Why isn’t all trade ‘fair’ trade?

When I’m talking to people about Fair Trade, I’m often asked about the extent of Fair Trade’s impact. Does it matter that Fair Trade helps one tea community in India and they are thriving when the community next door is living in extreme poverty?
I explain my theory of how Fair Trade’s impact will extend like a ripple effect sustained by consumers, the end goal being that one day all ponds will be rippled, or all trade will be fair, and we’ll wonder, like we do now at the thought of slavery, how we ever accepted that behavior.
In simple terms, it works like this–1 guy goes to Nicaragua and buys coffee beans from a coffee farmer at above market price. He brings it back to, say, Australia, and sells it to his friends. They like it, like that it helps the coffee farmers kids go to school and make a better life and they tell their friends. The guy goes back and buys more beans. Pretty soon, so many people are buying these Fair Trade coffee that he has to buy from the farmers neighbors. The bar is then lifted for the whole region and the cycle spins upwards.
I was just reading something that supports my theory and shows how increased consumer demand is helping Fair Trade (chocolate in this case) make the critical leap from being a small, fringe concept to becoming ‘business as usual’, that unfair trade is on its way to being abolished.
It turns out that Kraft and Nestle are testing out the Fair Trade market and starting to use only Fair Trade cocoa beans for the Kit Kat bar and the Cadbury Dairy Milk bar, among others. This is like in late 2008 when Starbucks decided to double their Fair Trade purchases to 40 million pounds, making them the world’s largest buyer of Fair Trade beans. While the multi-nationals and big corporate businesses like Nestle and Starbucks are driven, and sometimes legally bound, by the desire to make as much money as possible, not to make the world a better place, they are the ones with all the power, the ones who have the ability to make a real difference and the ones who’s move towards practices like Fair Trade signals a paradigm shift.

Again, this is all initiated by demand, by people choosing, voting throgh their purchases, to make trade fair or voting not to.  Two of my favorite Fair Trade chocolate bars that are available at any Whole Foods and many other conventional grocery stores and gourmet/ natural ones too are Divine and Equal Exchange.