Working through a Caribbean case study, this paper examines the networks and associations of Fair Trade bananas as they move both materially and morally from farms in St Vincent and the Grenadines to supermarkets and households in the United Kingdom. In doing so, the paper provides grounded empirical evidence of Fair Trade C T N F distinction between ways of framing justice to argue that, in order to transcend its complex postcolonial positionalities, the Fair Trade Foundation needs to include recognition in its moral economy as well as representation and redistribution. The paper compares the moral framework of Fair Trade as an ideology and social movement with the lived experience of certified Fairtrade banana farmers in the Windward Islands who work mostly for, rather than within, an idealized moral economy. The paper also contributes to several recent debates in the agri-food literature exploring the interconnections between production and consumption, the role of materiality in contemporary food networks, the historical and (post)colonial nature of food moralities, and links between political and moral economies of food. Following an outline of recent debates about the moral economies of food and its relation to Fair Trade as a movement, the paper dissects the moral economy of the Fairtrade Foundation, highlighting the historical and geographical, material and symbolic, gendered and generational ways that food producers in the Global South (in this case, banana farmers in St Vincent and the Grenadines G N Despite the good intentions of those who promote the Fair Trade movement through the Fairtrade Foundation and the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO), our case study reveals a moral economy of non-(or partial) recognition, which has a range of unintended consequences and paradoxical effects.
Trinidad and Tobago is contributing to climate change by maintaining a model for food security that is based on corporate controls over food and agriculture. With policy documents, media sources, and ethnographic data, I argue that Trinidad and Tobago's food system is connected to national and transnational markets that firmly affix the country's food system to the fossil fuel economy. Three examples are provided. The first is the adoption of the World Bank's 'value chain' model for agriculture, which favours larger, economically (rather than ecologically) efficient farmers. The second is the recent state-led campaign to 'put T&T on your table', which overlooks the political prioritisation of industrial food imports exemplified by current policies to eliminate VAT (Value Added Tax) on industrial food imports. The final example is the November 2013 Memorandum of Understanding between Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, under which Guyanese lands are being converted for the industrial production of corn, soya, and other crops for final processing and consumption in Trinidad and Tobago. While such policies are justified under the label of national and regional food security, I argue that they perpetuate a Caribbean-style corporate food regime that counteracts more climate-sensitive efforts to create sustainable producer-consumer networks.
Public health interventions that involve strategies to re-localise food fail in part because they pay insufficient attention to the global history of industrial food and agriculture. In this paper we use the method of comparative ethnography and the concept of structural violence to illustrate how historical and geographical patterns related to colonialism and industrialisation (e.g. agrarian change, power relations and trade dependencies) hinder efforts to address diet-related non-communicable diseases on two small islands. We find comparative ethnography provides a useful framework for crosscountry analysis of public health programmes that can complement quantitative analysis. At the same time, the concept of structural violence enables us to make sense of qualitative material and link the failure of such programmes to wider historical and geographical processes. We use ethnographic research carried out from April to August 2013 and from June to July 2014 in Trinidad (with follow-up online interviews in 2018) and in Nauru from February to May 2010 and August 2010 to February 2011. Our island case studies share commonalities that point to similar experiences of colonialism and industrialisation and comparable health-related challenges faced in everyday life.
Theories of dietary change and DR-NCD emergence and resulting interventions could be improved through a more holistic approach to nutrition that integrates sociocultural and historical evidence about both the target population and the scientists doing the research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.