Session 4: Fair Trade and Corporate Reporting

Gavin Fridell - Fair Trade and the International Moral Economy: Within and Against the Market
Dept of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada

Over the past two decades, globalization and its related neoliberal policies of trade liberalization and state downsizing have been accompanied by increases in unemployment, poverty, and inequality in
most Third World countries, including those in Latin America (e.g., Berry 1998). Among the responses to these alarming trends have been efforts to organize "fair trade" production and commercial exchange to improve the living standards of producers. Fair trade goods are officially produced under principles of democratic organization, no child labor, environmental sustainability, social premiums to improve community living standards, and a minimum-price guarantee to producers.
Developing a theoretically-informed framework for analyzing and assessing fair trade production is the purpose of my paper entitled "What's Fair about 'Fair Trade'?: A Framework for Analysis." While the fair trade industry has made some notable inroads into European and North American markets over the past thirty years, it has attracted very little academic attention. The few general works available on the topic have been primarily descriptive, lacking scholarly depth (Ransom 2001; Blowfield 1999; Barratt Brown 1993). In particular, the political implications of fair trade, which purports to be an alternative form of production and trade, have not been examined in any extensive or theoretically-grounded manner. For these reasons, I am currently working on a theoretically-informed case study of fair trade coffee production in Southern Mexico for my Ph.D. dissertation. My conference paper, which stems from my dissertation research, will outline the existing attempts to assess the fair trade industry, provide a critique of these attempts, and then propose a new framework for assessing fair trade drawn from the works of a broad range of political theorists (McNally 1993; Burbach 1998) and theoretically-informed case studies (Bebbington 1999; North and Cameron 2000).

Leigh Holland - Environmental Disclosures in Corporate Environmental Reports in the UK
Department of Accounting and Finance, De Montfort University, Leicester LE2 3AG, UK

Society recognises that environmental damage arises from many sources and that a concerted effort to overcome this damage is needed. One of the foci of attention is the management of environmental issues by businesses, and their activities in reporting their environmental impacts have been reviewed by academic researchers and those responsible for practice development. Corporate environmental responsibility is increasingly demanded, but society also requires that it is informed of the practices taking place through adequate environmental reporting practices. These practices are in turn informed by a range of influences, such as the general legislative regime and the development of both accounting and management practices. Environmental reporting is, and perhaps is likely to remain, a largely voluntary response. This paper attempts to explain current practice in environmental reporting in the UK by examining some of the external influences which may determine that practice. The study examines the extent to which environmental issues are reported in the Annual Report (the main medium of external disclosure for many companies) including the financial sections. The paper aims to review the context of the environmental framework in the UK in terms of its potential to influence environmental reporting; it also aims to establish the role of accounting practice in this, as accounting and accountants have been involved via professional and academic developments. The paper will also attempt to provide an outline of the theoretical perspectives surrounding environmental reporting practice, and suggest the potential for future developments.