Fairtrade products fail to help the poor, study finds
Coffee and tea drinkers spending an extra few dollars on Fairtrade-certified products are not actually benefitting the lives of the poorest workers in rural Ethiopia and Uganda, according to a new report. Researchers at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London spent four years studying rural labour markets in areas producing coffee, tea and flower crops for export. They found that the poorest manual agricultural wage workers in Fairtrade-certified farms are in fact paid less, and experience inferior working conditions, compared with those working in areas without Fairtrade certification. “Careful fieldwork and analysis in this four-year-project leads to the conclusion that in our research sites, Fairtrade has not been an effective mechanism for improving the lives of wage workers, the poorest rural people,” said Christopher Cramer, economics professor at SOAS, and one of the study’s authors. The Fairtrade Foundation is a U.K.-based charity, fou