Fair trade

University of Michigan Society of Fellows alumnus, Sarah Besky, highlights the social injustice in the tea industry

Sarah Besky is the Author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (2013, University of California Press)

Here's an excerpt from her website about her research and book:

I am a cultural anthropologist with research interests in the environment, capitalism, and labor. I recently finished a project on tea plantations in Darjeeling, India. Darjeeling tea is some of the world’s most expensive, but workers in Darjeeling receive some of the industry's lowest wages. My book, The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) explores how legacies of colonialism intersect with contemporary market reforms to reconfigure notions of value—of labor, of place, and of tea itself. This ethnography of ethical and regionally distinct trade is set against the Gorkhaland movement, which calls for the creation of a separate Indian state that would encompass Darjeeling’s plantations and its majority of Indian Nepalis, or “Gorkhas.” The Darjeeling Distinction won the 2014 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize.