"Maya Coffee: Fair Trade Markets and the ‘Social Fix’" with Molly Doane

This lecture looks at the way fair trade, paradoxically, reinforces mainstream ideas about the benefits of free trade. Fair trade sells its products by commodifying abstract values such as justice for exchange on the market. But rather than undermine the justice of markets, fair trade marketing has evolved in such a way that “Smithian” assumptions about the market —including the idea that equality derives from free trade—are privileged over more critical messages. Doane’s conclusions are based on ethnographic research on an organic, fair trade coffee commodity chain originating in Chiapas, Mexico and linked to the US Midwest and the UK. As fair trade has entered the mainstream, companies have de-emphasized marketing that emphasize the charitable benefits of fair trade products—messages that commodify the gap between consumers and producers. By anointing the market as a locus of justice, fair trade offers a reassessment of the market itself, one that implies anti-systemic remedies are not necessary for justice. Fair trade is a social fix—similarly spatialized—that restores a sense of moral order to an economically polarized world.