You could sip a Fairtrade coffee. Maybe munch on a Fairtrade banana, secure in your Fairtrade mind that nobody was getting an unfair deal on the back of your Fairtrade conscience.

Then you could spark your rolledup cigarette and wriggle your toes through your sandals as you raged rhetorically about how the rest of the world was so dastardly unfair. Apart from your good self, fair play to you.

Those days are, as John Lee Hooker would have it, gone, gone, gone. Today, we are all fair traders. A Millward Brown/IMS survey last year found that awareness of the Fairtrade mark had increased from 16% of the adult population to 50% in just four years.

Total sales of Fairtrade products rose by 40% in 2006 to a total of 9m.

And it no longer has to be boring. Last year, the Fairtrade mark introduced Fairtrade wine to the market. You can now get ethically sloshed.

If ice cream is your thing, then get stuck in to a Fairtrade feed of the stuff. So it goes with dozens of product lines now on sale throughout the country.

Fairtrade Ireland was introduced to this country in 1992 by a small group of people who passionately believed that producers in developing countries should get a fair deal for their products, something that has to be fought tooth and nail against the transglobal corporations that rule these countries.

Fairtrade, a not-for-profit organisation, certifies producer organisations such as co-ops that are paying a fair market price to producers.

There are now 171 such organisations in 23 developing countries throughout the world.

One example of the thousands of lives affected by Fairtrade is Oliva Kishero, a coffee grower in Uganda.

"Fairtrade is a good idea and makes a big difference to us, " she says. "It is marketing our coffee and giving us a fair price and we know we are not being cheated.

"Before the co-op started, we women carried the coffee to market on our backs, sometimes to villages 10km away. The traders would say our coffee is no good and offer us a low price. We had to take what they offered or carry it all the way back to our farms."

Buying Fairtrade produce is not going to solve the inequities in global trade. It's not even going to ensure that trends in a particular industry, like bananas, are going to broadly move towards paying a proper wage for a day's work. But it is a start, and if used by some merely to salve their consumer's conscience at a time of plenty, what matters is that a small difference is being made to at least a small number of lives.

At its most basic level, the growing popularity of the brand is an antidote to the prevalence of the 'Me' society that has come to the fore in the last decade.

But doing a bit for the exploited of the developing world would seem to be an easy option when the exploited in question are over there.

Last week, the Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland released a report on the trafficking of forced labour into this country to feed the needs of the economy.

Meat workers are enticed from Nepal to be paid the minimum wage, with a good portion of that written off against the provision of accommodation. Another man was expecting to be employed in the construction industry but found himself picking mushrooms without a permit. Domestic workers are particularly exploited. In one case, a woman worked from 7am to 10pm seven days a week for 150 a month.

This stuff is going on under the nose of the government and wider society yet little is being done to tackle it. There appears to be an attitude of leave well enough alone in case the economy comes tumbling down. Taking on exploitation in the supermarket by buying an ethical bottle of wine is fine and dandy. Taking it on in the places where we work and live would seem to be another matter entirely.

Fairtrade Fortnight is being launched in the Mansion House in Dublin this afternoon