BRITISH consciences may stand at ease. Sales of goods bearing the Fairtrade logo increased by 53 per cent last year. Ethical consumers spent £140 million on products that guarantee farmers in 49 developing countries a stable income. The biggest sellers were coffee, bananas, chocolate and tea. Sales of each grew despite stagnant demand in the non-ethical market and the Fairtrade Foundation estimates that five million farmers and their dependants are direct beneficiaries. So what could possibly be wrong with that?

But there is a flaw. Supporters of fair trade insist that fluctuating market prices for commodities pose the gravest threat to poor farmers. They cite the calamitous consequences of the coffee price collapse of 2001 as a powerful example, describing it as an “economic tsunami”. It is a dangerously limited perspective. There are bigger threats to the developing world than market forces. The biggest one over which British voters have influence is that gargantuan barrier to free trade otherwise known as the Common Agricultural Policy.

Among ideologically pure free marketeers the CAP is blamed for killing one person in the developing world every 13 seconds. From this perspective fair trade is not even an Elastoplast on a gaping wound. It is a diversion from reality that reduces pressure on the governments of rich countries to fight poverty abroad.

One does not need to embrace ultra-orthodox economic liberalism to recognise that the free traders have a point. The CAP does not just increase the price of food to European consumers. It also dramatically restricts Third World farmers’ capacity to export it. The European Union protects its own inefficient farmers at the direct expense of the starving.

Rich countries engage in unfree trade and the injustice and poverty this causes in the developing world is too extreme and too widespread to be eliminated by ethical purchasing alone. Only 1 per cent of the world’s coffee is Fairtrade coffee and, while every cup consumed reduces feelings of guilt, the real impact is negligible.

Until this argument is embraced, the advances of ethical shopping merely reduce the pressure on the Government to make a real difference. Fair trade alone represents a triumph of good intentions. Buying fair trade goods while ignoring tariff barriers is morally vacuous, however good you feel.