Surprise! Fairtrade Doesn't Benefit The Poor Peasants

This will come as a surprise to those who have bought into the marketing malarkey about Fairtrade products and not as a surprise to any of those who have really looked at the issue. Which is that there doesn’t seem to be any great benefit in the system for the poor peasantry that it’s supposedly designed to help. In fact, it actually seems to make people worse off, not better off. This isn’t I hasten to add, the result of a study done by some hateful neoliberal like myself. No, this is the result from a four year long research program by the impeccably liberal (and veering over into Marxian third world nonsense at times) School of Oriental and African Studies in London.