TY - JOUR PY - 2007// TI - Maya Coffee Farmers and Fair Trade: Assessing the Benefits and Limitations of Alternative Markets JO - Culture and agriculture A1 - Lyon, Sarah SP - 100 EP - 112 VL - 29 IS - 2 N2 - Fair trade is a form of alternative trade that seeks to improve the position of disempowered producers through trade as a means of development. It has also been celebrated as a contemporary social movement that contests the conventional agrofood system and its exploitative social and environmental relations of production. In this article, I employ the results of 20 months of ethnographic research in Guatemala and the United States to evaluate fair trade's potential as a form of alternative development. The research demonstrates that fair-trade market participation can offer a variety of potential benefits to producers, including higher prices, stable market access, organizational capacity building, market information, and access to credit. However, I also identify several key limitations of fair-trade markets, such as increasing debt burdens, insufficient compensation, the potential for growing inequality, and a lack of cooperative member participation in the fair-trade movement's international decision making and agenda setting.

LA - SN - 1048-4876 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/cag.2007.29.2.100 ID - ref1 ER -