ABSTRACT
As a globalized Alternative Food Network (AFN), fair trade has come a long way from its much more radical yet rather humble socio-economic origins. As one of its key goals, with wide support from within the fair trade movement and embedded in its working ethos, the mainstreaming of fair trade has brought not only massive and rapid growth, creating a worldwide market worth €3.4 billion in 2008 (FLO 2011) but also concentrated sales in supermarkets, at least in the UK. For example, Sainsbury's claims to be the world's largest retailer of fair trade goods (surpassing Wal-Mart) with sales in 2009 topping £218 million and one in every four pounds spent on fair trade in the UK going through their stores (Mortimer and Baker 2010; Thomas 2010). Yet, all of this – albeit while generating substantially more revenue for development in FTNs1 – has been accompanied by a marked shift in the cultural material politics of fair trade through significant changes to the discursive and visual semiotics of the knowledge regime that makes the connection between production and consumption. At the same time, fair trade supply chains have been transformed by supermarket and multinational corporation (MNC) involvement and the parallel need for better quality items.
