ABSTRACT
Women smallholders in Kenya interpret, construct and negotiate ethicality within their food networks in unique ways. By ‘grounding’ the study of global ethical food networks with the practices and lived experiences of producers within these networks, it has emerged that ethical trade standards exclude some of the livelihood knowledge, strategies and outcomes identified by producers they seek to regulate. Through women smallholders’ own words, they have: described the gendered power and knowledge relations that shape the vertical and horizontal aspects of their food networks; highlighted the ways in which women’s agency is marginal in how producer cooperatives function but is central to the functioning of women’s groups; and defined multiple dimensions of ‘ethicality’ that contrast with the conventions currently embedded in ethical trade standards. In sum, women’s own analyses have introduced aspects of food networks that currently sit outside the scope of ethical trade to address.
