Fair Trade Enclaves: Labour and Livelihoods in Costa Rica’s Banana Industry

Fair Trade Enclaves tells the story of exploitation and inequality in the production of Fair Trade bananas. It draws on immersive fieldwork in Costa Rica, which was the original testing ground for US-owned plantations and is today the world’s third-largest exporter of bananas. The book offers an ethnographic study of Fair Trade’s impact on the ’Dollar’ banana system and considers how the growth in Fair Trade affects workers’ livelihoods at the source of production. It documents the labour conditions and daily struggles of Costa Rican banana workers, featuring a comparative anthropological assessment of Fair Trade and conventional farms. The chapters provide a window onto Fair Trade’s ability to effect change within one of the world’s most exploitative and enduring commodity chains, exposing how Fair Trade currently fails to challenge the structural exploitation of banana production within the dollar system. The author reveals how, in some respects, workers at the conventional farm enjoy better conditions compared with those employed on the Fair Trade farm. The book is valuable reading for scholars of Anthropology, Development, and Latin American Studies.

Layla Zaglul Ruiz is a Canning House Research Fellow in the Latin America and Caribbean Center at the London School of Economics, UK.