(no subject)

There's a discussion going on over on simon_cozens' blog about the Fairtrade movement, and whether or not it does any good. A lot of the arguments advanced against it seem to boil down to "assuming no coercion, and fundamentally unrealistic conditions, Standard Economic Theory says it ought not to work", a line of argument that always makes me suspicious.

But anyway, this is an empirical question: do the problems that Simon and others describe occur in practice? Are the theorised benefits of Fairtrade realised in practice?

These are not easy questions to answer. So, I'm being lazy and asking here: is anyone familiar with the literature on this?