It's Fairtrade Fortnight! Yippee! The Fairtrade Foundation is urging us to start buying products such as coffee and bananas with the Fairtrade logo on them.

A good thing, too. The very point of free trade is that consumers are free to choose what and from whom they buy. So even if Fairtrade products might cost a bit more than normally traded goods, those of us who want to spend our money that way have that option.

The underlying message of Fairtrade Fortnight — that trade is pivotal to making poverty history — is spot on. But if we are serious about such an aim, it’s a Free Trade Fortnight that we really need.

Fairtrade-approved goods have had a specific floor price level negotiated, and meet certain criteria about the reinvestment of profits. As voluntary arrangements they are to be lauded. Like many others, I often buy them. Indeed, sales of Fairtrade goods grew by 50 per cent in the UK last year.

The worries begin when fair trade is posited not as one option within a free-trade world, but as a morally superior alternative to it. Last week’s Conservative Party statement of values, for example, was worryingly ambiguous — “We will fight for free and fair trade” — as if the two were different. They are not. Free trade is, by definition, fair.

The real problem is not that farmers are not paid enough. An International Monetary Fund report last year found that greater aid (which the false fair trade price can resemble) actually reduced countries’ export performance.

It is tariff barriers — both those supposedly “protecting” the developing world but which actually keep resources in unproductive, low-return activities (such as some farming), and those imposed by potential importers of developing world products. Top of that league, shamefully, remains the EU.

Free Trade Fortnight would campaign for the end of the Common Agricultural Policy and the EU’s agricultural tariffs, which average 20 per cent and peak at 250 per cent.

As the newly found prosperity of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea and India shows, trade is the engine of growth, enabling the investment that brought about comparative advantages in the manufacture of an ever-widening range of products.

Fairtrade Fortnight is fine, so far as it goes. But the fairest trade of all is free trade.