Department of Geography

Dr. Marisa Wilson conducted a research project which revealed how inequalities of access to food in Cuba are differentially justified according to the socio-spatial positioning of the consumer. It adds to debates in geography about themes such as alternative economic spaces and food networks, the limitations and potentialities of scalar representations like the nation state, and socio-spatial rationalities of sustainability. The project also questioned the feasibility of ethical consumer-producer linkages in different geographical-historical contexts. It compared global norms of fair trade as understood by fair trade campaigners in the United Kingdom to the idea of fair trade as understood by banana producers in St. Vincent, relating this case study to 'ethical' consumer-producer networks in Cuba. Like sustainable food production and marketing in Cuba, campaigns such as fair trade act as social and ecological alternatives to the presumed anonymity of the global market, while working within its interstices. Ethnographic material suggests that the feasibility of such projects for sustainability and social justice hinges in part on the creation of shared norms of historical belonging, forms of collective understanding that are lacking between campaigners (and probably consumers) of ethical food in the UK and farmers in St. Vincent.

The project was published as part of a book series edited by the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers. Its main thrust is to relate the ethnographic material collected between 2005 and 2007, and again during the summer of 2011, to debates in that time period on economic geography and scale versus 'site' approaches.