Martens, Deborah

Deborah Martens obtained a Bachelor degree in communication management at the Artevelde College in Ghent. After a long travel she continued her studies and obtained a Master in EU studies at Ghent University in 2012. Since December 2014 she works as a researcher at the Centre for EU Studies with a grant from the Special Research Fund. She works on the interdisciplinary research project ‘When EU trade politics and farm economics meet’ with Annelien Gansemans, from the department of agricultural economics, on the impact of EU trade on social development in Latin America. Together they aim at understanding how labour conditions in the agricultural sector are influenced by trading with the EU. Concretely, they link the macro level of EU politics and trade agreements as well as the meso level of CSR strategies of (European) firms to the micro level of the life on the ground in the agricultural sector, more particularly in the pineapple and banana plantations in Central America. Deborah also teaches an optional Master course on EU Fair Trade policy.