Fair Trade Enclaves

Fair Trade Enclaves tells the story of exploitation and inequality in the production of Fair Trade bananas. It draws on immersive fieldwork in Costa Rica, which was the original testing ground for US-owned plantations and is today the world’s third-largest exporter of bananas. The book offers an ethnographic study of Fair Trade’s impact on the ‘Dollar’ banana system and considers how the growth in Fair Trade affects workers’ livelihoods at the source of production. It documents the labour conditions and daily struggles of Costa Rican banana workers, featuring a comparative anthropological assessment of Fair Trade and conventional farms. The chapters provide a window onto Fair Trade’s ability to effect change within one of the world’s most exploitative and enduring commodity chains, examining the structural constraints that limit its ability to transform labour conditions within the dollar banana system. The author reveals how, in some respects, workers at the conventional farm experience better conditions than those employed on the Fair Trade farm. The book is valuable reading for scholars of Anthropology, Development, and Latin American Studies.