Speaking for the Fairtrade Foundation, CEO Michael Gidney said, “We welcome this focus on the low wages that persist among too many agricultural workers, particularly those who carry out informal work and who are very hard to reach.  In Fairtrade we are committed to playing our part in supporting all workers - in the past year for example we have substantially strengthened our Hired Labour standards and are making real progress on aspects such as Living Wage.”

However, the Foundation believes there are significant flaws in this study and that it is wrong to state that Fairtrade does not improve the lives of the poor.  Many independent academic studies have shown that Fairtrade does benefit poor farmers and workers supplying international markets.

In particular, the SOAS study failed to find Fairtrade certified farms for half of its research sites (Table 2:1, page 31), making a balanced comparison between Fairtrade and non-Fairtrade systems impossible.  For example, researchers looked at only one of five Fairtrade certified smallholder tea producer organisations in Uganda.  Many of these are selling higher proportions of their tea on Fairtrade terms – a study of a different organisation might well have reached very different conclusions.

“It is a shame that the report does not acknowledge a critical problem: that where farmers themselves have low levels of Fairtrade sales they are limited in the additional benefits they can pass on to workers, especially seasonal labour,” Michael Gidney continued.

The study did not assess how much each certified farmer organisation was selling on Fairtrade terms, nor consequently the amount of Fairtrade premium each received for investment in community projects such as health centres and housing.  

 In addition, the large “Fairtrade” flower farm in Ethiopia cited by this report left Fairtrade in 2011, whilst one of the “non-Fairtrade” flower farms studied in the report, which has some of the best wage conditions in the country,  joined Fairtrade in 2012. As a result , in 2012 alone, its first year of certification, this farm has earned several hundred thousand pounds in additional Fairtrade premiums for investment in workers’ own projects to improve their own lives and their wider community.  Read full statement here