Cxffeeblack on the relationship between sustainability, fair trade, and the long tail of colonialism in the coffee industry:

Sustainability discourse asks how to keep the crop alive. It rarely asks how to keep the grower whole. When certification schemes negotiate a differential of a few cents, what is being priced is a human life, and the negotiation assumes the arrangement itself is acceptable and only the number is in dispute.

What is the fair trade for my children to be cotton pickers? There is no number. I am not asking what the wage should be. I am asking why that is the position on offer at all. Every framework that begins with a price has already conceded the position, and they have been conceding it for three hundred years.