Can you bite into your favorite chocolate bar and enjoy the pleasurable taste and feel with the knowledge that some people may have suffered intolerably in its production? And can you drink your morning tea or coffee with satisfaction when the plantation worker earns 20p [US .40] a day? [Buyers of Fair Trade Products] said it was much nicer to eat or drink a product without visualizing miserable boy slaves or exhausted women and men growing it or picking it for you and living in dire conditions. Middleton Guardian, UK, October 8, 2003 T he international Fair Trade movement represents a major departure from conventional methods of marketing agricultural commodities from countries of the South. Fair Trade initiatives challenge the arrangements under which many tropical food crops are produced and in their place encourage more socially-and environmentallysustainable agriculture. They do so by marketing agricultural Fair Trade and Eastern Caribbean Banana Farmers: Rhetoric and Reality in the Anti-Globalization Movement Mark Moberg With the impending removal of tariff quotas that formerly guaranteed access to the UK market, the Eastern Caribbean banana industry faces the prospect of direct price competition with cheaper Latin American bananas. Some farming communities in the region have embraced Fair Trade as an alternative marketing strategy. Certified Fair Trade farmers receive higher prices than do conventional growers, as well as a social premium for local development. In exchange, they must conform to extensive social and environmental criteria. This article compares the rhetorical claims of the Fair Trade movement with the experiences of Fair Trade farmers on St. Lucia. By examining the price differential between conventional and Fair Trade fruit and appropriateness of certifying criteria, I offer a preliminary assessment of Fair Trade as a form of anti-globalization politics.

Many consumers and food-justice activists regard Fair Trade as a moral alternative to markets dominated by corporate agribusiness. Fair Trade frames producer-consumer relationships in the language of reciprocity and justice rather than the impersonal logic of the market. Despite its moral economy discourse, the movement embodies neoliberal assumptions that regulation and development should occur through the realm of consumer choice rather than state intervention. To receive the higher prices that Fair Trade promises, farmers are subject to certification processes that heavily regulate their planting practices and development priorities. Here I explore the contrasting views of economic morality held by Fair Trade organizations and Caribbean banana farmers. Farmers do not view Fair Trade in terms of the lofty values of social justice and reciprocity animating the movement's discourse.Rather, they operate with a working definition of economic morality similar to those elucidated by E. P. Thompson, James Scott, Marc Edelman, and others who have examined peasant and worker responses to injustice. From farmers' points of view, compliance with Fair Trade certification should at least enable them to persist in agriculture.As Fair Trade prices have fallen while surveillance of their working lives has increased, many regard this notion of economic morality as increasingly violated. [fair trade, Caribbean, neoliberalism, certification, moral economy, agriculture] RESUMEN Muchos consumidores y activistas de justicia alimentaria consideran el comercio justo como una alternativa moral a mercados dominados por corporaciones de agronegocios. El comercio justo enmarca la relación productor-consumidor en el lenguaje de reciprocidad y justicia en vez de la lógica impersonal del mercado. A pesar de su discurso de economía moral, el movimiento representa las asunciones neoliberales sobre que la regulación y el desarrollo deben ocurrir a través de la esfera de la elección el consumidor más que por la intervención del estado.Para recibir los precios más altos que el comercio justo promete, lo agricultores están sujetos a los procesos de certificación que intensamente regulan sus prácticas de siembra y prioridades de desarrollo. Exploro aquí los puntos de vista contrastantes de moralidad económica sostenidos por las organizaciones de comercio justo y productores de bananos del Caribe. Los agricultores no ven el comercio justo en términos de los nobles valores de justicia social y reciprocidad que animan el discurso del movimiento. Más bien, ellos operan con una definición de moralidad económica que esta siempre cambiando, similar a aquellas dilucidadas por E. P. Thompson, James Scott, Marc Edelman, y otros que han examinado las respuestas de campesinos y trabajadores a la injusticia. Desde el punto de vista de los agricultores, conformidad con la certificación del comercio justo debe por lo menos posibilitarles persistir en la agricultura. Como los precios del comercio justo han caído mientras la vigilancia de su vida de trabajo se...

In much historiography of the colonial Caribbean, British administrators are portrayed as mediators between domestic elites, foreign capital, and the working class. Such scholarship converges with popular belief in Belize, whose institutions are seen as a legacy of ‘impartial’ British rule. This article examines the relationship between the United Fruit Company and the colonial government of British Honduras. Contrary to claims of administrative impartiality, colonial officials facilitated the company's monopoly over the banana industry and acted as company advocates before the Colonial Office, actions that ultimately undermined the colony's independent banana producers.

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