Fair trade certification has little real impact on ground-level poverty.

Evidence

However, the results have been less than unequivocal. For instance, while branded fair trade coffee may indeed come from sanctioned cooperatives, it may also be packaged by prison labor or used to launder drug money. Furthermore, the majority of fair trade planters manage to sell only around 20 percent of their output to fair trade markets, so on balance, the brand has had little impact upon poverty at the ground level. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader research on how market-based ‘ethical consumption’ substitutes for structural change; parallels Marina Warner-type critique of consumer-expressivism.