LAUSR

Fair trade as a concept, practice or ‘language’ has always been a dividing issue among various global participants, which largely view fair trade through the prism of either the ‘consuming’ global North or the producing global South. These two visions of fair trade through different lenses are often either blurry or splotchy. There is no secret that the scholarly narrative on fair trade is equally contentious and split between the producing global South and the consuming global North. For the global South, on most occasions, scholars struggle to get their own version of fair trade into the more far-reaching publications of the global North, while scholars based in the global North have little or no problem in getting their narrative of fair trade through the necessary channels. Although there is, hence, a huge gap in the scholarly narrative on fair trade, this handbook has plugged most of the loopholes concerning the fair trade narrative. This is a handbook that strips the notion of fair trade to the bones revealing its inner faults, cracks and ‘political blood flow’. The Handbook of Research on Fair Trade elucidates, informs and educates anyone about fair trade through the various contributions of the authors, and it achieves this although all of the authors are based in the global North (although some have extensive experience in the global South). This handbook addresses fair trade from three major perspectives: (1) the fair trade movement, (2) the business of fair trade and (3) fair trade and development. All three aspects represent the very problems that concern fair trade: (1) the activist movement and ‘inner guilt’ of the global North; (2) that fair trade is actually a business, either in regard to the corporate side or those involved in fair trade advocacy, mostly in the global North; and (3) the impact or relevance of fair trade for the global South. By revealing the inner core of fair trade, this handbook manages to reach a level that most other research compilations fail to achieve. Furthermore, because fair trade is covered in the handbook from the perspective of all the major social sciences, it deserves to be praised as a powerful handbook on fair trade. However, this approach also represents a paradox of wealth. All 30 contributions are in fact a sort of ‘luxury axiom’, and although the handbook properly addresses fair trade in all its conceivable facets, from a critical perspective, it is a victim of the very subject it addresses.