Towards domestic fair trade? Farm labor, food localism, and the ‘family scale’ farm Sandy Brown Æ Christy Getz Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Over the past several decades, consumers in the global North have increasingly looked to fair or alternative trading systems as a means to promote ecologically and socially sustainable agricultural pro- duction. While fair trade has historically been limited to international commodity networks, US-based agro- food activists have recently turned their attentions towards building a domestic movement, to bring fair trade principles and standards ‘home.’ Through an exploration of this growing movement, we consider the potential for third party certification and labeling to incorporate social justice into US-based agricultural production, with a particular focus on the implications for farm workers. We view current efforts to bring the principles of fair trade to the domestic arena as a reflection of several interrelated developments: a growing need on the part of small and mid-sized farmers to garner price premiums due to the erosion of the organic price premium; a recognition of the failure of organic certification to advance a holistic vision of sustainability; and the strategic embrace of voluntary regulatory mechanisms as an alternative to public regulation and collective bargaining. Initial research suggests that this has led to particular framings of the domestic fair trade concept, which may undermine the movement’s ability to address the social relations of agro-food production. Specifically, prioritization of the ‘family-scale’ farm and an undercurrent of food localism may obscure farm workers’ role in valorizing the US agricultural landscape. Keywords Agriculture Á Certification and labeling Á Fair trade Á Farm labor Á Governance Over the past several decades, consumers in the global North have increasingly looked to fair or alternative trading systems as a means to promote ecologically and socially sustainable agricultural production. Despite widely divergent views about the goals and meaning of fair trade 1 (Renard 2003; Fridell 2006), its primary objective is to improve the position of marginalized producers in the global South by mobilizing Northern consumers to purchase commodities at a price premium paid directly to the producers. Though fair trade has historically been S. Brown (&) Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 507 McCone Hall #4740, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA e-mail: sandybrown@berkeley.edu C. Getz Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, 207 Giannini Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA e-mail: cgetz@nature.berkeley.edu 1 For the purposes of this paper, we utilize the term ‘fair trade’ to refer to the broader movement of alternative trade organi- zations and their supporters. We capitalize the term when referencing particular certification initiatives and organiza- tions, for example the Fair Trade Labelling Organization (FLO) and the Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA). 123 GeoJournal DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9192-2