Exploitation and Fairtrade in Costa Rica's Banana industry

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'When the trumpet sounded everything was prepared on earth, and Jehovah gave the world to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other corporations. The United Fruit Company reserved for itself the juiciest piece, the central coast of my land, the delicate waist of America'. Pablo Neruda La United Fruit Co. from Canto General (1950)No other commodity symbolizes exploitation in Latin America like the banana. When Pablo Neruda penned the words above in his famous poem of 1950, he was voicing his protest at the creation of 'Banana Republics' of Central America. In more recent times, the Fair Trade movement has claimed to offer an alternative, 'fairer' type of banana production in the region. But we still don't know whether this new model is genuinely challenging the exploitation of the so-called Dollar system of banana production in Central America that has long been dominated by U.S. corporations. This project directly addresses this gap by documenting the lives of people working in the region's banana industry, both on Fair Trade and non-Fair Trade farms. It will produce a monograph, two peer-reviewed articles and a series of consultations and workshops, all designed to address the challenges Fair Trade faces in the Dollar banana system. The monograph provides a study of two farms in Costa Rica, one Fair Trade certified and one conventional. Building on my doctoral research, the book will demonstrate that Fair Trade, as currently practiced, has only a limited ability to challenge the structural inequalities contained within the Dollar banana industry. I argue that Fair Trade's current locatedness within neoliberal trade networks, means it is unable to address the structural problems and inequalities that reproduce exploitation. The analysis in the monograph is based on a detailed ethnography of the lives of those who work on the banana plantations. Drawing upon a year of fieldwork on the farms, the book exposes how a series of factors - gender, patriarchy, national identity and religious ideology - contribute to the reproduction of inequality and the lack of resistance among workers. This will be supplemented by new research documenting the responses of Fair Trade policy makers to these challenges.Specific themes within this research will be developed in the two peer-reviewed articles. One of these will expand on a chapter in the monograph by exploring gender power dynamics on the shop floor of the farms. The second article will document the consultative exercise held as part of the project, in which Fair Trade policymakers and scholars will discuss current challenges of Fair Trade tropical commodities (see below).Alongside the monograph and articles, this project has a strong emphasis on public engagement. I will establish a new network that brings Fair Trade policy-makers from the Fairtrade Foundation (London), World Fair Trade Organization (the Netherlands), Fair Trade International, Fair Trade Max Havelaar (the Netherlands) and Agrofair (the Netherlands) into dialogue with scholars who specialize in Fair Trade. This consultative exercise will produce a report that identifies where the gaps in knowledge on Fair Trade lay, how academics might usefully fill these gaps, and how Fair Trade can implement more effective interventions. Unlike the existing initiatives that bring academics into dialogue with Fair Trade officials (e.g. The Fair Trade International Symposium, The Journal of Fair Trade), the report will be specifically aimed at making policy recommendations and therefore creating a positive impact among the lives of producers and workers connected to Fair Trade.