...team of researchers who conducted a four-year study on earnings of Fairtrade workers in Ethiopia and Uganda. They found that those Fairtrade workers had systematically lower wages and worse working conditions than comparable non-Fairtrade workers, and that the poorest often had no access to the “community projects” that Fairtrade touted as major successes. Professor Cramer commented that “ the British public has been led to believe that by paying extra for Fairtrade-certified coffee, tea, and flowers they will ‘make a difference’ to the lives of poor Africans. 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.”...