Exploring the Limits of Fair Trade: Towards a Critical Political Economy of the Local Food Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I explore the limitations of the fair trade movement in the context of the global political economy. I argue that local food systems, based on regimes of trust and reciprocity, may be able to transcend the spatial and theoretical limits of the fair trade movement by re-embedding production in the local context. Drawing on the works of David Harvey, Karl Marx, and Karl Polanyi, I argue that the potential for such local production represents a more powerful potential corrective to the discourse of globalization in the context of food production and consumption. While remaining mindful of the limits of the local-global binary and the transformative potential of any local movement in the context of a globalized system of capitalist agricultural production, I argue that the local food movement may nevertheless represent a powerful alternative to the logic of neoliberal globalization. Indeed, drawing on examples from the United States, Canada, and South Africa, I argue that localization has the capacity to re-embed food production in local social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, potentially transforming the nature of food production in ways that the global fair trade movement cannot.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.129 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".