Is Bigger Better? The Small Farm Imaginary and Fair Trade Banana Production in the Dominican Republic

• Published in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 104; no. 5; pp. 1082 - 1100
• Main Author: Trauger, Amy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC Routledge 03.09.2014; Taylor & Francis Group; Association of American Geographers; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Agricultural production; Agricultural products; Agricultural workers; America; banana production; Bananas; Benefits; Bgi / Prodig; Capital; Caribbean; Comercio Justo; Commodities; Consumption; Cultural anthropology; Dominican Republic; Dualism; Equality; Export-import trade; Fair Trade; Farm commodities; Farm exports; Farmers; Farms; Fruit production; granjas pequeñas; Inequality; Labor; Markets; People, Place, and Region; Plantations; producción de banano; Production; Regulation; República Dominicana; Small business; Small farms; Social change; Social justice; Supply chain management; Supply chains; trabajo; Trade theory; 公平贸易; 多明尼加共和国; 小型农场; 香蕉生产; Dominican Republic; Manpower; Employment; Agriculture; Working conditions; Plantation; Fair trade; Banana
• ISSN: 0004-5608; 2469-4452; 1467-8306; 2469-4460
• DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.923720

Fair Trade is a certification system designed to create social change in production and consumption patterns, primarily in agricultural products, by shaping what happens on the production end of the supply chain through a certification and regulatory system. Previous research on Fair Trade investigated the workings and benefits of Fair Trade production models, with little attention paid to how the Fair Trade model might fail to meet its objectives. Research on Fair Trade would suggest that if inequality and exploitation exist in the Fair Trade supply chain, it would be experienced by the most marginalized actors, such as the temporary workers hired by smallhold farmers, who are frequently invisible in the Fair Trade literature and documents on banana production in the Caribbean. Through a global ethnography of the organic and Fair Trade banana supply chain in the Dominican Republic, this research reveals how Fair Trade as a "spatial fix" for capital and a "small farm imaginary" work to marginalize a particular class of workers. It also reveals the unseen sociality of Fair Trade standards in the systemic and structural assumptions in the small farm production model that Fair Trade promotes. The study finds that smallhold workers are essential to sustaining the market for Fair Trade bananas in a form of functional dualism between smallholders and plantations. In a counterintuitive outcome of the workings of Fair Trade, workers might be better off in the medium-scale plantation model unique to the Dominican Republic.