For some consumers, buying 'fair trade' products - typically coffee, tea, chocolate and cotton clothes - is a trendy way to live the good life with a good conscience. For others, paying a small premium to insure that dirt-poor peasants in Africa, Latin America and Asia are insulated from fickle buyers and devastating fluctuations in global commodity markets is part of a deeper commitment to equality across continents.
Whatever the motivation, exhibitors and visitors at an international fair trade show on the outskirts of Paris say, there is no doubt that "equitable commerce," as the French call it, is catching on.
Totalling about a billion dollars per year, registered fair trade remains a drop in the bucket of world trade, about one hundredth of one percent. Far more impressive is the growth rate of this fledgling commerce with conscience.
Sale of foods stuffs and clothing bearing a label certifying equitable conditions of production shot up more than 40 percent across Europe in 2003. In France - one of the largest fair trade markets in the world - and Italy, the jump was 81 and 400 percent respectively, according to an OECD study.
"The bottom line is that a million families in the world - some five million to six million people - today benefit from the fair trade system," says Victor Ferreira, Director of non-profit Max Havelaar France, the national affiliate of the largest certifying organisation in the world. "If governments were to get behind this, it could be twenty times more."
Awareness has also increased sharply. In France, less than ten percent of people surveyed in 2000 had even the vaguest idea of what fair trade was. Four years later, fully three-quarters had at least heard of it.
Billed as the first international fair trade show, Equitexpo seeks to attract both the general public and potential buyers. Each were on hand in large numbers over the weekend to sample goods such as olive oil from the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, sesame seed products from Burkina Faso, Mayan baskets from Guatemala, or cotton and wool clothes from Nepal. But some buyers were more welcome that others, and understanding why reveals deep rifts within a multi-pronged movement with literally dozens of interlinked - and often feuding - associations, co-operatives, certifying bodies and businesses.
Within the fair trade community, activists distinguish between a "reformist" approach and an "alternative" one. Both seek to improve the lot of small-scale producers of commodities, but each has very different ideas about how to do so.
"If we want to reach the general public and sell in greater volume we have to be in supermarkets," explains Gaelle Rouby, director of communications for the Plateform for Fair Trade (PFCE), a French umbrella group of 30-odd associations - including Max Havelaar - that accounts for 80 percent of fair trade sales in France.
That kind of logic is anathema to Didier Porte, one of the leaders of an alternative network called Minga and the principal organiser of Equitexpo.
"Offering a 'fair price' to producers is not enough - it doesn't really mean anything," says Porte. "Supermarkets are just cashing in on a growing trend and are not really interested in the well-fair of these people," he says.
Another bone of contention is whether fair trade is, or is not, purely a north-south affair in which wealthy developed nations from Europe and North America buy goods from developing nations mostly below the equatorial belt.
"We are the Indians of the north," says Douar Den, a potato farmer from Brittany in western France. "We have many of the same problems as producers in the southern hemisphere," he adds.
For Den and Porte, the problem has to do with a lack of transparency all along the chain of production, processing, distribution and sale, whether in Europe or in South America and Africa.
Unlike the "reformers," who are more willing to work within existing commercial networks, their far more ambitious - and radical - aim is to create parallel structures that bypass profit-driven market structures all together.
Maxime Haudebourg, the manager of an enterprise in central France called Perche Activité, seems less concerned with philosophical quarrels than simply doing good.
An electrical engineer by training and formerly the CEO of a successful industrial firm, Haudebourg decided after trip to India in the mid-1980s that increasing profit margins was not satisfying enough.
So he retooled his engineering talent and began making machinery to produce fruit juice, on the one hand, and alternative energy, on the other. Then he found partners in local co-operatives, in France and abroad, and helped them start businesses.
"It seemed more useful to make fruit juice from Moroccan oranges and mangos from Burkina Faso and apples in France than to make perfume for Guerlin," he said referring to a famous French perfume house.