The Fairtrade hallmark best known for coffee and chocolate has taken on an ambitious new challenge: the rag trade.

The garment industry would be a spectacular and symbolic prize for the Fairtrade movement. For most mainstream economists garment production - labour-intensive, globalised and cheap to set up - is a typical first step on the road to riches. But to many development campaigners the sweatshops of Asia embody the worst excesses of race-to-the-bottom capitalism. Determined campaigning in the late 1990s, particularly on US college campuses, forced companies such as Nike and Gap to examine their vast webs of sub-contractors and commit to clamping down on child labour, unsafe conditions and worker maltreatment. The cotton going into the clothes is also a cause célèbre: campaigners such as Oxfam point out the travails of poor west African farmers competing with subsidised US cotton dumped on the world market. In Britain, the Fairtrade Foundation guarantees higher prices to producers in return for bestowing its certification logo on the end product. Even in its traditional areas of food and drink, the Fairtrade Foundation remains a small operator. Its mark appears on a fifth of ground coffee and just one-twentieth of the instant coffee market in the UK. Fairtrade has set itself suitably modest goals in the garment business. The fashion supply chain has many links between the Senegalese cotton field and the high street, but garments can be certified as Fairtrade if the cotton comes from farmers guaranteed a higher price: on average a third higher than the market level. "We do realise we need to go up the supply chain," says Diana Gayle, non-food manager for the Fairtrade Foundation. "But to start with, just as in coffee, we are focusing on the very poor farmers right at its beginning." Even for unprocessed cotton, Fairtrade's share of total trade is tiny. J Sainsbury's purchase of 40,000 tonnes of Fairtrade cotton earlier this year may be the UK's largest order, but global production is almost 25m tonnes a year. Extending coverage elsewhere in the industry will be hard. Ms Gayle says that for the end product to carry the Fairtrade logo, all producers - spinners, weavers and manufacturers - must meet certain basic labour standards. This makes it hard for companies to source from China, the world's biggest textile producer, since it does not permit free trade unions. The narrow focus on cotton farmers worries other campaigners, who fear companies may be able to burnish their image, and perhaps increase their profit margins, with minimal changes in business practice. Julia Hawkins, at the Ethical Trading Initiative, an alliance of companies, NGOs and trade unions, says: "The fair trade movement, although it does some great work, tends to focus on simply giving higher prices to very small producers. We also need to look at the entire industry and the role that large multinationals can play in raising labour standards across the board." Some products aimed at the ethical consumer go further. The Gap T-shirt that will carry the "Product Red" brand, launched by rock star Bono, is entirely African, from raw cotton to finished product. It aims to rescue some of the textile business in the poor southern African nation of Lesotho, an industry that was imploding under the pressure of Chinese competition. But such projects arouse traditional concerns about Fairtrade: that it encourages producers to stay in industries that are not economically viable without artificially high prices that cannot be guaranteed indefinitely. Fairtrade-branded clothing may well be harder to replicate and scale up than more traditional products such as coffee. Alex Singleton, director-general of the Globalisation Institute, a London-based free-trade think-tank, says Fairtrade can be useful if it helps producers up the value chain. But he adds: "It is easier to persuade people to spend a little more on Fairtrade coffee than to spend £20 on a T-shirt they can get for less than two."