The US and many European countries give large subsidies, billions a year, to their farmers, and there's a feeling that that distorts the act of global agricultural markets so badly that poor farmers and poor countries simply can't enter it.
The campaign endeavours to encourage people to use fair traded products which supports millions of farmers and workers in developing countries.
Food exporters, and countries where farmers are self-sufficient, or net sellers, benefit.
The draft says countries must reduce trade barriers and "market-distorting policies" to help farmers -- particularly those in developing countries -- sell their products and increase production.
The key question is not whether other countries' researchers, farmers and entrepreneurs have the potential to absorb and adapt available technology.
Fairtrasa helps underprivileged small-scale farmers in third world countries escape poverty and improve their lives by providing them with technical support and access to international markets.
So that a tiny number of farmers and a few large agricultural firms in rich countries can continue to benefit at the expense of the world's poor.
The 2002 law has plenty of critics, namely limited government types, environmentalists and those concerned about the plight of farmers in developing countries.
The assessment argues that modest outlays on rain-fed agriculture, in particular, could drastically improve the productivity of farming in poor countries and so help both to raise farmers' incomes and also to cut the need for an expansion of agriculture elsewhere.
Several other countries, including Japan, also provide generous support to their farmers and tend to hide behind European intransigence.
Ban said countries must also expand microcredit to small farmers, minimize trade barriers and tariffs, and boost investment in agriculture.
Today, an estimated 4 to 5 million farmers in 51 countries around the world use it in whole or part, and are seeing yield increases of up to 200 percent.
In developing countries, rural women farmers grow most of the food that is eaten and dominate the informal economy.
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Subsidies distort production in rich countries, penalizing taxpayers at home and undermining the prospects of poor farmers from Thailand to India to Uganda.
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One of the world's biggest producer countries, Brazil, gave in to pressure from its farmers last September and approved the planting of a variety of GM soyabeans.
We are now in a situation where our farmers have adapted and done the right thing and what's happened is that other countries are not following it at all and trying to put eggs produced in battery cages, which we've banned, back onto the market.
Developing countries wonder how that squares with the aims of making it easier for poor-country farmers to compete in global markets and have proper access to the domestic markets of the rich countries.
And it has fewer farmers and coal-miners clamouring for subsidies, as they do in most of the other applicant countries (Cyprus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Estonia).
The countries that export cotton are getting less revenue and getting deeper into debt and farmers individually can't afford basic things like health care and even food in some cases.
If Western consumers demand organic food among their imports, is that foisting an inappropriate standard upon growers in poor countries, or is it potentially helping to set better standards for farmers' health and welfare in the exporting country?
Martin, the economist, says farmers have to move in that direction if they're going to compete with countries like Turkey and China.
Humans don't use animal power for agriculture much more, but oxen and horses are still harnessed for work in less-developed countries, particularly as poor farmers have to deal with increasing fuel prices.
It could have signed up to Fairtrade, an international social movement that promotes the payment of above-market prices to producers of agricultural commodities in developing countries by setting a floor price, with an additional premium that goes to farmers for reinvestment and social projects.
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The key to that, as countries such as New Zealand have discovered, is to snap the link between the subsidies farmers receive and the decisions they make about what and how much to grow.
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