Media Library
This section catalogues a variety of media resources relating to Fair Trade, including books, videos and podcasts. Take your time browsing through our media library and get in touch with any new knowledge resources you would like us to include!
Books
The Fair Trade Revolution, edited by John Bowes (Pluto Press, 2010)
A lively survey of Fair Trade and the challenges facing it, written by some of the leading lights in the Fair Trade movement.
From Sainsbury's to Cadbury's, the Fair Trade campaign made sustainability a cornerstone for food conglomerates. Built around the experiences and perspectives the key individuals who kick-started the social movement, this book examines the challenges ahead now that Fair Trade has 'gone mainstream'.
Fair Trade has come a long way in the last 20 years, celebrating one of the most successful social movements; the authors set their sights on their next goals. Emphasising the importance of ensuring that farmers and other producers remain the main beneficiaries; examining the tensions between large and small operators; the impact of a recession; changing environmental policy; and the danger of large operators embracing Fair Trade as a marketing exercise, rather than a practice: some of the leading lights of the Fair Trade movement assess Fair Trade's future. With chapters from Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation Harriet Lamb, and the founder of the first Fair Trade Town, Bruce Crowther, this book will inspire activists and consumers to keep making fair choices. Purchase here.
Book
Racism, Capitalism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic by Zophia Edwards, Co-publisher: Zand Graphics Ltd
Categories: Agriculture & Food, Agroecology, COVID-19, Development, Dialectics, Environment, Food Sovereignty, Health, Imperialism, Leftism, Pamphlets, Philosophy, Political Science, Thinking Freedom
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural problems affecting nonwhite racialized workers in the core and periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, are race neutral or willfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global inequalities.
This piece seeks to understand how the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other nonwhite racialized labor in the core and the periphery persisted throughout the COVID-19 crisis through the lens of Black radical scholarship on racism and capitalism. It historicizes the pandemic within the long arc of racist capitalist labor super-exploitation at the birth of capitalism and in its subsequent unfolding. It also shows the mechanisms by which COVID-19 has exacerbated the already existing, structural racial and colonial inequalities that undergird the global economy.
White capital and Western states have deemed nonwhite labor “essential” to maintaining profits and called upon these workers to ensure continued production and profits in almost every realm. These workers were seen as essential but expendable; compelling them to continue laboring during the deadly pandemic increased the precarity and danger they faced and exacerbated racial and economic inequalities both within and between countries. At the same time, neoliberal racist states are further marginalizing these very workers by excluding them from much needed social protections to cope with the impacts of COVID-19 on their health, income, and overall well‑being.
The piece also illuminates why, despite the dire social and economic conditions threatening the lives and livelihoods of workers writ large, white workers continue to refuse to join a multiracial antiracist movement for liberation from imperial and racial capitalist exploitation. The author ends by reflecting on what it means to “return to normal” within the architecture of racial capitalism and the pursuit of a different path to justice and freedom.
Click here to buy https://darajapress.com/publication/racism-capitalism-and-covid-19-pandemic?goal=0_8bf19bd3c7-692849e5b1-369235159&mc_cid=692849e5b1&mc_eid=676bbdcfb3
Cover image: RAT RACE - unfinished business (2018) Karl Doyle, oil pastel and acrylic paint on paper, 24in. x 18in. Private collection, Trinidad & Tobago. Karl Doyle (www.tntkarldoyle.com)
From the introduction by David Austin: "Edwards represents a refreshing voice in our time and part of a Caribbean radical tradition in the spirit of Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, Oliver C. Cox, and C.L.R. James, from her native Trinidad, as well as Guyana’s Walter Rodney and Andaiye."
— David Austin, author: Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Society in Sixties Montreal; Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution.
Edwards' work is groundbreaking, through her analysis she establishes the responsibility of capitalism and securely anchors how the devastating impact of COVID-19 and racism affects the most vulnerable.
—Patricia Rodney, CEO, The Walter Rodney Foundation (WRF)
Podcasts
The Sustainable Food Trust Podcast
The Sustainable Food Trust podcast questions current food production methods and sheds light on the future of farming. Chief Executive Patrick Holden hears from a range of voices, including policymakers, business leaders, food producers and campaigners, about some of the issues facing farming systems across the world. Listen on Soundcloud | Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify