IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/agrhuv/v27y2010i4p387-399.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Corporate cooptation of organic and fair trade standards

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Jaffee
  • Philip Howard

Abstract

Recent years have seen a substantial increase in alternative agrifood initiatives that attempt to use the market to curtail the negative social and environmental effects of production and trade in a globalized food system. These alternatives pose a challenge to capital accumulation and the externalization of environmental costs by large agribusiness, trading and retail firms. Yet the success of these alternatives also makes them an inviting target for corporate participation. This article examines these dynamics through a case study of the two most significant such food system alternatives—organics and fair trade—focusing on corporate involvement in establishing and renegotiating the standards undergirding these initiatives. We compare the development of and contestation over the standards for both certified organic and certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. We provide a brief history of their parallel processes of rapid growth and market mainstreaming. We examine claims of cooptation by movement participants, as well as the divergences and similarities between the organic and fair trade cases. Analyzing these two cases provides useful insights into the strategic approaches that corporate firms have deployed to further capital accumulation and to defuse threats to their profit margins and to status quo production, pricing, labor, trading and retailing practices. It can also offer valuable lessons regarding the most effective means of responding to such counter-reforms and of protecting or reasserting the more transformative elements at the heart of these alternative systems. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Jaffee & Philip Howard, 2010. "Corporate cooptation of organic and fair trade standards," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 27(4), pages 387-399, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:27:y:2010:i:4:p:387-399
    DOI: 10.1007/s10460-009-9231-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10460-009-9231-8
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10460-009-9231-8?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. T. Robert Fetter & Julie A. Caswell, 2002. "Variation in Organic Standards Prior to the National Organic Program," Food Marketing Policy Center Research Reports 072, University of Connecticut, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Charles J. Zwick Center for Food and Resource Policy.
    2. Jean-Jacques Laffont & Jean Tirole, 1991. "The Politics of Government Decision-Making: A Theory of Regulatory Capture," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 106(4), pages 1089-1127.
    3. Conner, David S., 2004. "Beyond Organic: Information Provision For Sustainable Agriculture In A Changing Market," Journal of Food Distribution Research, Food Distribution Research Society, vol. 35(1), pages 1-6, March.
    4. Stuart Shulman, 2003. "An experiment in digital government at the United States National Organic Program," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 20(3), pages 253-265, September.
    5. Tad Mutersbaugh, 2005. "Fighting Standards with Standards: Harmonization, Rents, and Social Accountability in Certified Agrofood Networks," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 37(11), pages 2033-2051, November.
    6. Timothy Vos, 2000. "Visions of the middle landscape: Organic farming and the politics of nature," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 17(3), pages 245-256, September.
    7. E. DuPuis & Sean Gillon, 2009. "Alternative modes of governance: organic as civic engagement," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 26(1), pages 43-56, March.
    8. Laura Raynolds, 2000. "Re-embedding global agriculture: The international organic and fair trade movements," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 17(3), pages 297-309, September.
    9. Patricia Allen & Martin Kovach, 2000. "The capitalist composition of organic: The potential of markets in fulfilling the promise of organic agriculture," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 17(3), pages 221-232, September.
    10. David Campbell, 2001. "Conviction seeking efficacy: Sustainable agriculture and the politics of co-optation," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 18(4), pages 353-363, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alessandra Arcuri, 2015. "The Transformation of organic regulation: The ambiguous effects of publicization," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 9(2), pages 144-159, June.
    2. Erin Nelson & Laura Gómez Tovar & Rita Schwentesius Rindermann & Manuel Gómez Cruz, 2010. "Participatory organic certification in Mexico: an alternative approach to maintaining the integrity of the organic label," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 27(2), pages 227-237, June.
    3. Daniel Jaffee, 2010. "Fair Trade Standards, Corporate Participation, and Social Movement Responses in the United States," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 92(2), pages 267-285, April.
    4. David Goodman, 2000. "Organic and conventional agriculture: Materializing discourse and agro-ecological managerialism," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 17(3), pages 215-219, September.
    5. Aimee Shreck & Christy Getz & Gail Feenstra, 2006. "Social sustainability, farm labor, and organic agriculture: Findings from an exploratory analysis," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 23(4), pages 439-449, December.
    6. David E. Winickoff & Kendra Klein, 2011. "Food Labels and the Environment: Towards Harmonization of EU and US Organic Standards," Chapters, in: David Vogel & Johan Swinnen (ed.), Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation, chapter 10, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    7. Sarah Bowen & Kathryn Master, 2014. "Wisconsin’s “Happy Cows”? Articulating heritage and territory as new dimensions of locality," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 31(4), pages 549-562, December.
    8. Seufert, Verena & Ramankutty, Navin & Mayerhofer, Tabea, 2017. "What is this thing called organic? – How organic farming is codified in regulations," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 10-20.
    9. Sarah Bowen & Tad Mutersbaugh, 2014. "Local or localized? Exploring the contributions of Franco-Mediterranean agrifood theory to alternative food research," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 31(2), pages 201-213, June.
    10. E. DuPuis & Sean Gillon, 2009. "Alternative modes of governance: organic as civic engagement," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 26(1), pages 43-56, March.
    11. Michael Carolan, 2006. "Social change and the adoption and adaptation of knowledge claims: Whose truth do you trust in regard to sustainable agriculture?," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 23(3), pages 325-339, October.
    12. Carmen Bain & Theresa Selfa, 2017. "Non-GMO vs organic labels: purity or process guarantees in a GMO contaminated landscape," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 34(4), pages 805-818, December.
    13. Julianne Busa & Leslie King, 2015. "Corporate takeover? Ideological heterogeneity, individualization, and materiality in the corporatization of three environment-related movements," Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Springer;Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences, vol. 5(3), pages 251-261, September.
    14. Brian Ilbery & Damian Maye, 2005. "Alternative (Shorter) Food Supply Chains and Specialist Livestock Products in the Scottish–English Borders," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 37(5), pages 823-844, May.
    15. Elizabeth Barham, 2002. "Towards a theory of values-based labeling," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 19(4), pages 349-360, December.
    16. Mrill Ingram, 2007. "Disciplining Microbes in the Implementation of US Federal Organic Standards," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 39(12), pages 2866-2882, December.
    17. Osterhoudt, Sarah & Galvin, Shaila Seshia & Graef, Dana J. & Saxena, Alder Keleman & Dove, Michael R., 2020. "Chains of Meaning: Crops, commodities, and the ‘in-between’ spaces of trade," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    18. Laura DeLind & Philip Howard, 2008. "Safe at any scale? Food scares, food regulation, and scaled alternatives," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 25(3), pages 301-317, September.
    19. Raynolds, Laura T., 2004. "The Globalization of Organic Agro-Food Networks," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 32(5), pages 725-743, May.
    20. Phil Mount, 2012. "Growing local food: scale and local food systems governance," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 29(1), pages 107-121, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:27:y:2010:i:4:p:387-399. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.