The Feminist Experience of Fair Trade

Comercio Justo and Justice: An examination of Fair Trade 
and its impact on indigenous women and the family. 

(Presented at the ALLIED SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATIONS
annual meeting in Chicago, IL, Jan. 7, 2012)

Fair Trade is a multi-billion dollar form of commerce developed in the 1960s by American and European organizations as a way to promote cultural and environmental sustainability and bring greater economic return to marginalized producers.  It is supported by producers who voluntarily embrace the guidelines of Fair Trade by working  together cooperatively, sharing resources, improving product quality, and providing transparency.  Fair Trade is also supported by consumers who embrace its socially responsible values by purchasing Fair Trade products. 

Most Fair Traders are male land owners, though women are also an important, and often overlooked, part of trade too.  Forty-five percent of the members of the USA Fair Trade Federation are women.  There are also hundreds of women members in Europe’s World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO).  There are women directly engaged in Fair Trade as producers and also women who are affected by their husbands’ participation in Fair Trade.  The livelihoods of the women impact the quality of life for the children, family, and community.  Social structures and culture set different rules for women than men, making women’s access and participation in Fair Trade much different.  The feminist experience of women in Fair Trade is defined and examined in this paper.

In addition, many producers engaged in Fair Trade are from indigenous communities.  As the demands of globalization come with Fair Trade participation, there is an impact on the indigenous culture.  The Andean indigenous way of knowing, the Abya Yala, for example, is based on not just an exchange of goods, but also on reciprocity, shared knowledge, and a deep interconnectedness (Carcelen & Yepez, 2004). The degree to which one is able to work within their belief system, impacts their quality of life.

While my research confirms that Bolivian women’s Fair Trade participation has resulted in the same health, education, and monetary benefits the more frequently researched, Fair Trade coffee farmers reported in a 2009 study, there are other aspects of their quality of life, as defined by the women, which I also study (removed for anonymity, 2010).  The quality of life of indigenous women, to date, have not been examined in any fair trade literature.  These qualities, as defined by the women, include leadership, empowerment, acceptance and support from the community and family, opportunities, working conditions, freedom from violence, spirituality, and self expression.

I have been living and working with indigenous women in Bolivia for 15 years, as journalist, Fair Trade business owner.  In May and June 2010, I traveled to Bolivia as a doctoral researcher and ethnographer to study the effects of Fair Trade on these women.  Employing ethnographic research methods, I strove to capture the experiences as told and understood by the women in their own voices and context.  After two months of formal research, interviews, workshops, home-stays, and observation of over 66 indigenous women producers of high end alpaca knitwear for export, common themes and patterns began to emerge.  The results of this study are shared in the context of building a greater understanding of Fair Trade and its impact on indigenous women and the family.

The intellectual merit of this paper is to examine how Fair Trade outcomes advance our theoretical understanding of justice with a focus on Bolivia’s indigenous women engaged in Fair Trade production. Women question the justice of this commerce form.  Using the producers’ language, definitions and interpretation, this paper presents a perception of Fair Trade originating from their experiences.  This is analyzed in relation to the economic theories of justice developed by Amartya Sen.  Sen equates justice with capabilities, freedom, and development which offers many parallels to the Fair Trade guidelines established by western organizations.  The broader impact is to create a dialog around understanding Fair Trade which can lead to further development of just and equitable trade systems worldwide.

The Plight of Women

Women do not experience Fair Trade the same as men and they need it more because of their family responsibilities.  Women are sometimes paid as laborers though they are also working, unpaid, as homemakers, caregivers, and “providers of human life” (Floro & Meurs, 2009).   The International Labor Organization (ILO) labels women’s unpaid labor as “women’s double burden” defining it as a demand for both reproductive work and labor (Floro & Meurs, 2009).   Women are described as both “time-poor” and “money-poor.”  This means that when hours in paid and unpaid work are totaled, women have longer work weeks than men and less time for sleep or leisure (Fig. 1).  This impacts their time and flexibility for engaging in paid labor and decent work.

(Fig. 1) Cooking and cleaning, hours and minutes per day (UNDP, 2007)

The ILO defined decent work as employment which provides opportunity, fair income, security and social protection, and the freedom to organize (Floro & Meurs, 2009).  Globally, women are marginalized.  Since 1996, only 53% of all women participated in the global labor force while 80% of all men did.  These rates continued remain steady as of 2006 (Floro & Meurs, 2009).  In addition, it is not easy for women to find decent work.  Jobs have shifted from formal, legally regulated, large firms to smaller, informal firms and home work.  These jobs, while more accessible to women, are outside of the protection of labor laws and lack rights to social benefits such as health care and insurance.  Social, legal, and political institutions also play a large role in women’s access to decent work.  Traditional culture and patriarchy limit the appropriateness of women working as does fertility.  High fertility rates are directly related to a lack of women in the labor force (Floro & Meurs, 2009).  With new technologies, education, longer living, and political change, women’s opportunities to work have changed.  Jobs are still illusive though they are now more precarious than ever.  While new labor opportunities for women opened in global export processing zones (EPZ), these actually replaced the work of core, full-time (male) workers.  Some of these male workers were heads of households where the women lived.  Now the men are out of work and the less expensive, submissive women are in to take their places, at a lower wage, and a loss to the family security (Floro & Meurs, 2009).  Fair Trade intersects these scenarios by providing women safe, secure access to the wage economy.

The Indigenous Perspective 
(The rest of this paper was submitted to the Journal of Feminist Economics  for peer review and publication)