Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Fair Trade coffee production is a relatively new, but growing market for small-scale Brazilian coffee farmers. The majority of scholarship on Brazilian coffee production has focused on Brazil’s large-scale coffee plantations, and coffee planters ’ ongoing subjugation of their laborers, starting with slaves, continuing with immigrants colonos, to contemporary salaried farmworkers. This paper offers a different perspective by looking at one mechanism, Fair Trade, used by small-scale Brazilian coffee farmers to stay on the land and support their families. Towards the end of the twentieth century, when world coffee prices were bottoming out, new market-based movements for social justice, such as Fair Trade, were promoted as a sustainable alternative for small farmers. The growing body of literature exploring the impacts of Fair Trade has been characterized by a notable lack of attention to the gendered dimensions of Fair Trade coffee certification and production. However, scholars studying other alternative trade paradigms, such as organic certification, have documented an inequitable gendered division of labor in coffee production and processing. Moreover, a growing number of sources on Fair Trade and organic production cite increased labor demands due to these paradigms’ environmental standards. These facts are taken into consideration with feminist scholarship, which has demonstrated that rural women often have less access to resources and control over their labor than men. This paper explores the existing scholarship on gender and ethical trade, and will provide preliminary data from the author’s research on the gendered social, economic, and environmental impacts of Fair Trade coffee production at two cooperatives in Minas Gerais, Brazil