...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.”...

...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 c...