Fair trade, the other side of development

The fair-trade movement began in the sixties, while the international development policies were strengthened and introduced into the underdeveloped populations. In this context, the fair-trade discourse constitutes a critical voice, from the North or from the South, demanding a new international economic order which includes commercial relationships not in terms of aid or handouts, but in the form of a mutually profitable North-South exchange. In the current paper, we explore the representational practice of fair trade as part of the logic of development policies. Our approach, on the theory of coloniality power, seeks to reveal how fair trade, through the merchandization of ethnicity, generates a homogeneous, ethnic, and subordinate other, in terms of social power relationships.