Between market and movement: the fair trade coffee 'buycott' in the United States and Nicaragua

Abstract

Over the past two decades, social movements transformed the retail marketplace in the United States into a dynamic site for protest and reform. Product certification has become a central means for negotiating and resolving conflicts between social movement and market actors. The Fair Trade movement has been pivotal in the evolution of market-oriented campaigns in the United States by pioneering product certification and ensuring market penetration through mobilization of NGO and grassroots activist support. Fair Trade Certified coffee is the flagship product of the Fair Trade movement in the United States. What has made the Fair Trade movement unique among market-oriented social movement campaigns is that it presents retailers and consumers with an alternative to traditional boycotts - the purchasing of third party certified Fair Trade labeled products. This dissertation explores the tension between the product marketing and social movement imperatives of the Fair Trade coffee buycott campaign through multi-sited ethnographic research conducted within the United States - the largest coffee consuming country in the world - and Nicaragua - site of the first Fair Trade coffee exchanges in Central America. Over the course of two years of field study (2005-2007), I observed and interviewed U.S. activists who worked on the front-lines of buycott campaigns in the United States and Nicaraguan coffee farmers who labored in the fields that supply Fair Trade Certified coffee to U.S. retailers.%%%%