Is there anything fairer then fair trade?

Some stores, like the British Marks & Spencer chain, sell no other type. Even Nestlé, the world's biggest coffee company, sells a fair-trade brand. But whether is this rather too easy a way to salve our consciences - just how fair is fair trade?

Here are the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, where the beans for my favourite coffee brand - CafeDirect's Kilimanjaro blend - come from. The beans are grown by a farmers' co-operative, set up in the 1930s - Africa's oldest co-op perhaps.

Here is the man who buys the beans for CafeDirect, John Weaver. One morning, as rains drenched the mountainside, John stood in a shed among the fields before an audience of poor farmers. None had more than a couple of acres of land to make their living.

You should go and stand by them if you want to find out where your coffee came from. John explaines how he bought the coffee for $1.46 a pound (the unit of trade), whereas the local market price was $1.26.

The farmers had come to puncture that.

One older farmer, Jacob Rumisha Mgase, slowly got to his feet. He thanked us for coming, but said: "We'd like to know how much our coffee costs in the shops in England." John said it worked out at $12 for a pound of coffee. Most probably Jacob already knew that.

"So you buy our coffee for $1.46, and sell it for $12. Is that fair trade?" Good question.

CafeDirect is a good company doing its best. It sells only fair-trade coffee. It works hard to sell at a premium price so farmers can get the benefit. It is expanding fast.

Jacob's question was addressed not at CafeDirect, but at us. We, as customers, are it seems willing pay a little bit over the odds so we can feel better about ourselves for buying fair-trade coffee. But only a little. A few pennies extra for a bag of coffee. Even our sense of virtue comes ludicrously cheap.

The truth is that, because of the collapse in world coffee prices this decade, even farmers paid fair-trade prices are getting less than they did for a pound of coffee back in the mid-1990s. Is that fair trade? What do you think?

Let's continue to buy our favourite coffee, and enjoy it. But buying it you'll know that you are giving a small helping hand to much-abused Tanzanian farmers in the process. It is fairer trade. But "fair trade"? It is not.