Acceso usuarios
Christopher London
Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads in part "Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity�." To say that this right is routinely violated, and indeed that its violation is a structural feature of the global economy, is not unusual. But saying so, rather than making the Declaration a dead letter instead leads me to a question: What is it about the structure of the economy such that, despite wide recognition of the essential moral truth that humans ought to be able to live dignified lives, we find ourselves routinely unable to do much about it? I will approach this question through a consideration of the move to construct alternative value chains in the global coffee economy through social, agricultural and environmental certifications, the so-called �cause coffees�. Emerging in time with the post-Cold War liberalization of the coffee market, cause coffees promise to humanize the market by making transparent the social and environmental relations on which it is built. This transparency however, works in only one direction: it is producers who are made transparent, not the consumers, or even the retailers who serve the consumers. By reproducing the default relation that has always underwritten the global coffee economy, that of dominating core and subordinate periphery, coffee certification opens up a conversation about the content of market relations but it does not change those relations. I conclude though that it does serve as a place to start.
