Fair Trade vs. Swaccha Vyāpār: Women's Activism and Transnational Justice Regimes in Darjeeling, India

Abstract

444 Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Debarati Sen Fair Trade vs. Swaccha Vyāpār: Women’s Activism and Transnational Justice Regimes in Darjeeling, India During my ethnographic work among women organic tea producers in rural Darjeeling, India, I frequently faced difficult questions about the meaning and materiality of fair trade. Women smallholder tea farmers were gradually becoming conscious about the global popularity of the organic tea they produced. Whenever I showed Prema, one of the farmers, examples of fair trade publicity materials with smiling faces of women tea producers like her, she always offered comments such as: Another one! You know that smiling woman on that tea package is not us. It’s nice to know people around the world care about us so much, but why now? Where were these people when we had no roads, when no one gave us loans, when we ate only stale rice? What can they do for us if they do not care about what we women want? Prema’s sarcastic response is a powerful critique of the moral basis of the fair trade movement’s empowerment directives—directives that govern tea cooperatives in producer communities and that have specific consequences for smallholder women tea farmers’ political lives. It is also a rebuke of the virtual environment in which fair trade maintains its legitimacy. Similar pointed reflections on “fair trade” gradually revealed to me how intended beneficiaries of the global fair trade movement understood the value of fair trade in the context of their situated identity Debarati Sen 445 struggles and their efforts to gain social and economic justice. As a trade-based, transnational social justice movement, the key tenets of fair trade are to empower marginalized producers, in part by ensuring their participation in key decision-making institutions in their communities, and to promote social justice in general, with a core focus on women’s empowerment.1 It is also an alternative economic system, distinguished from so-called free trade by its biopolitical imperative to measure and manage the working of social justice through its trading system.2 Fair trade promoters and activist consumers believe that the ethical buying and selling of fair trade goods across nations can fulfill these overt goals by channeling new resources and governance mechanisms to producer communities. The fair trade product label stands as a proof and promise of trade-based justice work. What remains unexplored within this abstract global discourse on fair trade is how subjects of transnational justice regimes understand and mobilize around the governance practices of the ostensibly ethical transnational justice regimes of fair trade. In this article, I examine how smallholder women tea farmers in rural Darjeeling negotiate such regimes in the context of their specific identities (as housewives and savvy entrepreneurs) and histories of conflict over gendered access to resources in their own communities. Through long-term ethnography of fair trade operations and their effects on a smallholder tea farmers’ cooperative in rural Darjeeling, I contend that fair trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen gendered and patriarchal power relations in producer communities but that smallholder women tea farmers also make creative use of specific fair trade interventions to defend their own priorities and rupture fair trade’s imbrications with local patriarchies. AsIwilldemonstrateethnographically,thewomenfarmers’repeated juxtaposition in regular conversation of fair trade with swaccha vyāpār, a distinct Nepali iteration of fair trade that incorporates awareness of gender hierarchies, allowed them to articulate the shortcomings of fair 1. See Catherine Dolan, “Virtual Moralities: The Mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan Tea Fields,” Geoforum 41, no. 1 (2010): 33–43; and Sarah Lyon, “We Want to Be Equal to Them: Fair Trade Coffee Certification and Gender Equity within Organizations,” Human Organization 67, no. 3 (2008): 258–68. 2. See Debarati Sen and Sarasij Majumder, “Fair Trade and Fair Trade Certification of Food and Agricultural Commodities: Promises, Pitfalls, and Possibilities ,” Environment and Society 2, no. 1 (2011): 29–47. 446 Debarati Sen trade. In particular, this rhetorical strategy highlighted fair trade’s inability to promote their specific economic pursuits, some that were nurtured during previous participation in other transnational justice regimes such as microlending. Strikingly, women’s situated reading of...