Embeddedness without a space? Situating fair trade in the Ecuadorian flower industry

Abstract

In the last two decades, Fairtrade International has consolidated as the largest fair trade certifier in the world. Much of its growth has involved the expansion of its practices from exclusively certifying cooperatives of smallholder farmers to regulating agroindustries and nonagricultural companies. In hired labor contexts, Fairtrade claims to improve labor and environmental conditions and promote local development and many researchers praise Fairtrade for “re-embedding” economic relations in social and ethnical ones. In this article, I highlight the testimonies of workers on three certified Ecuadorian flower plantations, who acknowledge many of these claims, but remind us that framing Fairtrade as a mechanism for “re-embedding” economic relations elides the desire among workers to leave the flower industry and re-embed their economic relations in local social space. Whereas Polanyi conceives of embeddedness in historically and geographically situated relations, I argue that academic approaches to Fairtrade often misappropriate his notion of the concept by employing it to describe abstract relations between consumers and workers. I place this concept in dialogue with the work of Henri Lefebvre on social space and territory to re-conceptualize what an embedded territorial development might look like under Fairtrade and to foreground the limits and contradictions of this mechanism.