlé have moved some of their major branded lines over to FT. These include the brand-defining

Dairy Milk chocolate bar for the former and the globally recognized Kit Kat for the latter. What this

means is that, while this has worked to massively expand the FT market and its demand, especially in

the chocolate market, FT is now in a rather complicated ‘co-branding’ relationship with the FT logo

sitting side-by-side on the labels of some of the corporations that it worked to originally critique and,

indeed, fundamentally work against in its early years. This is certainly true with the co-branding

relationship FT now has with Nestlé, one of the most boycotted corporations on the planet, which

has in turn, seen some activists angrily cry out for a boycott of FT itself or at least suggest that

consumers only buy from those ‘100%’ FT companies.

In any case, the development and entrenching of this moment not only seems to further

muddle FT’s historical semiotic transparency and connections, it directly and problematically

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connects FT with brands and companies it originally articulated as its raison d’etre in its support for

small, marginalised producers so many years ago. Moreover, what this has opened up is direct

competition by these multinationals for that market that was pioneered by a number of committed,

activist brands who no doubt find it hard to contend with the marketing power, wherewithal and

exposure of newly crowned FT multinationals. Finally, this signals to us yet another nail in the coffin

of the actively choosing and knowing citizen-consumer given that, for those buying into these

particular lines of chocolate, there is no choice but to buy the FT version. The FT corporate-citizen, in

the context of the multinational purveyors of two of their most popular national and international

branded lines, is now the key caring and responsible figure in the construction of FT’s moral

economy.

A tactical Faustian bargain: The end of the fair trade consumer-citizen and rise of the FT corporate-

citizen?

What we have traced above in the analysis of FT’s shifting semiotic marketing moments of tactical

connection and disconnection is what might be called FT’s Faustian bargain: the mainstreaming of FT

through its shift to a quality product and corporate co-branding strategies—which has meant overall

market expansion and, thus, more support for FT’s marginalised producers —has come at the ‘cost’

of substantially reduced connectivity between consumers and producers. Thus, the tactical semiotic

practices of the deployment of knowledges, connectivities and transparencies that were at the base

of FT’s historical difference—but also, fundamentally, its movement-based, political project—have

given way to the equally tactical muddles of the quality-articulating, brandification of FT in its logo

and the corporate co-branding exercises that make up large portions of its new networks.

With this, but especially in the rise of FT-only institutional and corporate supply chains, has

not only come the emergence of the FT corporate-citizen, but the actively choosing consumer-citizen

has begun to recede given that the choice for FT has already been made for us. Here then, through

the quality and multinational moments in FT networks, choice has been actively de-politicised, while

farmers’ livelihoods have been de-commodified and disconnected from the purview of the

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consumer; the semiotic connections of FT have moved into virtual spaces, into the form of the FT

logo/brand and onto the co-branded lines of multinationals, the latter of whom can wield the FT

brand with relative impunity as they take up the mantle of the care and responsibility for some of

the world’s most vulnerable farmers.

The Complex Lived Worlds of Fair Trade Knowledges, Ethics and Connections

So far we have focused on the consumer experience of the transparent trade connections which FT

had actively worked to enact (FTF, 2005); however, it is clear that how the information, knowledge

and network resources are deployed to ‘articulate consumption and the consumer through a

register of ethics and responsibility’ (Clarke et al., 2007: 246) is both a complex and dynamic

practice. What counts as ‘ethical’ is neither simple nor uncontested and the ‘ethical consumer’ too is

a versatile subject, with their preferences depending on both time and context (Sassatelli, 2006). To

complicate matters further, all the other stakeholders in these global commodity networks –

producers, processors, distributors, importers, exporters and retailers – are also fluid actors, with

different and changeable priorities. Therefore, a FT commodity needs to adapt how it portrays itself

spatially and temporally in order to ensure the consistent and sustainable enrolment of all its

existing and potential stakeholders in order to survive. Here we focus our attention on the producer

end of the network, through exploring FT wine in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. In this

space, FT interacts with a range of other ethical discourses, which allows us to explore and analyse

how FT is practised and made knowable to producers but also how certain disconnections are

embedded up the value chain towards the consumer. First, however, we provide a brief background

to the South African wine industry.

The Wine Industry in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Despite 20 years having passed since the end of apartheid in 1994, the marginalisation of the

historically excluded black majority remains highly visible in South Africa (Alexander, 2006; Gray,

2006). Various socio-economic strategies have been deployed to address this and the current

national focus on Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), designed to advance black control over the

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economy, is grounded in the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act 2004. This strategy has

been operationalised through a weighted scorecard for businesses which assesses: ownership,

management control, skills development, enterprise and supplier development, and socio-economic

development. Although this national agenda has been taken up by the wine industry through the

WineBEE Charter (2007), critics argue that this has been adopted conservatively (McEwan and Bek,

2009a) and detracts attention from the continuing, unequal power relations (Du Toit et al., 2008).

Historically, South African agriculture has been grounded in deeply racialised, ingrained and power-

laden structures (Du Toit, 2002) and, despite post-apartheid legislative, social, technological and

market changes (Du Toit et al., 2008, Ewert and Du Toit, 2005), farmworkers continue to be one of

the most socially excluded groups in the country (Brown et al., 2003). The wine industry reflects

these broader trends—wages are low, working conditions are often poor, and the abuse of workers

persists in some areas (Bek et al., 2007, Human Rights Watch, 2011, Du Toit et al., 2008). The wine

industry remains almost exclusively white in terms of control and this white elite is ‘renowned for

circumnavigating legislative and voluntary initiatives in order to maintain the status quo’ (McEwan

and Bek, 2009a: 735). Increased international competition and domestic legislation have contributed

to a restructuring of the wine industry (Ewert and Du Toit, 2005) and, combined with the increasing

downward pressure on prices by retailers (Bek et al., 2007), this has meant investment in

transformation tends to be limited. This then is the complex and highly politicised context for FT’s

tactical practices within South Africa.

South African Fairtrade Wine

In the early 2000s, a group of South African wine producers approached FLO-International as they

wanted to facilitate international market access for their brands (Barrientos and Dolan, 2006). The

external auditing of FT was particularly attractive to the wine industry because it offered a way to

enhance the political credibility and market position of wine producers (Moseley, 2008) with

external audits protecting genuine participants within the still white-dominated industry (Kruger and

Du Toit, 2006). FLO-International wanted to support change in post-apartheid South Africa (Lamb,

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2008) and therefore introduced certification standards for South African wine grapes in October

2003 (FLO, 2006). McEwan and Bek (2009b: 260) comment that ‘the South African wine industry has

played a pioneering role in fair-trade wines’ and wine has become one of the most important FT

products in South Africa (FLSA, 2012).

However, given the unique context of this space, FT has had to embed itself differently here

in comparison to its other production areas. Given the continuing domination of South African

agriculture by white owner-farmers and plantation style farms, without explicitly including BEE in its

practices, FT would have ended up ‘legitimising the racial and material legacy of slavery, colonialism

and Apartheid’ (Kruger and Du Toit, 2006: 203) because it would have supported the unequal

structural conditions resulting from these. FT has therefore adapted to the specificities of South

Africa through this unprecedented and, hitherto unrepeated, national level negotiation that

incorporates BEE into what ‘fairness’ means in this particular space. This interaction works to the

benefit of both discourses with FT making BEE more stringent and accountable, through tying it into

recognised auditing systems, while BEE makes FT ‘knowable’ to South African producers by

enhancing its contextual relevance and sensitivity. Nonetheless, South African wine industry

stakeholders tend to position FT and BEE as separate entities, a definition grounded in their

particular arena of utility, recognising BEE’s national capacity to enact transformation and FT’s

strategic value internationally. The general consensus amongst wine industry stakeholders was that

BEE was more relevant domestically although it was accepted that there was a place for FT. Those

arguing for the latter’s greater importance focused on its role as an international commercial

strategy; with a global market worth £1.57bn (Fairtrade Foundation, 2013), being certified FT can

connect a producer to an established and lucrative niche market. Combined with the guaranteed

price floor and social premium, FT offers clear market-based incentives for involvement and, in

addition, can financially support the implementation of empowerment projects. However, there was

little mention of this enhanced capacity for BEE by the wine industry stakeholders. Fairtrade’s

limited reach, with only 16 certified wine grape producers (FLSA, 2012), reduces its capacity to

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address broad-based socio-economic change (McEwan and Bek, 2009b, Moseley, 2008) and this

small sphere of operation arguably masks the entangled nature of BEE and FT to the wider industry.

Nevertheless, although FT may be more widely understood as a commercial strategy, how it is

practiced varies between its different producers.

Fairtrade Practices I: Fairhills and tactical adaptability

Fairhills emerged out of the long-term supply relationship between Origin Wines (a South African

wine sourcing company) and the UK Co-operative Group. The latter wanted to initiate a significant

FT venture that would benefit a whole community as well as acquiring a reliable and quality supplier

for their own-brand FT wine. Origin Wines selected one of its suppliers, the Du Toitskloof co-

operative cellar in Rawsonville, Western Cape, and FT accreditation was achieved in 2005. This

relationship with an international retailing partner has proved significant for Fairhills, with the

Project Manager commenting that:

…if it wasn’t for them [The Co-op] buying into this project we wouldn’t have been in such a developed

stage … we’ve reached in 3 years’ time … what another project would have done probably in 10 years

(Interview, 23/05/2008)

This progress, combined with the levels of paperwork, capital and effort required to practice FT

contributed to the Project Manager considering that FT was the more significant discourse in this

particular space. However, the co-constitutive relationship between FT and BEE practices was

recognised and FT was felt to have made BEE more credible and operational:

…black empowerment as expressed by Fairtrade and by South African national legislation is [sic] two

totally different concepts. In South Africa, black empowerment is by ensuring that your business is co-

owned by black people or black citizens and basically it’s so easy to comply with national legislation

… with regards to Fairtrade … our first step towards black empowerment or empowerment, not black

empowerment, is more for us based on empowerment, empowering the lesser fortunate, being the

employees on the farms… (Interview, 23/05/2008)

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This highlights how Fairhills endeavoured to enact a broader, more socially responsive form of

empowerment than the economic focus of BEE. The Fairhills Association, which consists of the

farmworkers, owns 25% of the Fairhills brand name, the democratically elected Joint Body choses

how to spend the FT social premium and key project workers have been ‘skilled’ out of the

farmworker body. These all contribute to a more sustainable and supportive transfer of knowledge

and management control although within the overall BEE agenda for ownership, management

control and skills development (see Herman, 2010). To date, a craft co-operative and coffee shop

have been established to provide alternative employment within the project while day-care centres,

school buses, youth, sports and women’s clubs and an adult education programme have all been

initiated to bolster gender equality and education. Fairhills also aims to address the social exclusion

consequent of apartheid and so has used the FT social premium to fund community sports days and

a community centre to foster a sense of inclusion and togetherness amongst the farmworkers who

had previously had limited inter-farm interaction. Furthermore, a psychologist provides support in

terms of building self-esteem, addressing substance abuse issues and enhancing coping strategies

amongst the farmworkers. The future goals of Fairhills also reflect this broader sense of

empowerment as they include the aim to eventually own three production facilities, as well as

construct retirement housing and a health centre.

In Fairhills, FT enables this broader conceptualisation of empowerment to be practised as it

connects to a global market with capital premiums and external auditing as well as to a more

extensive ethical ideology than that which structures BEE. Despite this, BEE remains central as it

offers a route for FT to adopt contextually relevant practices and address the historical and

contemporary sensitivities of South Africa. The combination of these imperatives highlights the way

in which BEE and FT have become indispensable to their sustainable and sensitive operation within

Fairhills. However, the spatial relationality that exists between the different nodes of the Fairhills

commodity network means that context is critical in determining how FT is practised throughout the

network. Despite the essential connections between the two discourses within the production

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space, Fairhills is marketed to the UK consumer purely on its FT credentials, which focus on generic

statements and, arguably, do not highlight the contextuality of even the FT practices:

Fairhills is one of the largest Fairtrade projects worldwide spanning three countries: South Africa,

Argentina and Chile. The Fairhills projects bring life-changing development to the communities by

improving working and living conditions, education and health care. Making a better life for all.

www.fairhills.co.za (Fairhills Shiraz Merlot 2011, on pack description)

BEE has very limited market appeal and so it becomes invisible in marketing materials. This

disconnect highlights the strategic nature of ethical discourses as the overall durability of Fairhills

depends on the micro-level adaptations of its discursive operations (Herman, 2012). While FT

appeals more to consumers and so has to be foregrounded, Fairhills also depends on maintaining its

producer-level credibility and relevance by responding to the national demand for BEE. This tactical

adaptability to change throughout the network, in terms of which connections are made visible at

different nodes, is essential for Fairhills to appeal to the differing motivations of producers and

consumers to engage with FT in South Africa.

Fairtrade Practices II: Tukulu and ‘scales of knowing’

Tukulu – a partnership between Distell (a multinational producer, marketer and distributor of

alcoholic beverages), a community trust and a group of black businessmen – combines multiple

social and environmental certifications. It is certified organic, a Biodiversity in Wine Initiative

member, accredited by WIETA (the agricultural ethical trade initiative), a 2006 winner of a Farm

Health Award and was certified FT in 2009. This highlights the proliferation of ethical discourses and

increasing producer confusion over which to adopt, given the limited synergy between the various

codes; although this overlap has increased the economic and time burden on the average producer,

Tukulu’s connections to the multinational Distell has allowed it to take full advantage of the varying

market opportunities that these different ethical frameworks enable.

17

However, adherence to these multiple ethics appeared to be guided more by an economic

or political rationale rather than an ethical ideology, with both FT and organic positioned as critical

to establishing market share internationally. However, they were explicitly understood as separate

since the Marketing CEO recognised that ‘they mean different things to different people’ (Interview,

03/04/2008) and it was considered unnecessary to have a wine certified under both codes. The

separation between ‘organic’ and ‘FT’ within Tukulu enables the brand to have broad market appeal

as a whole without the expense of multiple ethical codes for each wine. Initially Tukulu placed more

emphasis on organic branding but, following FT certification, the focus shifted as the latter was

considered to be particularly useful in accessing the notoriously competitive UK market because, as

the Marketing CEO commented, FT offers an almost sub-category opportunity (Interview,

03/04/2008), which is essential within the multiple brands, varietals and price points of the UK wine

market. Although Distell’s BEE Group Manager commented that ‘the retailers in the UK are, that’s

the first question they ask, so it makes business sense … to get a Fairtrade accreditation because it’s

a license to trade’ (Interview, 07/04/2008), the Marketing Manager demonstrated a reluctance to

market FT because ‘it’s quite an ugly label’ (Interview, 03/04/2008), which was felt to detract from

the premium positioning of the wine. At the time FT was considered to have little relevance to the

South African market, although this is now changing, and so was seen purely as an international

imperative.

The limited practice of ethical consumption within South Africa combined with negative

publicity around ‘blackwashing’ within BEE projects restricted the market value of Tukulu’s BEE

credentials. As the Marketing Manager commented ‘we mention it in our brochure but…the

perception is that BEE is…just about giving it to people and being a front so we don’t push it in the

local market’ (Interview, 03/04/2008). However, Distell’s Head of Farming Operations recognised the

potential this could offer in a growing black consumer market:

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There will be a group of people…in South Africa also more sympathetic if you help disadvantaged

people especially if you go into the black market and they know that you are doing something behind

the scenes to uplift their people (Interview, 02/04/2008)

While BEE had a limited market purchase, although any appeal was seen as confined to South Africa,

the Marketing CEO commented that ‘we never really overemphasize or push the empowerment

thing as why you must buy the wine’ (Interview, 03/04/2008) preferring to rely on quality as a more

sustainable consumer motivator.

The market driven approach to ethical certification adopted by Tukulu highlights the

awareness amongst stakeholders within a commodity network of the potential for different

articulations of a discourse. Within Tukulu, these ‘scales of knowing’ can be seen through the

international positioning of FT and, albeit to an increasingly small extent, organics while BEE was a

route to national credibility but of limited market value. Unlike in Fairhills, Tukulu deployed its

multiple ethical discourses relatively independently with limited interaction between them within

the production space, which is arguably due to the more corporate motivations underlying their

practice. However, the market opportunities which they offer are largely based on their ethical

nature, which indicates an always present recognition of the other articulations that, for example, FT

may have. How FT is ‘known’ at any particular point in its commodity networks is always looking to a

‘counterweight’, consumer towards producer and vice versa, to ensure continuing participation,

recognising that motivations to participate are different across the various network stakeholders

(Herman, 2012). In fact, the micro-scale producer understandings of both FT and BEE were always

‘knowing’ and looked to connect or disconnect to each other as appropriate to ensure continued

network relevance.

Fairtrade’s power to connect emerges as grounded in its capacity to balance the necessary

stability of meaning essential to allow for a coherent message to be disseminated to consumers, and

tactical adaptability. However, while both Tukulu and Fairhills demonstrated a certain ‘knowing’

recognition of what appealed to the other scales of their network, even when FT was ‘plugged in’ to

19

connect to consumers, it was not monolithic. This ‘lead’ discourse contained space for local,

producer-level understandings grounded in BEE but was ultimately promoted because of its market

appeal. Context is clearly critical in governing the practices that shape FT connections; for example,

to consumers it may be a way to support producers in developing spaces, to workers it may

represent improvements in living standards and a changed relationship with management while to

marketing FT may be simply an international sales opportunity. It is this capacity to adapt that

enables FT to be made, and made knowable to the various stakeholders throughout its networks.

Conclusion

What we have attempted to do in this chapter is explore and analyse the temporal and spatial shifts

in the ways that FT is made known and made knowable to key actors in its networks, namely

consumers and supermarkets. These have shown to be both tactical but also a set of politicised

practices designed to facilitate FT’s move into the mainstream supply chains and supermarket shelf

spaces. Importantly, as we emerge at the other end of our analysis which worked to capture the

shifting tactical practices from both the consumer and producer side of FT networks, an interesting

point of comparison emerges with respect to the use of the FT logo. In older, more established FT

goods such as coffee and chocolate, the desire has been to more fully ‘normalise’ FT goods and so

the use of the FT logo itself has begun to fade into the marketing background as more institutional

supply chains take over and FT works to co-brand itself further with multinational corporations. On

the other hand, in newer wine networks, the need for and use of the FT logo was front and centre to

the decisions to certified as FT and communicate this key stakeholders in these wine networks; for

the wine networks discussed in the chapter, the FT logo and its use was crucial in order to signal the

unique nature and qualities of FT wine networks as opposed to its normalisation as just another

wine bottle sitting on the shelf.

We end with a question that signals a note of caution and concern: With FT’s Faustian

bargain and its continued moves into the mainstreamed spaces of supermarkets and multinational

corporations, will it be able to maintain its regulatory integrity that keeps small farmers and

20

marginalised farmworkers front and centre? Evidence with regard to this is a bit shaky given recent

analysis of the corporate-led watering down of standards that benefit the growing number of big

players in FT markets (e.g. BBC Food Programme, 2014; Jaffee, 2010; Jaffee and Howard, 2010). In

any case, understanding the tactical semiotic and knowledge connections and disconnections of FT

networks is critical to not just understanding FT’s practice of an alternative politics of development

but how it attempts to work for a new and transformative imaginary in our globally-connected

worlds of food.

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