Power and Fairness in Agricultural Markets: Violating Farmers' Freedoms?

While the (un)fairness of agricultural markets is frequently invoked, especially by farmers, fairness as a concept is difficult to define and measure. In this paper we build upon previous work by Hendrickson and James (2016)... [ view full abstract ]

While the (un)fairness of agricultural markets is frequently invoked, especially by farmers, fairness as a concept is difficult to define and measure. In this paper we build upon previous work by Hendrickson and James (2016) where they examined power and dependency in the agrifood system and the constrained choices that creates for farmers. They developed a conceptual framework for assessing the structural fairness of agricultural markets by proposing five basic liberties of agrifood fairness and showed how these liberties would be constrained or enhanced by the nature of negative or positive connections apparent in agrifood networks. The five basic liberties included: a) the freedom to negotiate and dictate terms, b) the freedom to profit from exchange, c) the freedom to know and to be informed, d) the freedom to be treated equally and e) the freedom to make ethical decisions.  In this paper, we build on this work by examining producer testimony from five workshops on agriculture and antitrust enforcement held by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Agriculture in 2010. Using Nvivo, transcripts of each workshop were coded according to the freedoms listed above and for the speaker's occupation (e.g. producer, educator, policy-maker).  Through our analysis, we show how these basic liberties are felt by producers to be protected or violated.  We then assess where safeguards might best be deployed or developed to ensure fairness in agrifood markets.