"Fair Trade" Is Fairly Flawed

The Guardian's Andrew Chambers, reacting to Nestlé's decision to slap the Fairtrade logo on KitKat bars in Britain, offers a nice rundown of the essential problems with the fair-trade movement. Mainly, fair trade is a short-term solution to a long-term problem, and one that makes solving that problem--rural poverty in developing nations--more difficult.

Chambers writes that "some say" fair trade is "an example of Western feel-good tokenism that holds back modernization and entrenches agrarian poverty."