It is Fairtrade Fortnight in the UK and the movement is enduring a bit of a kicking.

To explain my interest, I have been involved in the Fairtrade movement most of my adult life. When I was a teenager, the anger stoked when I visited tea plantations in Southern India. It led me to wholeheartedly support the radical solutions suggested by those involved in trade and development.

Fairtrade - the concept that farmers should be paid a sensible price in a climate where the price of raw materials was reducing year-on-year - struck me as being about the only way to change the unfair system that keeps a lot of people in poverty. Over the years, we have been involved in letter writing campaigns, boycotts and marches. All of this on a voluntary basis. In addition, we have made changes in our lifestyle to eat and promote fairtrade food over the alternatives. So I would characterise myself as not only a user of Fairtrade products, but a passionate believer.

In the last year I have become an apostate. I am now not convinced that the Fairtrade Mark is anything more than spin and that the positive effect on farmers is fairly minimal. For me, the rot began when the Fairtrade mark was awarded to Nestlé in 2005, a company many of us have been boycotting for years. I could not, and still cannot, understand how a company so associated with such bad practice could be deemed worthy of the mark.

The annual market for fairtrade products in the UK is around £490 million, almost $US 1 billion, and is rapidly increasing year on year. The overwhelming majority of these products are sold in the supermarkets.

Now, I am not a free-marketeer and many of their arguments such as those in the links above do not interest me. For me, the critical and only question is whether I am doing my best for the poorest people. I think it is a legitimate question to ask how much of the sale price is going to the farmer, who I am aiming to help by purchasing fairtrade products.

There are claims that fairtrade premiums do not reach the people they are supposed to, something we've discussed before on Celsias. Even when they do, the difference is often only a few cents. Sometimes the promise does not meet expectations. The over-supply of certain grades of fairtrade coffee has meant that some coffee farmers have only been able to sell a small percentage of their crop through fairtrade channels -- and this after having jumped through all the hoops required by the regulators.

Please don't get me wrong - that few cents might represent life and death to a poor farmer. There may genuinely be changes to those people's lives.

But these farmers are still poor. Dirt poor. Chronically poor. Disgustingly poor. Their lives in the tea plantations, the sugar plantations and the coffee groves are still far below acceptable standards. A few small coins is not enough of a foundation to build a better life.

To look at it the other way around, we are mostly supporting big business by buying fairtrade. As fairtrade products are 9-16% more expensive than the same quality of non-fairtrade product, it is not immediately clear where the money is going.

The truth is that more is going to the supermarket for the 'privilege' of stocking a fairtrade product than to the farmer it is meant to support. Most fairtrade products are processed in developed countries, therefore this is a big part of the total price. The recent big announcement by sugar producer Tate and Lyle to make all bags of consumer granulated sugar fairtrade is apparently worth £60 million, yet according to the Fairtrade Foundation will only give £2 million a year shared between 6,000 Belizian farmers. That isn't really an awful lot but gained the sugar multinational far more publicity than £2 million of advertising.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all that has happened is that the rich get richer whilst the poor remain poor. The ironic failure of this model is that the poor are unlikely to be able to develop much further because we are not prepared to pay the full price for our purchasing.

I am not interested in kicking the Fairtrade movement. There are some very good people involved, working really hard to make a difference. But the structures we have built are not going to provide the changes we want to see, and instead of blindly accepting the latest bit of eco-goo we are drip-fed by the increasingly corporate minded Fairtrade machine, we need to rethink.

At the very least I suggest:

1. Fairtrade products are luxuries. We need to start to treat them as luxuries again.

2. We need to reject any system that insists consumption by the richest is the only (or even the best) path to development.

3. We need to campaign against any fairtrade product which can be produced locally.

4. We need to support projects in developing countries which encourage self sufficiency in preference to cash crops, fairtrade or not.

We have to ween ourselves off these products. We frequently forget that those who produce them have experienced a lot more trauma in their lives and are a lot more resilient than we are. In a future where the fittest survive, I know who I am betting on.