Construction of Hierarchical Relationship Led by “Fair Trade Gift”: A Case of Fair Trade/People's Trade Coffee Transactions in Lao PDR

Abstract

This paper examines how patronage and hierarchy are constructed between development brokers and beneficiaries through fair trade activities in the Bolaven Plateau, Lao PDR (People's Democratic Republic). The author surveys the implications related to these development practices. The case provided is a fair trade project that aims to reestablish farmers' cooperatives carried out by a Japanese fair trade company. Fair trade, which aims to construct a partnership that enables disadvantaged producers and laborers in the Global South to live a sustainable life, brings morality into market transactions. Despite depending on the market economy (rather than donations or charity), fair trade stresses “empowerment” and “partnership,” which are orthodox concepts in the realm of social development. Under this scheme, all actors are required to construct and maintain social ties with each other, ensuring a positive reciprocal relationship between buyer and seller.

In his seminal work “The Gift,” Marcel Mauss argues that gifts create a connection between givers and receivers, which can sometimes result in the unequal dynamic of patronage and dependency. Drawing on Mauss's gift-exchange theory, Stirat and Henkel (1997) critically identifies how donations, seeming to be pure gifts from the people in the Global North, are transformed into conditional gifts once they reach the recipients via international development Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). While they conceptualize donations as “the development gift” this paper proposes an idea of “the fair trade gift.” Namely, it explores how funds are utilized in the context of fair trade projects. In contrast to Mauss's determination of the morality of exchange within a phenomenon of one-way gifts, the fair trade gift offers a perspective from which to determine elements of gifts within market transactions.

Focusing on the rhetoric through which market-exchange is transformed into gift-exchange (as interpreted by co-op representatives serving as development brokers for Japanese buyer's funds such as pre-payment, social premiums, and labor costs), this paper argues that the fair trade gift eventually affects the construction of a hierarchical patron-client relationship; namely, development brokers act as patrons in their responses to the expectations of beneficiaries as clients, rather than equal “partners.”